Interview with SLASH'EM Developers

MilenCent writes "The O'Reilly Network posted an interview with super-deluxe Nethack variant SLASH'EM's Warren Cheung and J. Ali Harlowe last month talking about the impending beta release of v0.0.7E2. (Don't you just love incredibly provisional version numbers? In development for years and not even a 0.1 yet!) There's another recent O'Reilly article on the game too."

Comments

Looks good...

[kb3edk]

Good to see that people continue to breathe life into Nethack. And I thought the graphical variants for the game had topped out with Falcon 's Eye. Well, time to download the alpha before the site gets /.'ed.

Easier install (please)

[Charm]

You think these guys would have heard of autoconfig or something similar. Their current build system for unix systems is terrible. I though the game looked good on the linux game tome but after downloading it and trying to install it you soon realise that not enough effort has gone into making building it easier.

Other games can why not Slashem

Re:Easier install (please)

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the mainline nethack developers are resistant to autoconfig because the game's been ported to many, many non-unix platforms, not all of which have the auto* tools. Or at least that was the party line a few years back...

Re:OT -- how to kill Lichs?

[Repton]

It's a while since I last played nethack, so my sk1llz are probably out of date ...

But the first advice is to make sure you are standing on the up stairs. Monsters which teleport at will (including the tougher lichs) always 'port to the up stairs when they get in trouble. And if you catch them there, they escape up to the previous level. So you need to make sure you're standing on the stairs...

Other than that, I think you can just whack them until they die. It might help if you are using Magicbane (which absorbs curses) (preferably at +2). Otherwise, try to get hold of a decent artifact (Frost Brand and Greyswandir used to be the artifacts of choice) and enchant it up to +5, or +7 if you can manage it. If memory serves, Stormbringer isn't all that hot a weapon, and +2 isn't much of an enchantment.

[generally, you should stock up on useless potions and scrolls in the early levels.. then, use boots of water walking and a moat to turn the potions to water and blank the scrolls. Bless the potions (you can #dip 10 potions of water into one potion of holy water and end up with 10 potions of holy water). Then get a magic marker, bless the magic marker, bless the scrolls, and write lots of scrolls of enchant weapon and of enchant armour. Modulo the disclaimer in the first line :-) ]

graphical variant

[polaar]

You might also want to have a look at Noegnud ("an alternate ascii/2D/3D UI for nethack and slash'em using SDL and OpenGL"). It seems to be more actively developed, and more playable than Falcon's Eye.

Re:Network Play = MANGBAND

[aunchaki]

The multiplayer networked version of the classic Angband is called Mangband and can be found at:

Mangband Home Hage

Re: Nethack for mobile phones

[rekrutacja]

Duncan Booth [1] has a Nethack port for Psion mobile machines. Since Nokia 7650 [2] and SonyEricsson P800 [3] are also built on the same Symbian OS [4] which is running Psion series 5 or 7, it's possible to port it. However nobody did it .

[1] http://dales.rmplc.co.uk/Duncan/Nethack.htm
[2] http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/p hones/7650/
[3] http://www.sonyericsson.com/P800/
[4] http://www.symbian.com/

Re:No wonder ...

[aardvarkjoe]

That is referring to the alpha version that was just released. Like 2.5.x is not a usable kernel for most purposes, but 2.4.x is.