/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

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: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.