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Interview with SLASH'EM Developers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the alpha-means-never-having-to-say-you're-sorry dept.

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."

9 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. No wonder ... by DogIsMyCoprocessor · · Score: 2, Insightful
    it has been in development for years.

    The first major challenge has been to design a protocol which is independent of machine architecture and doesn't require much overhead. Harlow settled on RFC 1014. He says, "I'm still working on fine-tuning the protocol to reduce overhead. One obvious improvement would be to move to an asynchronous protocol, rather than the current, simple synchronous protocol."

    Look, nobody's going to care that you shaved 0.2ms off the average case in the protocol if you never release the game.

    "The process is complicated by the fact that we need to be flexible enough that future window interfaces will have everything they need, but not so flexible that an external window interface could be used to cheat when playing with an official binary," says Harlow. "I believe I have achieved the latter, but I'm still a long way off achieving the former."

    Jeez, how about you release the freakin' game already and worry about the future window interfaces as they come up (if ever). You can always do a major release if you need to change interfaces and break stuff.

    At some point, you got to quit dressin' up your baby boy and let him out into the big scary world to find his way.

    --

    "And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."

    1. Re:No wonder ... by GoofyBoy · · Score: 4, Insightful


      This is a clear case of people programming purely for fun.

      Do deadlines. No end-users requirements. No political/checkpoint milestones. No office politics.

      Let them finely hone their program to the nth degree. It seems like they are more interested in the process rather than the end-product.

      And sometimes, thats a good thing.

      --
      The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
    2. Re:No wonder ... by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As insightful as that was...

      Mr. DogIsMyCoprocessor is apparently unaware that SLASH'EM is already a finished, fully working game. Most open source software is "under development," that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. (Nethack has been under development forever as well; most of us consider that a good thing.)

      Think (or at least learn something about the subject) before performing knee-jerk moderation, people.

      --

      How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
  2. Re:Network Play! by Tomble · · Score: 5, Insightful
    There have been multiplayer roguelikes, but not many, and they've generally not got that far. Because roguelikes basically aren't suited to multiplayer games.

    They could keep the gameplay the same, if you don't mind the possibility that you'll have to wait maybe a few hours (or strictly, forever) between each single step; otherwise, you have to fundamentally change it (eg, stop it being turn based). Then other gameplay details would start to look odd, and before you know it, you've changed it into Quake.

    --
    Be careful! New moon tonight.
  3. Re:OT -- how to kill Lichs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If it's a plain lich, stand back and throw darts or something at it. Use a stethoscope to see how well you are doing.

    Get a magic whistle and some means of taming monsters, and tame a minotaur or a mastodon -- something that can hit really hard. If you know where a polymorph trap is, tame some dags and magic-whistle them over the trap until you get a more studly pet. And if you have a wand of speed monster, your pets fight better!

    Get some gloves, a bag, and a fresh cockatrice corpse.

    If it's an arch lich, it can summon creatures faster than you can kill them. A cockatrice corpse is about the only way out of this one. Demiliches and master liches are somewhere in the middle.

  4. Re:Easier install (please) by BJH · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Autoconfig didn't exist when Nethack was originally written. Since Slashem bases their releases on the latest Nethack source, it's not in their interest to screw around with the build system - it ends up being just more stuff they have to maintain outside the Nethack tree that provides no player-visible benefit.

  5. Re:Network Play! by Requiem · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The nice thing about turn-based play is that it rewards patience and diligence. The problem I have with Diablo is that it's basically just click-click-click, all reflexes, which does not lend itself well to games like angband where two breaths from an ancient multi-hued dragon mean certain death.

  6. Subject by August_zero · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I like Slash'em, and I like their large tile grpahics set better than Falcon's eye, the 3d just slows the flow of the game down and makes it harder to play.

    While I appretiate all of the extra content that Slash'em intorduces, I still prefer NetHack over it's derivatives. There is something to be said about purity. Or I might just hold a little bit of sentimental value for the grandson of the first game on the PC that really stole my heart as a kid. Still though, Slash'em is a good change of pace.

    --
    On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
  7. Nethack for mobile phones by Hast · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is a bit off topic, but does anyone know of ports of eg Nethack to mobile phones? I've been considering to get me a mobile phone for a long time and if it would be possible to play a game like Nethack that would be a killer feature.

    From the research I've done there are a couple of mobile platforms which can be used for development. I'm not quite sure just how easy it is to do "for fun" development on them though. (Stuff like Mophun for Ericsson phones.)