haha, thats funny, i gave up on the same mission in GTA3... timed levels can be BS some times. there are a few games that i've just stopped playing because i couldn't get past a level and there were no cheats to bypass it.
Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/01/02/ falconseye.html
See this if you're having trouble printing code examples
Falcon's Eye: The Making-Over of Nethack
by Howard Wen
01/02/2003
Nethack is one of the oldest and most acclaimed games in the history of open source software. It's also, quite frankly, dull looking. This single-player, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game presents immersive dungeons, though it represents walls, monsters, items, and everything else with simple ASCII characters. Your player character, for example, is @.
Enthusiasts of NetHack with programming skills have devised various graphical overlays to enhance the game's look. These "windowing interfaces" essentially replace each ASCII characters with a bitmapped image. Your @ becomes a graphic of a warrior or wizard, and the various keyboard symbols that comprise a map are replaced with colorful tiles to form what actually looks like a dungeon layout. Most of these interfaces perform a make-over of NetHack with flat, 2D graphics, but some also present a pseudo-3d look.
Falcon's Eye aims for a much more sophisticated transformation, visually and otherwise. It overlays the ASCII characters with detailed graphics presented in an isometric 3D perspective -- accompanied with animation, sound effects, and music -- for the dungeons, player characters, creatures, and items. This particular windowing interface also adds mouse support, tooltip information for creatures and items, shortcuts for several keyboard commands, and many customization options. Falcon's Eye coats NetHack with so much eye candy that it makes the visually minimalist game look, sound, and play almost like a commercially produced role-playing title.
NetHack's steep learning curve and crude non-graphics turn away many users. That motivated Jaakko Peltonen, the 25-year-old from Finland who created Falcon's Eye. He works as a researcher of neural networks at Helsinki University of Technology. "Text-based games may not seem so appealing to computer gamers nowadays. On the other hand, I knew that NetHack's game content was varied and interesting," says Peltonen. "It seemed natural to upgrade the graphics, in order to better appreciate the game play."
Working with NetHack's Friendliness Toward User Interfaces
Peltonen originally developed a self-standing engine for displaying isometric graphics, then grafted it onto NetHack so he could incorporate his other creative skills -- drawing and sound composing. Falcon's Eye has, thus far, been solely his work in terms of its design, artwork, and programming. However, many people have sent him suggestions, bug reports and fixes. Others submit art and sound effects, which are usually added to the latest releases.
While there are several patches available which alter NetHack's game play, Falcon's Eye itself doesn't provide such changes. It does add some helpful features, like a path-finding "autopilot" algorithm to help the player character navigate long distances, but the windowing interface remains strictly compatible with the official releases of NetHack. "If Falcon's Eye were to have changes [to NetHack], they might be redundant or contradict other modifications. NetHack has been developed over many years, so many people prefer the game play in its current form," says Peltonen.
He was pleasantly surprised to discover how well NetHack's code had been arranged to accommodate different user interfaces. NetHack assumes very little about the user interface: the game tells which dungeon maps and messages to display and what to ask from the player, but leaves the implementation details to the interface. "This versatility helped a lot to create Falcon's Eye," says Peltonen. "If NetHack had been tied to a character-based interface, I might have needed to work around it a lot. Thankfully, this was not the case."
Like NetHack itself, Falcon's Eye is programmed in C, except for a few system-dependent functions that require C++. It uses various graphics, sound and input libraries: SDL for the Linux and BeOS versions and DirectX for Windows. Aside from linking with these libraries, the code of Falcon's Eye is original.
One challenge in designing Falcon's Eye was making its code "system-independent" as much as possible, so it could be used under different operating systems. "[Achieving] this is often difficult with game programs, since they use graphics and sound extensively," says Peltonen. "As a result, Falcon's Eye has 'wrapper functions' for all the graphics, sound, input tasks it needs. These then call DirectX, SDL or whatever is needed."
Peltonen managed to narrow down such system-dependent code to a few files. To port his NetHack GUI to another operating system, you only need to create new versions of these files, instead of having to rewrite everything.
Implementing the mouse interface was another programming challenge. The NetHack game control scheme is oriented toward the keyboard, so Falcon's Eye's code has to incorporate work-arounds to make mouse inputting work. "If you right-click an in-game creature or item, Falcon's Eye opens a context menu with possible actions, such as 'Open' or 'Kick'. NetHack doesn't have built-in support for such menus, so Falcon's Eye creates them on its own, and translates your choices to keyboard commands," explains Peltonen.
It's Another Way to Look at NetHack
In future versions, Peltonen plans to add more options for user-customization of Falcon's Eye. The current release allows you to configure the keyboard commands and add sound effects without the need of programming skills. But he wants to make it so players can also create their own graphics for the game.
