Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NetHack 5.0.0

nethack.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 186 posts

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#131

Post by abustamam »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #107
foresto wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still play this game. Spoilers still spoil experiences for others.

Meh, imo spoilers only spoil experiences for people who take media too seriously. When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with. Conversely, I have played Nethack on and…

I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot.

Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#132

Post by pests »

abustamam wrote: post #131
appreciatorBus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, imo spoilers only spoil experiences for people who take media too seriously. When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with. Conversely, I have played Nethack on and…

I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot. Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?

Agree 100%.

I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it was just a boxing movie, something like rocky or something.

I don't think reading the synopsis would have affected me like that movie did. I thought about it for days afterwards.

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#133

Post by abustamam »

pests wrote: post #132
abustamam wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot. Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?

Agree 100%. I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it was just a boxing movie, something like rocky or something. I don't think reading the synopsis would have affected me like that movie did. I thought about it for days afterwards.

Never watched, or even cared to watch, but now I'm curious! Thanks for the rec!

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#134

Post by jcul »

pimeys wrote: post #25
haunter wrote: post #4

I can highly recommend the 3D client especially because it works almost everywhere, hope it will be updated for 5.0.0 soon https://github.com/JamesIV4/nethack-3d Web https://jamesiv4.github.io/nethack-3d/

I don't know... I played Nethack 30 years ago a lot and always felt all the graphical updates were not worth it. There's something when you can easily see the whole map in one screen. And that scary pink h appears suddenly... Edit: but to be fair, I will try this 3d version.

"pink" h? There's a way to enable colours?

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#135

Post by melasadra »

How would you compare these to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) or Tales of Majeyal (ToME).?

I play tons of both games but am having difficulty settling in nethack

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#137

Post by cturner »

abustamam wrote: post #130
chongli wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drat. NetHack 5.0 changes thousands and upon thousands of things from the previous release, 3.6.7, which was 3 years ago. 17 years ago is an eternity in this game’s history. The versions may not have gone up hardly at all in that time, but the fix logs are enormous. Adding up the line counts of the fix logs for the 3.6.X releases with 5.0, I get a total of 6814 lines. That’s bug fixes only. There’s a similarly large…

Wait, what happened to v4??

This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release 5 is a DevTeam release with input from what was new blood fifteen years ago.

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#138

Post by boomlinde »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #121
haakon wrote: post #23

Can you name a game that is older than NetHack and still in active development? I can't.

You don't have to look very far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(1983_video_game) > Stable release 5.7.15 / 4 June 2021; 4 years ago

My understanding is that UMoria is an independent, complete remake of the original Moria. NetHack on the other hand is the same project with the same codebase throughout its history. With that in mind, NetHack is a few months older than the Moria still under development today.

Not to say that this is necessarily the right way to look at it. It's not clear-cut, is what I'm saying.

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#139

Post by archargelod »

troad wrote: post #119
trynumber9 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nethack embeds Lua 5.4.8, so you don't need it installed from a distribution's package manager. As long as your system can build C99* it can build Lua. And given that Nethack 5.0.0 is C99, this dependency is not reducing portability any further. * Lua has a LUA_USE_C89 flag so it may be more portable than Nethack 5.0.0 at this point.

> LUA_USE_C89 How much functionality/performance does one lose with this flag? Genuine question, I don't know. If C89 and C99 were equally performant/functional, it would seem logical to just target C89 (since any C99 compiler should be able to compile C89 too). There must be some reason it's a flag.

I downloaded a Lua 5.4.8 source tarball and checked all the uses of LUA_USE_C89 (manually, without AI):

luaconf.h:50-655

- windows builds always use C89 (quote: "broadly, Windows is C89")

- in C99 Lua uses 'strtod' and 'sprintf' for hex number conversions. Otherwise, Lua provides its own implementation.

- no math function variants with l_ and f_ prefixes in C89

- optional lua_KContext type is not available with C89

llimits.h:79

- type definition C99: uintptr.t vs C89: size_t

llimits.h:184

- in C99 or GCC Lua has a pragma for inlining functions, otherwise it's macro'ed to nothing

lmathlib.c:176

- math_log has an additional optimization in C99

    if (base == l_mathop(2.0))
      res = l_mathop(log2)(x);
    else
lmathlib.c:285

- LUA_RAND32 define might fail to find 64-bit type (comment says it's for testing)

loslib.c:36

- `strftime()` only supports one-char options in C89

lprefix.h:14

- no _XOPEN_SOURCE with C89 (POSIX/XSI stuff) - no _LARGEFILE_SOURCE with C89 (manipulation of large files in gcc and other compilers)

both of these defines don't appear anywhere else in Lua source code

Re: NetHack 5.0.0

#140

Post by bhaak »

cturner wrote: post #137
abustamam wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what happened to v4??

This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release…

The story is a bit more convoluted. After the 3.4.3 release in 2003, the DevTeam stopped releasing new versions. They were still responsive when contacted by e-mail, though. But then we also didn't know how the development version looked like.

In 2014 the dev version was leaked to the community and in the following discussions with the DevTeam on how to handle this, the DevTeam got the first shoot of new devs in a while which lead to the release of 3.6.0 in 2015. This version was a polished version of the dev version, also incorporating some of the popular community patches at the time. The 3.6 branch received regular bugfix and security updates (3.6.7 was released in 2023).

Since 3.6.0 there's a mirror repository of NetHack on GitHub. So the development version that was internally numbered 3.7.0 which would become 5.0.0 was always accessible and, contrary to the 3.4.3 era, could be played anytime and was also installed on the public servers to play.

Post reply on HN