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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

#81

Is there a multiplayer+easy mode of the game? I'd really like to play it like D&D, with a party.

No. At first glance, it seems easy, just make other players appear like monsters and add a chat feature. But if you consider more details, you arrive at their FAQ answer:

> We think you can't do that in a playable way without compromising the basic idea of being able to think as long as you want about what you're doing, but many people have made many different suggestions as to the one obvious way to handle things. If you still like the idea, you can try Crossfire, a multiplayer roguelike for UNIX/X11. Other games to check out are MAngband and Diablo

See http://www.nethack.org/common/info.html

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

#82

Haven't been able to ascend a tourist since the post 3.4 Elbereth nerfings... but doesn't mean it's not possible. I'll keep trying.

Ascended my first tourist yesterday! It's actually a great class to play after the quest. You just have to be very careful (and perhaps lucky) in the early game.

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

#83
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't even need a web browser to view this announcement -- it was posted on 27 April 2018 to rec.games.roguelike.nethack. Assuming you already have a newsreader set up, you can just go ahead and read that message.

But you need to pay for usenet to use a newsreader, right?

For text groups, there is AIOE and Eternal September.

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

#84
post #81

Is there a multiplayer+easy mode of the game? I'd really like to play it like D&D, with a party.

No. At first glance, it seems easy, just make other players appear like monsters and add a chat feature. But if you consider more details, you arrive at their FAQ answer: > We think you can't do that in a playable way without compromising the basic idea of being able to think as long as you want about what you're doing, but many people have made many different suggestions as to the one obvious way to handle things. I…

I disagree with the reason for not implementing it, adopting something like "simultaneous turns" mode from Civilization series could provide that time to think for everyone. But I'll check out Crossfire.

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

#85
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't even need a web browser to view this announcement -- it was posted on 27 April 2018 to rec.games.roguelike.nethack. Assuming you already have a newsreader set up, you can just go ahead and read that message.

But you need to pay for usenet to use a newsreader, right?

I just went ahead and logged in to a machine where I had slrn installed, then signed up for an account with http://www.eternal-september.org/ and configured my .slrnrc with

   set force_authentication 1
   nnrpaccess news.eternal-september.org [user] [password]
then ran something like

  slrn --nntp -h news.eternal-september.org --create
and

  L*nethack
to select rec.games.roguelike.nethack

then do

  s "happy to ann"
to do a subject search going forward, then read the message.

Page down and up with space & b, etc.

It's been a little while since I used a newsreader and I didn't use to slrn, so took a few minutes to get used to.

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

#86
post #45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in fact NetHack is supposed to be a more forgiving roguelike. See http://nethack4.org/blog/strategy-headroom.html

It might have been 20 years ago, or even 10, but today there are a lot of popular roguelikes which are still challenging but have fewer unavoidable deaths and less reliance on spoilers. Dungeon Crawl is a good example, but there are a lot of roguelikes even gentler than that.

The linked post is from 2014, and specifically mentions DCSS being "lower headroom". I expect a significant issue here is different use of "forgiving"; IIUC proponents of DCSS would tend to stress YASDs as being "unforgiving", but the focus of the linked article is more on flexibility in play style - forgiving somewhat-less-than-optimal play, forgiving outright recklessness, and occasionally killing you regardless of your behavior are all three somewhat different things.

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

#87
post #22

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.)

There's only one person known to have won without spoilers (that is, without reading the source code or information derived from the source code). However, you can see lots of experts playing live on nethack.alt.org and they regularly win. I've personally won four times (with Valkyries and Barbarians, two of the easiest classes) and once got a Priest to the Astral Plane and died there. :-( Recently I've switched to C…

> There's only one person known to have won

That is quite a modern concept. Back in ye olden times, people just played local versions of games, and won, and didn't announce their achievements to the world. I am sure there is a plethora of people who won and just didn't brag about it.

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

#88
post #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

Loosing MS-DOS support is kind of a shame, because there's really no reason the game can't support it, but also because software for MS-DOS is some of the most portable software you can write these days.

DOSBox has accidentally achieved write-once-run-anywhere.

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

#89

Nethack is the game I've played more than any other.. having played it literally for decades and decades. Yet I switched to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup about 5 or 6 years ago, and really haven't gone back except to try Nethack again every now and then only to feel it too painful and slow to continue playing. I've been spoiled by Crawl's autoexplore, its richness of gods and god-granted powers, its colors (in text mode,…

> I just wish they'd take more of the best parts of Nethack and make Crawl even more fun.

Not that it's your (or anyone's) responsibility to do this, but quick reminder that both Crawl and Nethack are completely Open Source. So if anyone ever wanted to do a downstream fork that was pure Crawl + a few Nethack features... they could.

Just want to maybe stick the idea in someone's head.

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

#90
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…

:) To be fair, if I was writing any program and someone came to me with a bug like that, my first thought would be "#!@? I don't want to deal with this."
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