Falcon's Eye: a Make-over for Nethack

chromatic writes "Howard Wen has written two pieces on Falcon's Eye (an alternate interface for Nethack). The first is a description of Falcon's Eye and its features. The second is an interview with Jaakko Peltonen, the project's creator."

Comments

well, that's great and everything... but...

[jes5199]

notice the most recent update to the site is almost
a year
stale

and despite how nice the screenshots look, there's no animation. chess boards are more exciting

wouldn't it be nice if when the message "The gnome drinks a bubbly potion" appears, you actually saw him do it?

but nethack code isn't designed for that as it stands.
even the sounds effects are a kludge
(it just watches the text output for "You hear a X")

and as far as I know, no one's working on this,
at all.

Re:nice screen shots

[Nazghal]

The lameness filter almost certainly wont let someone post an authentic screenshot, even though you could as it's purely text based.. This link has a "screenshot" of what a typical screen might look like.

glHack

[the_real_tigga]

Falcon's Eye does have a brother in glHack.

Although top-down instead of isometric view, I find it much nicer.

Re:Relation to Rogue?

[EllF]

Nethack is a game very much in the tradition of Rogue, so much so that it (and its bretheren like Crawl, Angband, and Omega, to name a few) are called "roguelikes".

A roguelike generally has the following features:

• Randomly generated dungeon levels.
• Monsters with substantial abilities, often the same sort as the player might get.
• An "identification" item system, where the more you play, the more your character knows. (For example: a "purple potion" at the game's beginning, after you learn what it does, might become a "Purple potion of Invisibility."
• Multipurpose items: throw that purple potion at an Orc, and it vanishes. Poof.
• Substantial character death. No saving, except to stop playing for the night and to come back in the morning. When you die, you _die_.
• HARD. You'll die. A lot. ("YASD" == Yet Another Stupid Death.) And you know? You'll keep coming back.

Re: Relation to Rogue?

[Black Parrot]

> Anybody know what NetHack's relation to Rogue is? The games are incredibly similar.

Basic answer here and here. You should be able to find more by googling for roguelike.

Falcon's Eye is a BBS door game...

[Anonymous Coward]

Falcon's Eye was one of those nifty BBS door games like Usurper, Legend of the Red Dragon, Tradewars, et al. It came from the same author as the great BRE (Barren Realms Elite). Next time I name something I'm checking Google first....

Re:Hardware accelerated text game

[fader]

What about blind people?? Is there a speech synthesized version?

From the Nethack Guidebook (ships with at least the official sources from nethack.org):

NetHack can be set up to use only standard ASCII characters for making maps of the dungeons. This makes the MS-DOS versions of NetHack completely accessible to the blind who use speech and/or Braille access technologies.

Nethack & Falcon's Eye are up for awards

[bobz]

Nethack and Falcon's Eye are both currently competing for Best Free Role Playing Game and Best Free Linux Game in the Happypenguin Awards. Nethack was also nominated for Most Unique or Original Game, which seems a bit of a stretch to me. 10 or 15 years ago maybe it was original, but today?

Um, this already exists: egoboo.sourceforge.net

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this better than Egoboo?

Re:Behold...

[brandorf]

I'd have to reccomend Fallout 1 and 2, sure you do have a goal you need to complete, but the way you do it and the methods you employ can be radically different. Still are my favorite PC Rpg games. You can get both games in a valupak for pretty cheap now.