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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?"
Put down your crack pipes, your fat sappy, your smack, even your nose candy...there is a new drug in town...err old drug...err new and improved drug.
When you find my body dead over the keyboard with nothing but coke cans and pizza boxes just tell my parents I love them.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I think that this has got to be the only text base video game that works better with a video card that supports hardware acceleration.
Now even people with dyslexia can play nethack!
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.
monkeys.
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.
Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)/ falconseye.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/01/02
See this if you're having trouble printing code examples
Falcon's Eye: The Making-Over of Nethack
by Howard Wen
01/02/2003
Nethack is one of the oldest and most acclaimed games in the history of open source software. It's also, quite frankly, dull looking. This single-player, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game presents immersive dungeons, though it represents walls, monsters, items, and everything else with simple ASCII characters. Your player character, for example, is @.
Enthusiasts of NetHack with programming skills have devised various graphical overlays to enhance the game's look. These "windowing interfaces" essentially replace each ASCII characters with a bitmapped image. Your @ becomes a graphic of a warrior or wizard, and the various keyboard symbols that comprise a map are replaced with colorful tiles to form what actually looks like a dungeon layout. Most of these interfaces perform a make-over of NetHack with flat, 2D graphics, but some also present a pseudo-3d look.
Falcon's Eye aims for a much more sophisticated transformation, visually and otherwise. It overlays the ASCII characters with detailed graphics presented in an isometric 3D perspective -- accompanied with animation, sound effects, and music -- for the dungeons, player characters, creatures, and items. This particular windowing interface also adds mouse support, tooltip information for creatures and items, shortcuts for several keyboard commands, and many customization options. Falcon's Eye coats NetHack with so much eye candy that it makes the visually minimalist game look, sound, and play almost like a commercially produced role-playing title.
NetHack's steep learning curve and crude non-graphics turn away many users. That motivated Jaakko Peltonen, the 25-year-old from Finland who created Falcon's Eye. He works as a researcher of neural networks at Helsinki University of Technology. "Text-based games may not seem so appealing to computer gamers nowadays. On the other hand, I knew that NetHack's game content was varied and interesting," says Peltonen. "It seemed natural to upgrade the graphics, in order to better appreciate the game play."
Working with NetHack's Friendliness Toward User Interfaces
Peltonen originally developed a self-standing engine for displaying isometric graphics, then grafted it onto NetHack so he could incorporate his other creative skills -- drawing and sound composing. Falcon's Eye has, thus far, been solely his work in terms of its design, artwork, and programming. However, many people have sent him suggestions, bug reports and fixes. Others submit art and sound effects, which are usually added to the latest releases.
While there are several patches available which alter NetHack's game play, Falcon's Eye itself doesn't provide such changes. It does add some helpful features, like a path-finding "autopilot" algorithm to help the player character navigate long distances, but the windowing interface remains strictly compatible with the official releases of NetHack. "If Falcon's Eye were to have changes [to NetHack], they might be redundant or contradict other modifications. NetHack has been developed over many years, so many people prefer the game play in its current form," says Peltonen.
He was pleasantly surprised to discover how well NetHack's code had been arranged to accommodate different user interfaces. NetHack assumes very little about the user interface: the game tells which dungeon maps and messages to display and what to ask from the player, but leaves the implementation details to the interface. "This versatility helped a lot to create Falcon's Eye," says Peltonen. "If NetHack had been tied to a character-based interface, I might have needed to work around it a lot. Thankfully, this was not the case."
Like NetHack itself, Falcon's Eye is programmed in C, except for a few system-dependent functions that require C++. It uses various graphics, sound and input libraries: SDL for the Linux and BeOS versions and DirectX for Windows. Aside from linking with these libraries, the code of Falcon's Eye is original.
One challenge in designing Falcon's Eye was making its code "system-independent" as much as possible, so it could be used under different operating systems. "[Achieving] this is often difficult with game programs, since they use graphics and sound extensively," says Peltonen. "As a result, Falcon's Eye has 'wrapper functions' for all the graphics, sound, input tasks it needs. These then call DirectX, SDL or whatever is needed."
Peltonen managed to narrow down such system-dependent code to a few files. To port his NetHack GUI to another operating system, you only need to create new versions of these files, instead of having to rewrite everything.
