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Falcon's Eye: a Make-over for Nethack

Posted by michael on from the rogue-still-the-best dept.

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."

2 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If it's called nethack.. by mattdm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Text vs Graphics by Shade,+The · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.