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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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.