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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."
There is also a newsgroup for Rogue addicts (which is mentioned on the Falcon's Eye site): rec.games.roguelike.nethack.
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It's called that because it's a project that was developed on the net. No, really -- it was named back when doing that was something new and strange.
The "lameness" in "lameness filter" apparently refers to the filter, rather than the text that it's supposed to filter.
Nethack is text-based not because of technological constraints (as Falcon's Eye shows) but because the players and developers prefer the feel of the text-based Nethack.
Just because a game is visually simple, it doesn't mean it's computationally simple or has a simpler play. Nethack is one of the most complex games I have ever played, and never ceases to entertain me after years of playing.
It's also much more computationally intensive than you might think -- the full version requires a pretty decent computer. I can run it full-featured (without X running) on my PowerBook 3400, but it sometimes goes into swap. (32MB RAM, though)
I love the Nethack standard interface, but I've always turned on arrow key movement. k is kick. l is loot. I don't remember offhand what h and j are. J is jump, maybe, but I rarely need that.
:P
Anyway, using h j k and l for movement is ridiculous, when there are keys specifically designed for movement, and in a logical layout (i.e. not in a damn row) two inches away.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
IMHO NetHack is one of the best, or just best game in the world. One good feature is that you don't see anything, so you must use your imagination. And everyone has different imagination. The same happen when you read book. Movies are always worse than books, because they kill imagination of reader/viewer.
But from the other point of view - there are people who don't know NetHack. They play games like Diablo or NWN and think they are "unique", "innovative", better than anything else. Maybe thanks to this port then will download and play - enter amazing world of NetHack, and - BTW - enter world of Open Source.
And maybe even one day they will move from gfx port to hard core text version, and they will feel what we feel playing NH.
I got into Nethack via Falcon's Eye, and had many hours fun hacking through dungeon aplenty. Then I tried the QT interface, which is hardly as pretty but certainly a step up from ANSI graphics. And yet, it was better that way; you could see the whole dungeon at once, you could see which monster was which more easily, and keyboard commands were faster and more exact than any mouse-driven interface.
So then I upgraded and the QT libraries broke for Nethack, so I was temporarily forced to use the text-based interface to the game instead. I've never gone back to graphical Nethack since. Because it uses standard ANSI characters, it's far more easy to see what the dungeon represents. Instead of interpreting some small icons or raytraced models, you can instantly see what's about. A little picture of a kobold is hard to recognise, but a 'k' is easy to see. Once you've connected monsters with letters, then there's really only one way to play.
I really don't understand this complaint. The symbols all over nethack aren't words, they're symbols, just like graphics are. As long as the text is still there, as it is in Falcon's Eye, what's the problem? Regardless of whether a dragon is represented by the letter D or a picture of a dragon, it's still a dragon. The only difference is that people can see it and immediately know that it's a dragon just by looking at it, instead of figuring out what the letter means.