141–146 of 146 posts
I have long assumed that it will eventually be unethical to turn off dwarf fortress.
If we could pause the world, would it be unethical to do so? It's not the same as destroying the world. I'm just responding to the implicit reference to pausing-ai-being-unethical. pause != destroy.
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A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game 1. The endgame is too easy and boring. 2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots 3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically) 4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, an…
This is all true. However.. how many years of gameplay did you have to put in to learn it? Speaking for myself, I've been playing nethack since the 80's. How many other games can you name that will keep an audience interested for 20 or 30 years? I'd count that as a fantastic success in game design. Despite that, I do agree that the game has its weaknesses and could stand to be improved quite a bit. One of its greates…
I think that there's a possibility that it's not as difficult, in relative terms, for people around my age who grew up with similar games, and fairly hard ones at that.
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What's broken in it?
A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game 1. The endgame is too easy and boring. 2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots 3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically) 4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, an…
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What's broken in it?
Not sure if this is what johnswamps was referring to, but the two big things that come to mind are the Sokoban levels (there are only two fixed variants which can only guarantee you one of two things, and a lot of the time if people don't get the thing they want (usually the bag of holding), they end up restarting since the odds of getting it anywhere else in the game are pretty low after that) and the fact that you…
My teenage son - who, raised right, grew up on Nethack - absolutely loves this game, and will occasionally stay up all night and be found still feverishly working on some elaborate construction in the morning. From what I have seen, it is ASCII crack. edit: I guess it's modified code-page-437 crack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 edit again: This article really is a very interesting story behind the devel…
freakishly, the game actually uses opengl to display the grid of character sprites...
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Gates wrote, by himself, the best BAISC interpreter in the industry in a matter of months. At a time where there was no internet to check out the latest papers, StackOverflow to help you out, etc. Way more impressive than sticking together a few perlscripts for a social networking website. Zuckerberg wasn't the main programmer behind Facebook, btw.
Gates wrote the interpreter along with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff... while he distinguished himself as a programmer, he's not quite that level of amazing. I get the impression that in a situation similar to (but not as lopsided as) Wozniak and Jobs' arrangement, Allen did a bit more of the technical heavy lifting and Gates planned and arranged the business side.
wherein Joel Spolsky was reviewed by Bill Gates. It is pretty clear the man had serious technical chops.