Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.