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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."
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.
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 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.