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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."
How hard would it be to make it have "network play", ala Open Battle.net with Diablo II? It would be a very neat feature, I think.
Furthermore I believe that vaporware should use imaginary version numbers like v1.3*i.
Killer Tripe. Here's a picture: %
____ _______
Duty now for the future!
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.
Well, one good thing about being version 0.0.7e is that nothing much can be expected from it which gives people alot less power to bitch. Example: /.1 "This program is a piece! It doesn't do a damn thing and my mom writes cleaner code! Booya!" /.2 "Sir, I think you've been misinformed. As this is version 0.0.7e you have no right to bitch, it's alpha code. If you want something better code it yourself. -1 troll." ...eh, or somethin' liek that.
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."
Other games can why not Slashem
-- RTFM:Slackware::Beer:Saturday
Nope -- haven't read the Slash'em article. I've been too busy trying to kill these damned lichs that are popping up in Nethack. I've been hitting them with a +2 Stormbringer, tried polymorphing them, tried cancelling them, etc.. Nothing works. Anyone have clues on taking them out? No scrolls of genocide unfortunately.
*lifts up the rock*
Hey down there, some game called Duke Nukem Forever called, they want 5 years back.
It would be 'ready to ship'.
Slap a big 'ol 1 on the front and put it in a box.
Considering the state of most MMORPG's these days. You could put a script on the CD that pops up a dialog "Content comming soon!". Label it Ultimate Online Origins Space Wars Online 2. No one will ever know the difference.
Reviewers will gush with praise saying that it sure is promising and in time it may even become a game.
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?
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.
The multiplayer networked version of the classic Angband is called Mangband and can be found at:
Mangband Home Hage
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.)