I wonder if moving to Lua makes it easier to Hack/Mod? Maybe more easily create variations?
NetHack 5.0.0
111–120 of 186 posts
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or do what I did when I played this as a child: read the spoilers. Then start with Valkyrie, get the Mjollnir, wand of wishing, and a dragon scale mail as fast as possible. And a bag of holding and you get pretty far. It's a fantastic game if you have a bit of imagination. The possibilities are endless and it's so rewarding to ascend finally.
I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
I'm going to quote myself from a blog post I wrote back in 2012:
> Nethack is incredibly difficult, and near impossible to win without some knowledge. Whilst it could be argued that one could attain this knowledge through trial and error, it would take many many playthroughs to make any headway, even if you played in the invincible “Wizard” mode. Whilst I would recommend the use of spoilers if you wish to make progress in the game and discover what it has to offer, I wouldn’t suggest reading up on absolutely everything to give yourself an advantage. My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it. I still found the game incredibly challenging, as I was placed in situations that I couldn’t predict or prepare for, and I still had that thrill of discovery and amazement.
https://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/awesome-game-exper...
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#113This is going to seem either beyond idiotic (which it may be) or a troll (which it is not) but: is this game actually fun? Like, if you have zero nostalgia or anything, and your evaluation of it is based solely on what it is, is it something a person in their 20s would want to play? Is it fun in a different way than, say, Dwarf Fortress is fun? (Haven't played DF but I think I understand why people do.) Would really…
It's complicated. The soul of Nethack is opaque design, secrets, and emergent gameplay from mechanical interactions. In theory, the best way to play Nethack is by going in completely blind ("unspoiled"), so that you maximize the sense of discovery which is its most compelling trait. But in practice, I highly doubt that anyone in human history has ever beaten Nethack without looking up any spoilers. At some point you just get frustrated, decide enough is enough, and look up whatever spoilers are necessary to beat the game. Even getting started is rough for a beginner without spoilers, but at the same time taking a spoiler-maximalist approach is probably going to result in a pretty lackluster experience.
I'd say that, to some degree, roguelike game design has moved on, and when it comes to hilarity and sheer mechanical depth and breadth, games like Caves of Qud are probably better at evoking the feelings of Nethack without being so absolutely reliant on spoilers (which isn't to say that the game isn't still largely opaque, just that the essential parts are better-communicated). And on the flipside, anti-Nethacks like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup make it a design goal to be fun and playable even assuming a totally spoiled player, by focusing more on tactical and strategic decisions and being forthright about including all necessary information within the game itself.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#114Some notable changes in 5.0.0 (spoilers abound): If a bag of holding explodes (e.g. due to putting a wand of cancellation in it), most of its items are scattered rather than lost Amnesia no longer causes you to forget maps Unicorn horns no longer restore lost attributes Valkyrie ascensions (considered the easiest) are harder: chance to receive Excalibur when dipping a longsword in a fountain is decreased if not a kni…
Damn they really nerfed valkyrie. I loved that class.
For real! Valkyrie is the perfect "just bash things while only half paying attention" class. Great for when I'm playing to unwind (as opposed to playing as a challenge to myself).
At least there's still Samurai.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#115First impression: it has a tutorial, which should actually help increase the player base quite a bit. It comes with some movement quality of life (e.g. moving into a door opens it, moving into an obviously dangerous thing requires confirmation). If you enable the option, there's color coding of health (green -> full), burden level, and states like poisoning, which I think is new too. You can filter out messages like…
IIRC, there was always a way to filter out certain messages (or that may be an alt.org customization, but it's been a part of my config file for a while now).
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#116This is going to seem either beyond idiotic (which it may be) or a troll (which it is not) but: is this game actually fun? Like, if you have zero nostalgia or anything, and your evaluation of it is based solely on what it is, is it something a person in their 20s would want to play? Is it fun in a different way than, say, Dwarf Fortress is fun? (Haven't played DF but I think I understand why people do.) Would really…
Nethack is what you get when you take a team of developers and have them focus on gameplay to the exclusion of all else. No graphics, music, marketing, apps, action sequences, or profit motive. Just pure gameplay, with a richness of interactions and possibilities unmatched by more polished modern games. Nethack is so well balanced that, for most players, being gifted the three most powerful items in the game from the start barely affects your winning chances.
AI researchers think NetHack is interesting [1, 2]. You should too!
[1] https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/hambro22a/hambro22a.pdf
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or do what I did when I played this as a child: read the spoilers. Then start with Valkyrie, get the Mjollnir, wand of wishing, and a dragon scale mail as fast as possible. And a bag of holding and you get pretty far. It's a fantastic game if you have a bit of imagination. The possibilities are endless and it's so rewarding to ascend finally.
I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
> I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
You're crazy. All that does is prevent you from playing the game.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#118Wow! The inclusion of Lua bindings seems like a major step forward. This should make modding much more accessible.
Angband had a rework to use lua for 3.0.0 in 2002.
Then, nothing ever took advantage of it, and the lua was eventually stripped out.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lua is not on base on most distros, that's sad. Also it stops being as portable. By Amiga 68k platforms then. And maybe DOS. Also, there no official Nethack i686 builds. If I were them I'd try some micro-language from https://t3x.org as a pre-processor and bundle it. The T3X0 language itself can do wonders and even be ported to DOS with ease. EDIT: ok, Lua can be portable and even they got DOS ports, this is great.
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.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#120[flagged]