Nethack 3.4.0

Dark_Nova writes "Nethack 3.4.0 - the latest version of the greatest game ever created - has just been released. See the release notes for details about what's new, or go here to download it."

Comments

Wow, I remember way back when

[Cade144]

Wow, I remember way back to my youth, I'd loose all sorts of productive time in college.

Now I get to loose productive time as an adult. At least I'll get paid this time.

Re:What's the big deal about Nethack?

[10Ghz]

The game is amazingly deep. There's just so much you can do in it. There are tons of easter-eggs buried in there and lots of references to other works of fiction

I'm sure others who have more knowledge in Nethack will provide more info. I myself am not an expert on the subject.

Yay, new way to waste time at work

[Dragon218]

Hopefully, this edition will have the Amulet of Yendor in it.

The nerd litmus test.

[fluxrad]

Just divide the number of people who download the latest version of this game by the number of valid IP's on the internet and you can figure out exactly what percentage of people on the planet earth won't be contributing to the world's "population" problem ;-)

Re:Nethack vs Diablo

[dimer0]

Yup. And there's something to say for using your imagination... OH CRAP! The green "@" and the red "'" are trying to eat me!! Ohhh noo!

Do we need graphics fed down our throat for everything? Anyone remember playing AD&D? Or even D&D? I never walked out of a game saying "Hey, DM, your graphics suck!".

I tell ya what tho - I've spent about 20 hours playing Balder's Gate II, which is fun - but since I've started playing BG2, I've put in about 40 hours of Nethack. I have to keep playing - all for the high score list when I die.

What is NetHack?

[rtos]

What do you mean you've never heard of Nethack?!

I'm surprised to read quite a few posts from people saying "What's Nethack?" ... well, here's some information to get you started on an answer:

Unsung Heros: NetHack : "NetHack is a spectacular dungeon crawl that has been in development for more than 15 years. It's the only game in this feature that we can refer to in the present tense, because it is the only game still being actively worked on. It features random dungeons, enough monsters to fill an AD&D menagerie, and enough commands to create a programming language."

The Gamespy Hall of Fame : "Here's a game that's been under continuous development for over 15 years. It has no graphics, unless you count the primitive patterns made of ascii characters. And yet is has a huge following -- a very active newsgroup, fans all over the globe, and many instances of major media coverage. There's some kind of magic in NetHack, a world so huge and complex that every game is completely different, where each new item can twist the gameplay in new directions. Mostly we love it for the surprises -- the number of times you try some amazingly obscure action and find out that it works, leaving slump back in your chair and exclaim, 'They thought of everything!'"

Salon: The Best Game Ever : "But as any hacker worth the title will tell you, Nethack is still one of the best games ever made. What's more, it's one of the best open-source games ever made -- meaning anyone who cares can grab ahold of the game's source code and make changes and improvements. The player's guide is even authored by none other than open-source ontologist Eric S. Raymond..."

The Nethack Homepage : "Nethack is a single player, ASCII graphics-based adventure game, similar to the lines of Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy games. It is commonly classified in the larger group of Rogue-like Games, which generally are all text-based, solo adventures. Within the game, your character is after the infamous Wizard of Yendor, who has stolen the Amulet of Yendor and plans to use it for his evil purposes. You, a young member of your chosen class, have been blessed by your people and your god to retrieve the Amulet, and to save the world from the Wizard's evil plans."

Variants and Utilities : "One of the most impressive features of Nethack is the amount of 3rd party developed material that either is a varient of the Nethack game, or can be used to enhance your Nethack gaming experience. You'll find both variants and utilites for Nethack listed on this page."

But this one may be (in my biased opinion) the coolest project of all...

Nethack-Palm Porting Project : "The Nethack-Palm porting project is a loosely-knit group of Nethack and Palm enthusiasts who are working to port the classic game Nethack to the Palm platform. The project is well underway, but still far from complete so we welcome any new contributors." (See also Roguelikes for PalmOS)

So there you go. NetHack. What is it? The longest running, most amazing, coolest, open source game in the history of computers.... or something. :) But seriously, if you've never played NetHack, give it a try. It's worth it, if nothing else, just to say you did.

Re:What is NetHack?

[Kanon]

Here's a picture of the main character

@

And his dog looks like this

d

The orcs are quite good

o

Does that help?

Playability

[TimeTrav]

Heres a game that has real playability. You could play nethack for 100 hours+ and still not "master" it. I consider this to be more entertaining than playing some shoot-em-up that can be solved in 10 hours or less. Other games may be pretty, but this game has SOUL.

The infocom games were similar ... many hours of playability. If new game authors would make games with the same appeal and infinite replayability as nethack, I might *never* go outside again! :D

Re:Playability

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately (fortunately?) for me, I succumbed to searching for cheats on the web after dying the 6th time. Nethack is wonderfully rich, but in it's richness it's also one of the most unforgiving games you can play. There are hundreds and hundreds of things to do...but by the same turn there are just as many ways to die.

For those of you who are not familiar with Nethack, once you're dead...you're dead. This can get especially frustrating if you've invested a lot of time in the character. So after having died so many times within the first hour of gameplay...almost regardless of what I did.(it's very easy to run out of food, die of desease, etc) I decided to check the web:

No sooner than 15 minutes later, I had discovered a 'cheat' for saving character files. This effectively meant that I would never die...provided I kept backup copies of my character which wasn't a problem.