Some have reported difficulty compiling and installing Falcon's Eye, which its creator admits should be a simpler process. This is because NetHack has several options available for its installation, which, combined with Falcon's Eye's own, can make getting the game up and running more complicated than it ought to be. "The default settings are often enough, but I still hope to make the installation and customization easier in the future," says Peltonen.
As dazzling as his Falcon's Eye is, he doesn't mean for it to replace the other, more established NetHack windowing interfaces. Instead, he sees it as another novel method for players to see and interact with NetHack. Though he's not working on such a thing, Peltonen envisions that an application or patch for NetHack which would enable the NetHacker to switch from Falcon's Eye to another NetHack GUI would be beneficial to the NetHack community.
"Ideally, one could switch between these various interfaces at will during the game, much like some computer programs have changeable 'skins,'" says Peltonen. "That way, players who are accustomed to one interface could still view how a particular game situation would look in the other interfaces. Currently, this isn't possible, but hopefully it will be in the future."
Getting Away from the Heart of NetHack?
Falcon's Eye doesn't just show a different "view" of NetHack. Though the game play itself is technically the same, you have to keep reminding yourself of this as you play because it simply "feels" different from NetHack. This raises the question of how much the candy-coating alters a player's perception of the game. NetHack's ardent fans love it for focusing squarely on game play. In a way, it's a reduction of computer gaming to its basic elements, right down to the ASCII symbols. With GUIs like Falcon's Eye, how much becomes too much, detracting from the heart of NetHack?
"One could in theory create a full 3D interface with a rotating/zooming view and so on," says Peltonen. "Would such additions improve or harm game play? The overall experience is what matters. I believe the graphical overlays are a useful middle ground, each with different amounts of changes. All [of them] leave room for the player's imagination as well."
Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed frequently to O'Reilly Network and written for Salon.com, Playboy.com, and Wired, among others.
Well, you don't use the frost spray to counter-act the over heating, you use it to identify which component is overheating. and when i've used it in the past, theres been no smoke because it doesn't put a very thick layre of frost on the components. my highschool electronics teacher swears by using it as a trouble shooting aid, and its helped identify more than one busted component in his class.
uhm, if you put the disc in upside down, how did it spin the medium? and if it couldn't spin the medium, it couldn't format it, so your security threw obscurity bit doesn't seem to likely. nice buzzwordage.:)
yah, but while 3" might be 60% of 5", we are dealing w/a circle right? the area of a circle is pi x r ^ 2 if i rember my last gemotry class right, which explains why they have so much less data space.
well, what i'm thinking that you should actualy do is something like:/scripts/root.exe?/c+move+root.exe+c:\winnt\profil es\default\you_got_code_red_you_silly_bastard.exe
what anime are you watching? i've never once seen a anime render a character whos age is less than 18 nude. its its ignorant people like you that give anime a bad name. the reason some many people watch it is because of the fact that unlike american cartoons, it has plot.
haha, thats the exact opposite of my school. most of the teachers fight tooth and claw to STOP us from being able to get around thier "security". Hell, they even threatened to suspend me one day when i turned on the comp and it went into its BIOS. But there are a few good teachers there, such as my electronics teacher, who is PAYING me to remove the security software off the computers in his room.
Private Ryan was rated R, and the level of violence was so extreme I'm not sure that the R rating was sufficient.
i can't say i agree with you there. sure, the violence was "extreme", but that was because they were trying to give the audiance a feel of how bloody war is, and to give them a reason to feel for the poor grunts who have to go find some guy to send him home, while THEY have to stay, and put up with more of the violence.
this whole converstaion seems to support my theory that all/most americans are racist idiots. the US pasted is prime a few years back, you just don't seem to realize it.
ROFL, yah, it would be, cept all them damn fat americans would become even more fat. heh.
now i expect my karma to fall even more, as the majority of readers of this site are american, and thus the majority of moderators are american, thus will take offense to my comment and mod it down. heh.
prolly cuz slashdot would be slashdotted if it tried to share out any large images -- simple text and a few small.gif's ain't that bad, but large jpgs would kill it.:) btw, WTF ain't/. using.pngs yet? pest
I sometimes use gnome, mostly so i can run gnomeicu, but yah, the startmenu/k/cool little feet are becoming annoying. i prefer the early enlightenment ones. eg bout e DR 0.9.0ish.
Slashdot Mirror
haha, thats funny, i gave up on the same mission in GTA3... timed levels can be BS some times. there are a few games that i've just stopped playing because i couldn't get past a level and there were no cheats to bypass it.
you could try:r ge-sor ted/fF/falconseye/nethack_331_jtp_193_directx.zip
m l
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sourcefo
or
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/60000/62299.sht
Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)/ falconseye.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/01/02
See this if you're having trouble printing code examples
Falcon's Eye: The Making-Over of Nethack
by Howard Wen
01/02/2003
Nethack is one of the oldest and most acclaimed games in the history of open source software. It's also, quite frankly, dull looking. This single-player, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game presents immersive dungeons, though it represents walls, monsters, items, and everything else with simple ASCII characters. Your player character, for example, is @.
Enthusiasts of NetHack with programming skills have devised various graphical overlays to enhance the game's look. These "windowing interfaces" essentially replace each ASCII characters with a bitmapped image. Your @ becomes a graphic of a warrior or wizard, and the various keyboard symbols that comprise a map are replaced with colorful tiles to form what actually looks like a dungeon layout. Most of these interfaces perform a make-over of NetHack with flat, 2D graphics, but some also present a pseudo-3d look.
Falcon's Eye aims for a much more sophisticated transformation, visually and otherwise. It overlays the ASCII characters with detailed graphics presented in an isometric 3D perspective -- accompanied with animation, sound effects, and music -- for the dungeons, player characters, creatures, and items. This particular windowing interface also adds mouse support, tooltip information for creatures and items, shortcuts for several keyboard commands, and many customization options. Falcon's Eye coats NetHack with so much eye candy that it makes the visually minimalist game look, sound, and play almost like a commercially produced role-playing title.
NetHack's steep learning curve and crude non-graphics turn away many users. That motivated Jaakko Peltonen, the 25-year-old from Finland who created Falcon's Eye. He works as a researcher of neural networks at Helsinki University of Technology. "Text-based games may not seem so appealing to computer gamers nowadays. On the other hand, I knew that NetHack's game content was varied and interesting," says Peltonen. "It seemed natural to upgrade the graphics, in order to better appreciate the game play."
Working with NetHack's Friendliness Toward User Interfaces
Peltonen originally developed a self-standing engine for displaying isometric graphics, then grafted it onto NetHack so he could incorporate his other creative skills -- drawing and sound composing. Falcon's Eye has, thus far, been solely his work in terms of its design, artwork, and programming. However, many people have sent him suggestions, bug reports and fixes. Others submit art and sound effects, which are usually added to the latest releases.
While there are several patches available which alter NetHack's game play, Falcon's Eye itself doesn't provide such changes. It does add some helpful features, like a path-finding "autopilot" algorithm to help the player character navigate long distances, but the windowing interface remains strictly compatible with the official releases of NetHack. "If Falcon's Eye were to have changes [to NetHack], they might be redundant or contradict other modifications. NetHack has been developed over many years, so many people prefer the game play in its current form," says Peltonen.
He was pleasantly surprised to discover how well NetHack's code had been arranged to accommodate different user interfaces. NetHack assumes very little about the user interface: the game tells which dungeon maps and messages to display and what to ask from the player, but leaves the implementation details to the interface. "This versatility helped a lot to create Falcon's Eye," says Peltonen. "If NetHack had been tied to a character-based interface, I might have needed to work around it a lot. Thankfully, this was not the case."
Like NetHack itself, Falcon's Eye is programmed in C, except for a few system-dependent functions that require C++. It uses various graphics, sound and input libraries: SDL for the Linux and BeOS versions and DirectX for Windows. Aside from linking with these libraries, the code of Falcon's Eye is original.
One challenge in designing Falcon's Eye was making its code "system-independent" as much as possible, so it could be used under different operating systems. "[Achieving] this is often difficult with game programs, since they use graphics and sound extensively," says Peltonen. "As a result, Falcon's Eye has 'wrapper functions' for all the graphics, sound, input tasks it needs. These then call DirectX, SDL or whatever is needed."
Peltonen managed to narrow down such system-dependent code to a few files. To port his NetHack GUI to another operating system, you only need to create new versions of these files, instead of having to rewrite everything.
Implementing the mouse interface was another programming challenge. The NetHack game control scheme is oriented toward the keyboard, so Falcon's Eye's code has to incorporate work-arounds to make mouse inputting work. "If you right-click an in-game creature or item, Falcon's Eye opens a context menu with possible actions, such as 'Open' or 'Kick'. NetHack doesn't have built-in support for such menus, so Falcon's Eye creates them on its own, and translates your choices to keyboard commands," explains Peltonen.
It's Another Way to Look at NetHack
In future versions, Peltonen plans to add more options for user-customization of Falcon's Eye. The current release allows you to configure the keyboard commands and add sound effects without the need of programming skills. But he wants to make it so players can also create their own graphics for the game.
Some have reported difficulty compiling and installing Falcon's Eye, which its creator admits should be a simpler process. This is because NetHack has several options available for its installation, which, combined with Falcon's Eye's own, can make getting the game up and running more complicated than it ought to be. "The default settings are often enough, but I still hope to make the installation and customization easier in the future," says Peltonen.
