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NetHack 3.6.7

nethack.org

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Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#51
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, if the security of nethack is critical to your security, then you probably do something very wrong. There is no reason to not sandbox the hell out of it.

Not all security works in your oversimplified Windows-centric ways. Since we're not building a VM per user on multi-user systems, we do care about security of the programs we install.

You don't have to spin up a VM per user to sandbox on Linux. You could use firejail. But traditional UNIX user sandboxing could also go a long way.

I'm just saying that I would never trust nethack to not execute arbitrary code and I would have other security measures in place if my threat model required it. It's written in C. I don't expect most contributors to be security focuesed. The primary use is a user running it on their own machine, which is a completely different threat model.

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#52
Cool, but I still prefer a patched Slashem =).

Altough the references to Terry Pratchett are a good reason to play vanilla Nethack.

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is somewhat sacrilegious to say but I think for all the reasons you say DCSS is a much better game than nethack. Some years ago I went through a phase of being quite into nethack and ascended a couple of times, but really lost interest because there are too many situations where there is only one correct way to play. There’s also just a lot of arbitrary nonsense that they expected you (not sure whether th…

Nethack tries to present the experience of exploring a rich and detailed world, full of interesting things to discover. The drawback is that you only get the joy of discovery once. Finding something like the technique to steal from shops is fun the first time, and then tedious every other time. To best enjoy Nethack, I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible. DCSS sacrifices Nethack's sense of wonder for bett…

Not better, but different. DCSS it's combat oriented. Nethack it's for exploration and interactivity between objects and effects to win.

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#55
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you’re describing confirmation bias.

No, he describes learning. You know, adjusting up the probability of X the more you see X?

All I see in every thread is this meta complaint about seeing this genre of comments too often. I find that pretty annoying.

And yet, I don’t want to say my subjective experience is objective truth. Maybe I notice and remember the comments that annoy me? You see how that works?

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#56
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is somewhat sacrilegious to say but I think for all the reasons you say DCSS is a much better game than nethack. Some years ago I went through a phase of being quite into nethack and ascended a couple of times, but really lost interest because there are too many situations where there is only one correct way to play. There’s also just a lot of arbitrary nonsense that they expected you (not sure whether th…

Nethack tries to present the experience of exploring a rich and detailed world, full of interesting things to discover. The drawback is that you only get the joy of discovery once. Finding something like the technique to steal from shops is fun the first time, and then tedious every other time. To best enjoy Nethack, I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible. DCSS sacrifices Nethack's sense of wonder for bett…

I have been playing both NetHack and DCSS for years and won both multiple times.

I keep going back to NetHack. There’s something I find very endearing about it even though I know what to expect. Perhaps it’s similar to Stardew Valley. A sense of place, of coherence and care, that DCSS lacks. The shopkeepers and the priests. The guards in Minetown. The Oracle. The “monsters” who are neutral to you based on your alignment. All the graffiti and the Discworld books. Even the bloody Sokoban levels which people love to complain about!

In Stardew Valley you’ve literally got to till the soil and plant seeds and water them. You’ve got to break boulders and cut back weeds and cut down trees, and go fishing in the nearby river or lake. You can look at all of that stuff as “tedious”, just as you might for shopping or item identification or altar sacrifice in NetHack.

But I don’t see it that way. These aren’t tedious chores I must do in order to win the game. These are activities I want to do and relish doing. They’re almost meditative, in a way.

Don’t get me wrong. I still like DCSS. But for all of its philosophy around removing tedium, the game still feels way too long. If you’re considering the game purely on challenge grounds, much of the difficulty disappears after the early game. It’s quite interesting from a tactical perspective in the beginning, up until lair or so. After that it’s mostly just a long grind until the end.

So I really can’t agree that DCSS is a better game than NetHack. It’s very different, scratching a different itch. It’s also much more difficult than NetHack, with very tight balance in the early game.

But I would also say that there are a lot of other Roguelikes that try to do what DCSS does (such as Rift Wizard) and some also that take NetHack’s approach (such as Caves of Qud). This is evidence enough to me that both designs have merit and that people are interested in playing both.

So I would conclude that it’s inappropriate to call DCSS a better game than NetHack. It’s a different game, with different goals, not a replacement.

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#57

If Dwarf Fortress can get a fantastic GUI, does that mean we can get one for NetHack too? I can dream.

The iOS app just got updated and I think it has new tiles. What we really need imho is a mobile interface like the one that Beamdog designed for the Switch version of Baldur's Gate. That way it could be played on systems like the Steamdeck.

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#58
post #27

If Dwarf Fortress can get a fantastic GUI, does that mean we can get one for NetHack too? I can dream.

Nethack already has a wonderful GUI. Characters are graphical (if it's on the screen, it's a graphic), and there's plenty of tiles you can use.

By your logic, every CLI program is a GUI program. That may be technically not wrong, but it doesn't really mean it's true, according to what people usually mean when they talk about GUIs.

Re: NetHack 3.6.7

#59

I must be some kind of medieval purist because today in the middle of 2023 I still play the original rogue, in its 3.6.3 and 5.4 versions, and I can barely tolerate some of the changes. That's what I don't like about Hack and its "new" incarnation, Nethack. Changes were introduced that change the original spirit. I also played Moria and Adom for years with mixed results. I was never able to play Nethack. I'm going to…

Just different games. I prefer Moria over Angband. Don’t like some of the changes.
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