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Nethack 3.4.1 Released
fatquack writes "Almost a day ago the DevTeam wrote: The NetHack DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of NetHack 3.4.1. NetHack 3.4 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack. It is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.3. Get your copy at nethack.org now! (and it fixes the boulder/landmine bug)."
NetHack is cool because you can play it at work... nobody will notice you're playing a game, it just looks like ascii/binary garbage.. :)
Infogrames (UK) could learn a thing or two from these people.
They had a simultaneous world release for Master of Orion 3, er, except for the UK, which gets it 10 days later.
I figured I won't donwload Nethack. Why? Because I know how damn good it is and I know I'll be lost forever if I start playing it for real.
For the ones who don't know what Nethack is: The GameSpy Hall of Fame has a really good piece on Nethack.
.: Max Romantschuk
There are many, many, many ways of cheating at nethack. But why in the arse would you do it? If you want to make it easy, go into explorer mode.
I first tried playing Nethack a few years ago, and I couldn't stand it. I'm a huge fan of RPGs and MUDs, but I just couldn't get the whole nethack thing. For those of you who don't like it either, try Falcon's Eye (or another Nethack GUI--there's many!)
You can drop _all_ you belongings and squeeze you naked '@' past the boulder.
most of the time anyway.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Starving? Pray to your diety! Makes perfect sense!
:-).
Or eat some food. Or kill an animal, then eat it. Or drink some fruit juice. Larry Wall didn't invent TMTOWTDI, you know.
As for praying to your deity... well, if you believe in an interventionist deity, and you're starving to death, what would *you* say the natural response is? I find it quite realistic to have prayer as a last resort when you are cursed, starving, or dying by violence, and the system of sacrifices to placate the gods certainly has parallels in a lot of belief systems.
As to the realism of prayer actually *working*, I think maybe I'll leave that can of flames unopened for now
Yeah. First there was 'Hack', which was a logical name for a game about hacking monsters to pieces. Then they added a prefix that had nothing to do with the theme of the game, but rather a technicality - hey, it's a game that's developed in the 'Net'. The result is logical in its own way, but completely misleading to those who don't know this.
- WWWWolf, who should get back to the Usenet any week now
Yay! I'm not alone! Not alone!
Just about any of the big RPGs since the resurgence are far more fun in my opinion than Nethack. Fallout and Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Ultima VII (use Exult to play it) - any of these would be a more entertaining use of my time than playing Nethack.
The boulder/landmine bug was a serious problem that was identified with release 3.4.0 a few days after it was released. Unfortunately, the release had already been shipped, and so everyone had to either patch it on their own (which involved a re-compile, something Windows users simply seem to lack the skill for) or wait for 3.4.1.
... these things happen to include boulders that block your path and can be pushed around, as well as rare traps called landmines. When a landmine explodes, it leaves a pit behind. Boulders fill up pit. When you push a boulder onto a landmine, it triggers a panic in the program, which dumps out on you without the possibility of even recovering your saved game.
In the game of Nethack there are many things
If anyone is interested in playing Nethack but you don't want to go through the trouble of setting it up for yourself, you can simply play on my public server. SSH or telnet into fyre.sytes.net with username "yasd", password "yasd". You'll be able to set up a username, preferences, and get started playing Nethack. Good luck with your 'hacking!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Open a tin of salmon to get rid of cursed rings
Eat a red dragon to become immune to fire attacks
GENOCIDE! Woot!
Dip your sword in a pool after inscribing Elbereth on it to gain a +5 magic sword
And there's millions of little things like that. That's one of the reasons it's called Hack - because it has been "hacked" together by hundred of programmers and is full of "Hacks".
All the time I played Diablo I found myself wishing it had the depth of hack with the graphics and sound of Diablo.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Part of the reason I play Angband instead. Constantly dying from starvation compliments of Nethack's RNG was too damned frustrating.
Angband's home page can be found here, but for some reason ther's currently just a placeholder up.
The trick with missiles in Nethack is to walk diagonally. If you do it right, and plan where you're going to go before you get there (think Chess or Go) you will be able to get to a door and close it without getting shot. The trick to food and spells and the like is to eat them/cast them in safe places where you know you won't be attacked while you're eating or while you fuck up and accidentally cast "darkness". There is a strategy to Nethack, no question, though i have to admit i've never made it past about level 15 or 20 in the dungeons. The thing that really gets me is monsters that attack faster than you can, because they can outrun you and attack you and there's nothing you can do. (Or is there?) I am guessing the best players just hang around on levels 3 and 4 of the dungeon for ages till they level up enough to have a bit of a safety buffer, but i have a tendency to just go hard. Yeah, it's frustrating as hell... but it's just a time waster, you know? Whatever. There is a bit of strategy to it, but it's like playing Chess against a computer that will always kick your ass.
Here's the first 1051 moves someones recorded...
here.
It's from a site for a 3D version, but the caps are from original NetHack.
I enjoyed watching it - although grand master it probably isn't - could we start seeing NetHack run-through's appearing on the web the way old Doom and Quake run-throughs are published?!
insignificant sig
That's a joke, but if you want a colorful graphical version, try out Falcon's Eye.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
disassemble! Are you some kind of masochist? I just read the source when I'm playing. (I like thinking about programming and design as much as just playing, so I'm consciously doing this to have more fun, not just because it makes it easier.) When "You sense a faint wave of psychic energy", you can just grep -r for it in /usr/local/src/nethack/src, and find out that there's a mind flayer on the level.
... :)
BTW, the nethack source is beautiful. Normally, C code that has to deal with lots of text looks really bad because it can't trust the string to fit in a buffer, etc. Nethack's UI paradigm seems to work really well with C, and the availalbe C library functions. I love some of the global variable names; There's code like
if (u.have.amulet ) {
Stuff if you have the Amulet of Yendor
}
The other great thing about reading the source code is that you can be entertained by the messages that would be printed if you did certain things, without actually having to spend a lot of time playing to do them. Some of them are corner cases that you might not think of doing. (Read the code for dealing with getting seduced by succubi/incubi. Best message printed by nethack: You sit on the sink. You feel very attracted to the incubus
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Nope. The angband home page is here:
www.thangorodrim.net
The page you linked to is that of the old maintainer, who hasn't coded on the game for a few years now.
it's not a joke another screenshot from that same interface using falcons-eye tileset ...
j pg
http://noegnud.sourceforge.net/shots/20030224-01.
it has mutiple display methods, that's just the 3d-ascii view.
I died a lot of starvation too, before I realized that you could save yourself by praying once you became Weak from hunger. My problem is that often I breeze right by Weak and into Fainting without realizing it until mosters jump halfway across the level and kill me instantly.
At least Nethack can stack more than one item on a space. Also it doesn't have that slot machine/pachinko machine appeal that is Angband's main feature.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
When you find an icebox, it'll usually be full of edibles, but if it's not, spend some time filling it, and remember where it is.
Wearing rings or amulets increases how fast you get hungry, only wear them when needed.
As a last resort, (if you can't pray) you can polymorph yourself into xsomething that doesn't need food (gargoyle) of something that can eat rock (rock mole).
I know all this, but I was playing nethack last night, probably right when this was posted, and I starved, on level 8, on a square with a food ration on it. Ahh, the irony.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis