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The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

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Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#32

Has anyone won this game honestly? I've patched the C code and only got so far. I tried savefile hacking and that didn't get me to the end. I was only able to win by compiling a version with debug symbols and playing inside the debugger. (eg. find the flag for the Wizard of Yendor's invisibility status and clear it.)

Winning Nethack games is just like any other hard accomplishment; you have to plan, know what's needed to win, and have patience. It's an unforgiving game, but winnable with no cheating. I have ascended a couple of times as a Valk and Wizard. I stopped playing a decade ago because it's very hard to play casually; you just get so involved. I am in awe of people who do mind-boggling conduct ascensions like the one here :

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/rec.games.rogueli...

I suppose the time spent was worth it for them.

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#33
post #31

Has anyone programmed an AI to win Nethack? It seems like an obvious thing to try.

Yes!

https://github.com/krajj7/BotHack

https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullau...

Edit: I remember looking at BotHack at the time and being surprised at how extensively and elaborately hard-coded the strategy and evaluations were. This is definitely not machine learning!

Edit 2: HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8990869

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#34

Has anyone won this game honestly? I've patched the C code and only got so far. I tried savefile hacking and that didn't get me to the end. I was only able to win by compiling a version with debug symbols and playing inside the debugger. (eg. find the flag for the Wizard of Yendor's invisibility status and clear it.)

I've won, exactly once. It was the first time I got a knight into the quest (I can pretty regularly get barbarians and Valkyries near gehennom) and it turned into my first time to the wizard, my first invocation ritual, and ultimately my first ascention. I have since got the amulet once, but then had my brain eaten.

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find DCSS's development goals very interesting in contrast to Nethack. While Nethack is widely famed for "the dev's think of everything", DCSS has been on a streak of streamlining mechanics, such as the latest release collapsing all food items to rations instead of the pizza, royal jelly, and others. Though rip wand of healing.

Ugh, that kind of development approach gets my skin crawling for some reason.

Yeah, I find that a lot of the changes made for the sake of “streamlining” just made the game more boring.

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#36
post #4

Is this available on any websites that don't require Javascript to view? (Seriously folks, there's no reason a static site like this should need JS enabled to read, except for tracking purposes.)

Google groups still follows the deprecated AJAX crawling scheme:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/re...

Edit: note that URL redirects back to the JS-only version if you have JS enabled

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#37
post #31

Has anyone programmed an AI to win Nethack? It seems like an obvious thing to try.

Has anyone programmed an AI to win Nethack? It seems like an obvious thing to try.

There's a long history of using bots (they weren't really smart enough to be called AI, but they did "learn") to play games like this.

Long before Nethack there was Rogue. And then, 37 years ago, there was Rog-O-Matic. As Wiki describes it:

Rog-O-Matic is a bot developed in 1981 to play and win the computer game Rogue ...

Described as a "belligerent expert system", Rog-O-Matic performs well when tested against expert Rogue players, even winning the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rog-O-Matic

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#39
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your pull request crumbles into dust...

Not my PR! The issue is that if you die by having a cursed ball and chain fall onto your head while descending a staircase, the screen doesn't transition to the lower level so it's not clear on which level the bones file would be generated. (Per emails from the dev team, it does get correctly generated on the lower level.) Apparently fixing this issue somehow required rewriting huge portions of the graphics engine, w…

That's one hell of a bug to find. That's kind of hilarious. That does suck about how difficult to fix though.

Re: The NetHack dev team is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1

#40
Personally, since I'm less interested in MS-DOS modes and fixed-length 8bit charset modes, I switched to the redesigned NetHack 4, which works fine with modern UTF-8 terminals.

NetHack 4 is geared towards progression of the game and staying up to date with the changing world rather than mothballing the old game. It's a separate project from NetHack 3.x, with different goals and development teams.

http://nethack4.org

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