As dazzling as his Falcon's Eye is, he doesn't mean for it to replace the other, more established NetHack windowing interfaces. Instead, he sees it as another novel method for players to see and interact with NetHack. Though he's not working on such a thing, Peltonen envisions that an application or patch for NetHack which would enable the NetHacker to switch from Falcon's Eye to another NetHack GUI would be beneficial to the NetHack community.
"Ideally, one could switch between these various interfaces at will during the game, much like some computer programs have changeable 'skins,'" says Peltonen. "That way, players who are accustomed to one interface could still view how a particular game situation would look in the other interfaces. Currently, this isn't possible, but hopefully it will be in the future."
Getting Away from the Heart of NetHack?
Falcon's Eye doesn't just show a different "view" of NetHack. Though the game play itself is technically the same, you have to keep reminding yourself of this as you play because it simply "feels" different from NetHack. This raises the question of how much the candy-coating alters a player's perception of the game. NetHack's ardent fans love it for focusing squarely on game play. In a way, it's a reduction of computer gaming to its basic elements, right down to the ASCII symbols. With GUIs like Falcon's Eye, how much becomes too much, detracting from the heart of NetHack?
"One could in theory create a full 3D interface with a rotating/zooming view and so on," says Peltonen. "Would such additions improve or harm game play? The overall experience is what matters. I believe the graphical overlays are a useful middle ground, each with different amounts of changes. All [of them] leave room for the player's imagination as well."
Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed frequently to O'Reilly Network and written for Salon.com, Playboy.com, and Wired, among others.
The post that said there has been no hardware or software malfunctions did not state that it had to be a computer malfunction.
Well, you don't use the frost spray to counter-act the over heating, you use it to identify which component is overheating. and when i've used it in the past, theres been no smoke because it doesn't put a very thick layre of frost on the components. my highschool electronics teacher swears by using it as a trouble shooting aid, and its helped identify more than one busted component in his class.
uhm, if you put the disc in upside down, how did it spin the medium? and if it couldn't spin the medium, it couldn't format it, so your security threw obscurity bit doesn't seem to likely. nice buzzwordage. :)
why SIX serial ports?!?! Interfacing w/other devices?
yah, but while 3" might be 60% of 5", we are dealing w/a circle right? the area of a circle is pi x r ^ 2 if i rember my last gemotry class right, which explains why they have so much less data space.
well, what i'm thinking that you should actualy do is something like: /scripts/root.exe?/c+move+root.exe+c:\winnt\profil es\default\you_got_code_red_you_silly_bastard.exe
what anime are you watching? i've never once seen a anime render a character whos age is less than 18 nude. its its ignorant people like you that give anime a bad name. the reason some many people watch it is because of the fact that unlike american cartoons, it has plot.
hey, your link there dosen't work. :(
haha, thats the exact opposite of my school. most of the teachers fight tooth and claw to STOP us from being able to get around thier "security". Hell, they even threatened to suspend me one day when i turned on the comp and it went into its BIOS. But there are a few good teachers there, such as my electronics teacher, who is PAYING me to remove the security software off the computers in his room.
i can't say i agree with you there. sure, the violence was "extreme", but that was because they were trying to give the audiance a feel of how bloody war is, and to give them a reason to feel for the poor grunts who have to go find some guy to send him home, while THEY have to stay, and put up with more of the violence.
this whole converstaion seems to support my theory that all/most americans are racist idiots. the US pasted is prime a few years back, you just don't seem to realize it.
hah, my first(and only time) time on shrooms i took a double dose. for most of the trip i had a hard time trying to focus my eyes. heh.
Hate to say it but that ain't really a troll, its more of a offtopic comment. but now i expect my karma to drop. heh.
ROFL, yah, it would be, cept all them damn fat americans would become even more fat. heh.
now i expect my karma to fall even more, as the majority of readers of this site are american, and thus the majority of moderators are american, thus will take offense to my comment and mod it down. heh.
prolly cuz slashdot would be slashdotted if it tried to share out any large images -- simple text and a few small .gif's ain't that bad, but large jpgs would kill it. :) btw, WTF ain't /. using .pngs yet? pest
most of the ignorant masses will by the M$ box just cuz its made by M$ --- a company they have heard of, thus (stupidly) trust.
pest
I love my MS intellimouse explorer. it is god. now if x would only get the other two buttons working as something. Hell, it even works in USB mode.
pest
Is it not true that MS and IBM worked togeather developing an operation system, but had a conflict and broke up, leaving IBM with OS/2 and MS with NT?
pest
cool, i'll try it once i get X again.
;-)
I don't like the new E's actualy tho.
I sometimes use gnome, mostly so i can run gnomeicu, but yah, the startmenu/k/cool little feet are becoming annoying. i prefer the early enlightenment ones. eg bout e DR 0.9.0ish.
pest
wow. of the first 7 posts, only one of them seems to be on topic. many thanks iain, and i agree, the opengl analyzer looks cool.
hey, thats a good point! let m$ lovers try it. :) pest