Implementing the mouse interface was another programming challenge. The NetHack game control scheme is oriented toward the keyboard, so Falcon's Eye's code has to incorporate work-arounds to make mouse inputting work. "If you right-click an in-game creature or item, Falcon's Eye opens a context menu with possible actions, such as 'Open' or 'Kick'. NetHack doesn't have built-in support for such menus, so Falcon's Eye creates them on its own, and translates your choices to keyboard commands," explains Peltonen.
It's Another Way to Look at NetHack
In future versions, Peltonen plans to add more options for user-customization of Falcon's Eye. The current release allows you to configure the keyboard commands and add sound effects without the need of programming skills. But he wants to make it so players can also create their own graphics for the game.
Some have reported difficulty compiling and installing Falcon's Eye, which its creator admits should be a simpler process. This is because NetHack has several options available for its installation, which, combined with Falcon's Eye's own, can make getting the game up and running more complicated than it ought to be. "The default settings are often enough, but I still hope to make the installation and customization easier in the future," says Peltonen.
As dazzling as his Falcon's Eye is, he doesn't mean for it to replace the other, more established NetHack windowing interfaces. Instead, he sees it as another novel method for players to see and interact with NetHack. Though he's not working on such a thing, Peltonen envisions that an application or patch for NetHack which would enable the NetHacker to switch from Falcon's Eye to another NetHack GUI would be beneficial to the NetHack community.
"Ideally, one could switch between these various interfaces at will during the game, much like some computer programs have changeable 'skins,'" says Peltonen. "That way, players who are accustomed to one interface could still view how a particular game situation would look in the other interfaces. Currently, this isn't possible, but hopefully it will be in the future."
Getting Away from the Heart of NetHack?
Falcon's Eye doesn't just show a different "view" of NetHack. Though the game play itself is technically the same, you have to keep reminding yourself of this as you play because it simply "feels" different from NetHack. This raises the question of how much the candy-coating alters a player's perception of the game. NetHack's ardent fans love it for focusing squarely on game play. In a way, it's a reduction of computer gaming to its basic elements, right down to the ASCII symbols. With GUIs like Falcon's Eye, how much becomes too much, detracting from the heart of NetHack?
"One could in theory create a full 3D interface with a rotating/zooming view and so on," says Peltonen. "Would such additions improve or harm game play? The overall experience is what matters. I believe the graphical overlays are a useful middle ground, each with different amounts of changes. All [of them] leave room for the player's imagination as well."
Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed frequently to O'Reilly Network and written for Salon.com, Playboy.com, and Wired, among others.
NetHack with a mouse?!
How the hell are we supposed to get n00bz to use h, j, k, and l to move the cursor, the way God intended?
This is all the work of some EMACS d00dz, I tell ya.
Next thing you know, they'll release Omega 1.00 with a graphical interface and call it Duke Nukem Forever.
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.
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.
Falcon's Eye does have a brother in glHack.
Although top-down instead of isometric view, I find it much nicer.
my
The nethack.org site has a willwheaton link. It always seems every slashdot story has 6 degrees separation between the article and willwheaton.com. ;)
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
He took a 1970's era game and made it look like a 1980's era game, in 2001!! Now that's what I call progress!
I've written a 3D wrapper around the original pong code, and it looks like real tennis players, motion captured and all.
They look kind of awkward running back and forth at the service line though.
Where's the "net"?
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....
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
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The "lameness" in "lameness filter" apparently refers to the filter, rather than the text that it's supposed to filter.
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.
Isometric 3D display? Mouse-driven?
Obviously these rogues have just ripped off Diablo.
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)
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.
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?
I'm an avid Nethack player, and I tried Falcon's Eye for the first time recently.
I could barely work out how to move. The isometric layout is HORRIBLE. I couldn't even get through doors.
When somebody decides that they need not-particularly-pretty raytraced graphics to make up for what their imagination can't deal with, it's time that they tried reading a book. One without pictures.
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?
i'm sorry, but falcon's eye still doesn't look right. everyone knows that if they ever made a true 3d version of nethack is would have ascii text characters fully rendered in 3d. i'm still waiting for a 3d hethack where i'm a 3d ampersand running away from a fully rendered 'B'.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
How is this better than Egoboo?
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 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.
Heh.
:)
Actually, it's wil wheaton dot net
Now I feel like I've arrived.
Now I have to go play Net Hack for several hours, just to die in the mines while blind.
And Mrs. Wheaton will go to bed alone, again.
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.
And every one is available for Windows. Game selection is not the reason to choose Linux. There are no decent games for Linux that are not available for Windows as well.