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First NetHack bot ascension

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Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#31

Post by mentat »

riffraff wrote: post #26
cturner wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly complicated. That's probably less of a big thing now than it was in the 80s or 90s. In the 80s or 90s it was just amazing that a game could be that intricate. The sigil-based graphics are part of what make the complexity possible. And - the dev team have coded in all manner of combinations of things, many of which get you killed in plausible/amusing/annoying/complicated ways. There's a culture of play…

> The sigil-based graphics are part of what make the complexity possible I don't think that is relevant, I have played the GUI version for many years, and it's perfectly usable.

The intended point was probably that they enabled the complexity in the interface pre-GUI.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#32

Post by mklim »

jsheard wrote: post #24
pdpi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it surprising? (And I do not at all mean that in a snarky tone. I've been lurking in the nethack community for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me)

The speedruns most people are familiar with are the product of someone playing a meticulously planned route over and over again until the execution is almost perfect. With the more popular games it reaches a point where they are barely even playing the game anymore, instead running on auto-pilot and hoping to make the least mistakes and get the most favorable RNG with minor things like enemy AI patterns. Speedrunning…

> requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played

I agree here, but I just want to emphasize that Any% speedruns (runs where you purposely exploit glitches or flaws with the game engine to trigger the final cutscene as fast as possible) still take incredible amounts of skill. More skill than playing the game as it was intended to be played, in a lot of cases. The current Ocarina of Time route involves exploiting several glitches that require pressing the correct button combination on a specific frame (N64 games run at 20fps), jumping at just the pixel perfect angle to slide through a model's corner/collision tracking, etc. Much more difficult stuff than beating the game straight through. Super Monkey Ball 2 (Gamecube game) speedruns require pulling off maneuvers trickier than anything the levels were explicitly designed for, the difficulty of which is hard to overstate. That game is hard. Speedrunning a game with true RNG everywhere like Nethack is definitely a beast of its own since you can't memorize routes, but even runs with completely static routes are incredibly difficult to pull off.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#33

Post by pavel_lishin »

jashkenas wrote: post #19

Folks, do yourself a favor, and check out the bot's source: https://github.com/krajj7/BotHack/blob/master/src/bothack/bo... It's really, really neat. Even to those of us who know little or nothing about the game, from the nested Englishy descriptors piled up into short conditions for things-the-bot-might-want-to-do, the basic strategies can be discerned...

... and then there's some things that probably only make sense if you're very familiar with Nethack:

    (def desired-shirt
      (ordered-set "T-shirt" "Hawaiian shirt"))

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#34

Post by mkramlich »

statico wrote: post #28

You can watch players (and bots) play NetHack in real time: telnet nethack.alt.org ...then hit "w" to watch games that are in progress. You might need to resize your window, and some players might be using a different character set than your terminal. If you want to start playing, telnet there, create an account, hit "p" to play a game and then "?" to read basic help. http://nethack.alt.org/ will keep logs of your ga…

The beauty/terror of NetHack is that even if you play with the wiki/spoilers at hand it's still a difficult game to master and win, even survive. YASD and the RNG kill most people, and often.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#35

Post by jsheard »

mklim wrote: post #32
jsheard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speedruns most people are familiar with are the product of someone playing a meticulously planned route over and over again until the execution is almost perfect. With the more popular games it reaches a point where they are barely even playing the game anymore, instead running on auto-pilot and hoping to make the least mistakes and get the most favorable RNG with minor things like enemy AI patterns. Speedrunning…

> requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played I agree here, but I just want to emphasize that Any% speedruns (runs where you purposely exploit glitches or flaws with the game engine to trigger the final cutscene as fast as possible) still take incredible amounts of skill. More skill than playing the game as it was intended to be played, in a lot of cases. The current Ocarina of Time route inv…

Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply that rote speedrunning doesn't require skill. It's just a different kind of skill, and a lot of patience.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#36

Post by mjgoins »

statico wrote: post #28

You can watch players (and bots) play NetHack in real time: telnet nethack.alt.org ...then hit "w" to watch games that are in progress. You might need to resize your window, and some players might be using a different character set than your terminal. If you want to start playing, telnet there, create an account, hit "p" to play a game and then "?" to read basic help. http://nethack.alt.org/ will keep logs of your ga…

It's worth pointing out that no one ever finishes (ascends) a game of Nethack without looking at the spoilers, so they're really not spoilers, they're more like the instruction manual.

It is definitely more fun to try playing the game for several hours without reading the spoilers, but you're not going to figure out stuff like the Invocation Ritual without reading the spoilers.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#37

Post by mkramlich »

I'm the creator of a Rogue-like game (Dead By Zombie) and love NetHack, consider it one of the masterpieces of game design I've tried to study and learn from. Lessons baked into it both in terms of game design and software. Has a lot of bang per buck, in terms of fun/value per LOC, and per square inch of screen real estate.

If anybody gets introduced to Rogue-like UI for the first time because of this article, and likes it, I also recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Similar but very very different in ways that people tend to either love or hate.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#38

Post by jballanc »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #33
jashkenas wrote: post #19

Folks, do yourself a favor, and check out the bot's source: https://github.com/krajj7/BotHack/blob/master/src/bothack/bo... It's really, really neat. Even to those of us who know little or nothing about the game, from the nested Englishy descriptors piled up into short conditions for things-the-bot-might-want-to-do, the basic strategies can be discerned...

... and then there's some things that probably only make sense if you're very familiar with Nethack: (def desired-shirt (ordered-set "T-shirt" "Hawaiian shirt"))

This one's actually not that hard to explain. Shirts can be worn under your armor, and these are the only two kinds of shirts. Normally, a shirt adds nothing to your armor class, but it can be enchanted (up to +7 safely), so it's nice to have one if you can find one. The problem with the Hawaiian shirt is that shop keepers will assume you're a tourist, and charge you extra.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#39

Post by pavel_lishin »

jballanc wrote: post #38
pavel_lishin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and then there's some things that probably only make sense if you're very familiar with Nethack: (def desired-shirt (ordered-set "T-shirt" "Hawaiian shirt"))

This one's actually not that hard to explain. Shirts can be worn under your armor, and these are the only two kinds of shirts. Normally, a shirt adds nothing to your armor class, but it can be enchanted (up to +7 safely), so it's nice to have one if you can find one. The problem with the Hawaiian shirt is that shop keepers will assume you're a tourist, and charge you extra.

> The problem with the Hawaiian shirt is that shop keepers will assume you're a tourist, and charge you extra.

Absolutely cannot tell if you're fucking with me, or if this is an actual game mechanic - and if so, why this shirt would be desirable.

Re: First NetHack bot ascension

#40

Post by jubalfh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #39
jballanc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one's actually not that hard to explain. Shirts can be worn under your armor, and these are the only two kinds of shirts. Normally, a shirt adds nothing to your armor class, but it can be enchanted (up to +7 safely), so it's nice to have one if you can find one. The problem with the Hawaiian shirt is that shop keepers will assume you're a tourist, and charge you extra.

> The problem with the Hawaiian shirt is that shop keepers will assume you're a tourist, and charge you extra. Absolutely cannot tell if you're fucking with me, or if this is an actual game mechanic - and if so, why this shirt would be desirable.

It's usually not a first choice, but the tourist starts the game wearing it.
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