So with this method I happily hummed along, and my wizard gained all kinds of levels and items...and the Nethack world WAS incredibly rich and diverse. But...for whatever reason...I payed another visit to the cheats section on the web. After about 15 minutes of looking I discovered 'Poly-piling'. It involves zapping a 'pile' of your gear with the 'Wand of Polymorphing' transforming it into other random items of the same type. This, coupled with the ability to reload my previous saved games(thanks to my backup copies) effectively gave me the ability to stock my wizard with any item I wanted =(. . I'd just zap and reload until the process prduced the item(s) I was looking for.

So, to make a long story shorter, by the end of about 1 week's time, my wizard had mega gear, and mega levels...but I had lost something...my Nethack innocence if you will..and there was no getting it back.

For the brief time that I played nethack, it was all there was in life. The underlying texture of Nethack was the most wonderful and diverse computer based roleplaying experience I have every had. But, those times are forever passed for me. Sometimes in those fond memories...I try to return to the game, to revel again in that fountain of wonder...but every time I try, the urge to invoke those nasty save/polypiling cheats overpowers me! Alas I cannot...and I end up quiting the game out of shame...rather than doing so.

The Moral of the story...is that the posters here who play for years very likely do not employ these 'cheats'. I chose the dark path...and it forever tainted my Nethack experience...yes, power was quicker, easier to obtain! But ultimately it spoiled me! and I cannot enjoy Nethack for what it was meant to be...trecherous, unrelenting, and vastly rewarding game play!

God

[Wind_Walker]

When are the people over at Nethack going to realize that this feature bloat is completely destroying the product? Have you looked at the latest release.txt file? A new Win32 GUI, control-P for a full screen message...

And at a size of 1.1 MB?!?!?! How am I supposed to download that on my dialup connection?

Release notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously, because I'm not karma whoring.

The NetHack DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of NetHack 3.4.0.

NetHack 3.4 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack. It is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.3.

There are a great number of bug fixes in this release, as well as many changes and surprises beyond what you see listed below. Here is a brief overview of some new additions and changes in the game.

• Many, many bug fixes and tweaks to the core code and to several ports
• Enhanced config file processing and player selection prompts for some ports
• Stamina affects ability to throw heavy things
• Objects merge in containers
• Wish for "nothing", and genocide "none" to preserve your conduct
• Several small refinements to race/role separation
• Config file BOULDER option to specify the symbol for displaying boulders
• Riding has been improved
• New travel command which is particularly helpful for mouse navigation on handheld computers
• more feedback about skill advancement from #enhance command
• End-of-game disclose options can be individually tuned to your liking
• Mac: command-key shortcuts in the player selection dialog
• Amiga: screenmode requester
• Win32: new graphical interface contributed by Alex Kompel

We've also included variations of enhancements contributed by members of the NetHack community at large. Among them:

• Scott Bigham's new T-shirt messages and his option to turn off resistance display effects
• Malcolm Ryan's option for "autodig"
• Jay Tilton's full-screen message window display via control-P
• Dylan O'Donnell's patch for optionally starting with no pet
• Tom Friedetzky's blessed/uncursed/cursed selection patch for menustyle:full
• Jason Short's additional lens uses
• Kelly Bailey's Gnomish Mines changes
• Ken Arnold's patch to display prices in your inventory

A fuller list of changes for this release can be found in the file doc/fixes34.0 in the source distribution. The text in there was written for the development team's own use and is provided "as is", so please do not ask us to further explain the entries in this file.

The NetHack 3.4.0 source code supports many different platforms including most Unix versions, Windows, DOS, Linux, Apple Macintosh(tm), Apple Macintosh OS X(tm), OS/2(tm), Atari(tm), and Amiga(tm).

Also, note that the Gnome toolkit interface is still considered an experimental option. We have not enhanced the port ourselves, and so far we have not received any contributions doing so from the NetHack community.

-- Happy NetHacking! --

Re:Hurray!

[NoBeardPete]

The deal with NetHack is that is has been in development for ~15 years, and almost all of that work has gone into the gameplay. The interface hasn't changed at all in forever, there aren't really any graphics, so all of the work that is put into the game goes into how it plays, not how it looks.

Once I get really into a game, the graphics don't much matter (excepting maybe a few select games, such as Myst). Once I've been playing for very long, I stop really seeing the details of the graphics, and see more of the abstract concepts involved. If new graphical effects are slowly leaked out over time, I may continue to pay them some attention (in Black and White, for example, I continued to pay some attention to how my creature was growing, getting fatter or thinner, and looking nicer or meaner), but it's mostly at the level of mild amusement. As long as I'm just going to see the abstracted version of what's really going on, why waste a lot of time on the interface? Put the time into game play, because that's what I really care about.

The problem, though, is that people are initially attracted to a game by the graphics, even if the graphics don't ultimately have a big impact on how much they enjoy it. I've been playing NetHack since, uhhh, shit, I dunno when. Given modern standards for graphics, most people look at it and snort in derision. I know this happens all the time when I'm playing and someone wanders by and asks what I'm up to. I can try to explain that the gameplay is _way_ more important than the graphics, but it's hard to get people to sit down and put in the effort to learn it.

I'm still happy playing, but this makes me a little nervous. How many new people are finding NetHack these days? I'm guessing it's not many. If NetHack can't keep attracting new blood, it'll eventuall stagnate and die. _Man_, that would suck.

Falcon's Eye

[BigJimSlade]

Has anyone checked out Falcon's Eye? It's a frontend for NetHack that has 3D isometric graphics and background music, and it's available for Linux, DOS and Windows. It looks fabulous, and I think it's a great way to get new people interested in the game.