First NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament

bhaak1 writes "The first — and hopefully annual — NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament called Junethack started last Sunday and runs until the end of August 14th.This tournament features Vanilla NetHack and several of its forks: SporkHack, UnNethack, AceHack and as a special bonus game — never seen on a public server before — NetHack 1.3d, the first version of the game called NetHack, released 1987. There are various achievements to gain, even for those poor souls that can't win this complex and sadistic game. The source code of the tournament management and website software is available for hacking on GitHub if you prefer hacking code to hacking monsters."

Comments

no comments?

[eyenot]

because everybody else on /. ran off to join the tournament.

Timely.

[bmo]

>started last Sunday

Slashdot. Yesterday's news next week.

--
BMO

Re:Timely.

[Elbereth]

Hey, you have to give the editors time to vet each and every story before it's posted. The kind of journalistic integrity that we Slashdotters demand takes a lot of time and effort. Do you think they just sit around all day, giving every story a rubber stamp of approval? That way lies dupes, trolls, thinly-veiled advertisements, and inflammatory nonsense. I for one am glad that they... oh never mind. I can't keep up this level of irony.

Re:Timely.

[Anonymous Coward]

It does take the editors some time to determine if the story is sufficiently related to Bitcoin before approving it.

Re:Timely.

[ais523]

I think it's because 4th edition came out, and it was basically an entirely different game from the ones that came before it, with a few references back. It's not necessarily a bad game, but it's not a continuation of the previous versions, and it rather split the playerbase (between the ones who keep playing 3rd edition or variants of it, and ones who've moved onto the new game). If Wizards hadn't called it Dungeons & Dragons, there wouldn't really be a problem. As it is, though, it's a bit like, say, Python 2 and Python 3; a mess that's hurting the game in general.

Re:Oh boy

[ais523]

My own variant AceHack (which has been unexpectedly Slashdotted, it seems; I'm glad I'm not hosting it myself) is designed to improve the interface, while keeping the gameplay the same or slightly easier. (Most of the other variants are indeed designed to make the game more complex/harder.) It's also something of a protest against the way that vanilla NetHack is effectively unmaintained nowadays; although it is apparently still being developed (I've got replies to bug reports as recently as last week, including descriptions of what they changed in response), the repositories aren't public, and so nobody can actually benefit from the changes. So I'm trying to make an improved version without, hopefully, offending too many people (although some of the changes have still managed to annoy subsets of players; that's typical of anything, I guess). This tournament is quite healthy for the game's ecosystem, in a way; rather than playing vanilla over and over again, it can advertise some of the more actively and publicly developed variants, and also the public servers on which many of the community play nowadays. (In particular, telnet://nethack.alt.org, or http://alt.org/nethack, is one of the most popular public servers nowadays, and many people play there in preference to locally; it's just one of the servers on which the tournament can be played.) So in summary, the major advantage of the forks is that (other than SporkHack) at least they're still under development in a way that people can actually play them, unlike vanilla. My own fork AceHack is unfinished and still in alpha (SporkHack and UnNetHack have both had releases, and at least Un is likely to have more releases in the future), and we've been trading code and ideas between the forks reasonably freely.

Re:Oh boy

[ais523]

It was me who calculated the optimal number of moves to win, at 2016. (I'm not completely convinced that the calculation is correct, though.) The current human records are 2135 with bones-stuffing (i.e. deliberately suiciding an advanced character to drop a whole load of valuable items into the game where another character can pick them up), and 2596 without any bones abuse, both by Maud. (For those wondering, the realtime record holder is Sayo (an alternate account of Adeon), with 1 hour 16 minutes.) It's obviously impossible to beat 2000 turns as that's the earliest you can enter the Quest. (For more information, see http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Speed_ascension.)

I'd say that speed-ascension is far from solved. Maud can only get runs that fast when he gets incredible amounts of luck (only around 1% of games are lucky enough for him to even bother trying to speedrun them, he generally quits the other 99%), for instance; and different ways to do things are being discovered all the time. The polyself-based strategy all speed ascenders use nowadays is only a couple of years old, and very different from the way a normal game plays.

I haven't played that for years...

[NotQuiteReal]

But I still remember the gist of the game...

You type in something like: jjkkljjkk

And the response is something like: "You killed your dog"

Re:Nethack?!

[bhaak1]

The Angband people are only jealous that NetHack is better at grinding even though this is the main game feature activity of Angband.

Just read this easily followable grinding guide for raising the perfect pudding in NetHack. ;-)

Re:My greatest accomplishment

[BobNET]

I would have had my degree a year sooner if I hadn't wasted all that time playing Nethack.

I would have ascended in Nethack if I hadn't wasted all that time getting my degree.

Picture from the event

[dkleinsc]

You have entered a room full of nerds!

@@@@@
@@@.@

Dkleinsc the Stripling St:03 Dx:05 Co:10 In:12 Wi:14 Ch:01
Dlvl:1 $:2000 HP:10(10) PW:0(0) AC:10 Ex:0

ADoM

[Kagura]

People are still playing ADoM, and they're doing it on PuTTY (telnet/SSH) servers. Come join us at #adom on irc.freenode.net !

Re:Linley's Dungeon Crawl

[bhaak1]

And the other NetHack tournament /dev/null/ has been doing it before Crawl since 1999.

Junethack is loosely based on DCSS' tournament model. We're using existing public servers (we only need access to the xlogfile with all the game information and the options file for verifying the player's identify which on most public servers are public anyway).

We don't think that we are directly in competition neither with the DCSS tournament nor /dev/null. One of the goal of this tournament is raising awareness of NetHack forks (like e.g. my fork UnNetHack), as NetHack hasn't seen a release in too many years, even though the DevTeam still claims that they are working on the mythical next release.

Whereas /dev/null offers vanilla NetHack with some additional challenges where some have to be solved in-game (e.g. Pac-Man level) and others out-game (in Zapm or Kingdom of Loathing).

We are actually on quite good terms with the DCSS DevTeam. I have even met some of them in real life and there are a lot NetHack players enjoying both NetHack and DCSS. I encourage everybody who likes NetHack to give DCSS a try. I will also be playing again in the next DCSS tournament.