/dev/null/nethack Tournament 2001

bakunin writes: "Tonight (Halloween) at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null's third Annual NetHack Tournament opens. As with past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who'd like to play. We're also open to anyone who'd like to volunteer to run a game server, since (though we have a T1 hosting the main game server) play can be slow across the transoceanic links." /dev/null is calling for volunteers to run a server; you only need a modest machine but must have good bandwidth. See below for more information. bakunin continues: "/dev/null is a loose association of networking geeks, unincorporated and noncommercial. We make no money from this; we just do it for giggles.

The prize structure going in, as we're open to suggestions to change this during the Tournament, is:

Prizes
The "standard" prizes will go to:

• Highest Score
• 1st, 2nd and 3rd Highest Score in each class

The "additional" prizes will go to:

• Most Ascensions
• Lowest Scored Ascension

Since we'd appreciate volunteer servers to help speed the game play up for folks not near Oakland, California, here's roughly what you need to host:

Server Requirements
Remember, before volunteering, that anyone with admin level access to a game server box is not allowed to compete. So don't volunteer to host if you want to be a contender.

• a multi-user NetHack installation (thus, probably, a Unix of some sort; the /dev/null server is an OpenBSD system)
• sufficient speed/disk/memory to support 250 player accounts and 25 concurrent players (ours is a P133 with 64M of memory and 2.5G of disk)
• a dedicated Internet connection (our is on a T1)
• since NetHack needs real user accounts, we'd recommend that it be a dedicated system (the players will need to be entered in /etc/passwd to play on the box)

"

Comments

Just how much bandwidth...

[BluePenguin]

They say that you need a dedicated connection, and bandwidth is a biggie... but how much bandwidth? Is this a "Cable Modem's a bad idea" limiter? Will consumer DSL provide sufficient bandwidth? Or is it really going to need T1 speed?

:q!

Re:Just how much bandwidth...

[jandrese]

A lot of consumer broadband connections have upload caps that will make them almost certainly unusable for nethack. If your local DSL provider or cable company hasn't set a cap though I'd think they'd be sufficent.

Wait till Nov 1 to start playing...

[Masem]

Remember that Nethack is real-world-clock-sensitive. If you play on a Friday the 13th, past midnight, or on Halloween, a lot of fun but deadly things can happen.

Of course, there's a better chance at getting some of the better goodies when the difficulty is higher, so it might be worth trying...

Re:Cool,I'll admit, but ecxiting?

[Balinares]

Your choice. I personally find it highly satisfying to loot the corpse of some player who got killed stupidly without me even helping. =)

Nethack competition

[Spootnik]

If only the save files (and bones) were compatible between different platforms and different compile-time options..

For the problem at hand, it should be easier to include the random number generated code in the game (rather than rely on a system library), and add an option to start with a specific seed. That should ensure everybody got the same initial conditions.

Oh, it would need an option to specify the external time too, instead of using the system clock.

Of course, small changes in the initial playing may have unpredictable consequences for later levels. So it would still be very much a matter of luck.

How about this... in addition to adding a new RNG that could work with a specific seed, configure it to generate all the dungeon levels *before* starting the player at level 1. This might take some time, but it should balance out the items that people find, and some of the monsters. Since monster generation is a function of player level as well as dungeon depth, pre-generation of levels could assume that the player is level (dlvl/2) or so, when figuring in monster creation.

Then, for a tournament, the director could say, "Okay, start a game with this role, this race, and random seed XYZ."

Putting this on a telnet server could ensure that each tourney seed is only used once per user.

Thoughts?

Re:Nethack competition

[WNight]

It's a good idea. Tournament games need to be like this, making sure than random events don't influence the outcome more than skill. In fairly random games you need to make sure that they influence everyone equally.

The problem with displaying the seed beforehand is that it'd be possible to predict what you'd get if you polymorphed a specific pile of stuff, and not do it unless you'd get something good out of it, etc.

Of course, you could do the same thing anyways, but if you weren't running the server it'd be harder. (There are still ways though to figure out what seed was used.)

As to the bones and save files... They could be exported into a text file, something platform independant. In fact, some XML-ish format would probably be the best. That way other games could implement import and export features for Nethack characters, keeping as much as they can and translating items into close equivalents.

There's no real issue of cheating because

1) You can already cheat, you just need to edit a binary file.
2) You can sign the text file, and put the user into 'no score' mode if the signature doesn't match. (Cheatable though, see #1)
3) Wizard mode is available, so it's not like anyone is trying to stop newbies from exploring.
I personally think it's a great idea. In fact, I'll make a note about looking at the source and seeing if it's within my skill.

Full moon, too!

[Balinares]

Wow! Tonight is Halloween AND full moon. How does NetHack handle that? Does it make it THE best possible night to be playing NH? :)

Re:That wasn't very nice /.

[ackthpt]

I've played single player versions of NetHack for years, starting on my Amiga. I still have versions of HackLite and such, with pretty artwork done by the Software Distillery on there. The only time I defeated the Wizard of Yendor was on a PC, wich also had color, just representations of mobs were letters and characters instead of the nice colored tiles on the Amiga versions.

The complexity of these games, though, still blows away a lot of what's out today. Imagine taking the engine of NetHack, Larn, Moria or Omega and giving it a Quake like view. Sure, you'd have to impliment Real Time and handle interaction for far more than just point-and-shoot, but it might have potential. For all I know, someone's probably doing it.

Re:Nethack = old school

[Laplace]

Anything you need to do to make it compile? Hell yes! NetHack won't compile out of the box. Don't even try. Set aside a few hours, go through the readme and configuration files, and figure out what you really want the game to do. Edit all of the files specified, try to compile, go back and fix your errors, and try to compile again until it works just right.

If you can find a recent version that is native for your machine, it might be easier to do that. If you can't do that prepared to spend some time figuring out how to make it work for your particular configuration. I don't know if you can do a compile under Code Warrior. You would be better off using a command line compiler like gcc.

Compiling NetHack isn't easy, but it can be done by the general computer savvy public. I know, I did it and everyone says that I'm a dumbass.

Good luck and have fun!