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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."
How about asking "When will Falcon's Eye actually be updated to work with Nethack 3.4.0?"
No Points Name Hp [max]
1 5516572 daniel-Mon-Hum-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood. 322 [342]
2 5472484 daniel-Cav-Hum-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood. 188 [193]
3 3672208 daniel-Wiz-Gno-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood. 157 [160]
4 3236010 daniel-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu ascended to demigoddess-hood. 128 [133]
The caveman was polyless, genoless, and killed all eight demons princes, and the monk was weaponless and polyless. And somehow I managed this with good old ASCII graphics.
Anybody know what NetHack's relation to Rogue is? The games are incredibly similar.
Well, actually, the interview with Jaacko Peltonen is from yesterday, and the article by Howard Wen is from two weeks ago, so while Falcon's Eye may have been around for several years, this posting from slashdot is actually quite recent.
Regarding your second point about nethack purists, any nethack player can choose whatever display they want. But if someone wants to look at a pic of a wizard instead of @ then they have that CHOICE.
make world, not war
In Korea (and actually Japan) there's an expression 'legs on a snake', meaning a completely useless and pointless addition.
:)
Now, maybe I'll go play a little Angband, or Crawl, perhaps Omega. To us old-timers, 'D' means a terrifying ancient dragon, whereas a 32x32 bitmap of a dragon means 'silly'
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Where's the "net"?
without graphics card requirement is... ADOM. Nice interface, with inventory, and esp. missle combat. Also has a nice, busy newsgroup of devoted followers @ rec.games.roguelike.adom
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I was pleasantly suprised to find there was a Windows port, so I could finally wrestle my Linux box back from them, although they keep insisting on playing Frozen Bubble, but mostly Rocks and Diamonds.
One of the great things about Rogue (read: NetHack) was that it gave *nix a unified way of talking with various and diverse terminals.
It's not much, but it's a sig.
How about making a 3D FPS-version of nethack? :)The nethack "world" is based on squares, and so are some of the older "2.5D" FPS's like f.eks. Wolf3D. I'm not a very experienced (or even slightly good) programmer, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make a simple raycasting engine for nethack. :) ;)
Ofcourse, you wouldn't have the same overview as the real thing, but I know *I* would have loved to explore endless of dungeons in full 3D anyway.
Anyone up for it?
No, but you can interface speech synthesis software with the nethack text. Actually, I first was introduced to Nethack by my older brother, who was introduced to it by a blind man who played it with a speech synthesiser and minimal (something like 20%) vision. He could handle SpaceWar because of the high contrast and using the lasers and missiles for figureing facing - but would often get confused about which object on the screen he was - the ships and missiles all looked the same to him.
Someone please integrate the NetHack game engine with the Quake rendering engine. Then the "full 3d zoomable interface" mentioned at the end of the first article will be realized! :^)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm all for choice and openness, and if these front-ends bring more people to the wonderful world of nethack then all the better.
But if you have not weened yourself from the graphics to give the ASCII text mode a serious try then you are really depriving yourself of a lot of fun. And yes, after just a little period of adjustment the text only mode is actually a lot easier. After all there are over 320 different creature types in just the standard Nethack; using just letters and a few symbols you can readily recognize 58 categories, and then throw in color text and other symbols for objects and it's much better. Pretty graphics are going to almost always be ambiguous and similar looking and disappointing (the sense of scale is always an issue, you have everything from a spider to a dragon). Text is wonderfully expressive...that's why modern languages use small letter-like alphabets rather than artistic pictographs. And it's also why nethack is best played like you're reading a book rather than watching a movie. 3D graphics can never live up to what your imagination dreams up. I don't want to see a picture of a disenchanter thank you, that R will do just fine and lets my imagination do the rest. And yes my heart rate usually jumps when I see an L approaching me! Seriously, if you've been playing the graphical front ends and are starting to get bored, try the text version and use your imagination!
I've been playing nethack for about 15 years and still love it. And yes I am listed in the guidebook, but to be fair I only helped a little bit with the Amiga port a long time ago. I owe the real devteam members a lot of gratitude for all these wonderful years of play.