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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-faster-than-duke-nukem dept.

Nethack 3.6 Released!

After a 10+ year hiatus, the NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6, a combination of the old and the new.

Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.

Those of you expecting a huge raft of new features will probably be disappointed. Although we have included a number of new features, the focus of this release was to get the foundation established so that we can build on it going forward.

The update does break compatibility with old save games and bones files due to the extensive changes.

Release Notes

NetHack 3.6.0 Released

NetHack 3.6.0 has been released, incorporating changes from over a decade of patches and forks, as well as adding numerous Terry Pratchett tributes. NetHack is a single-player roguelike game originally released in 1987. From the release notes:

This summer we had a bit of a reality check due to the outage at SourceForge which has driven some internal discussion about future direction concerning hosting and has unfortunately delayed the release - more to come on this.

[...] A number of significant changes were derived from UnNetHack, NetHack 4 and other variants, such as: Roderick Schertler's pickup_thrown patch; Extensions of Malcolm Ryan's Statue Glyphs patch for tty and tiles; Extensions of the Paranoid_Quit patch; Extensions of the Dungeon Overview; Aardvark Joe's Extended Logfile; Michael Deutschmann's use_darkgray patch; Clive Crous' dark_room patch; Jeroen Demeyer and Jukka Lahtinen sortloot patch; Stefano Busti's Auto open doors patch.

There are also a number of clean-up activities that were undertaken with respect to code hygiene and removal of conditional build code in order to streamline the code. Most of these were restrictions introduced years ago in order to allow the run time size of the binary to fit on platforms with smaller memory footprints. As most, if not all of those platforms are no longer in use, the decision was made to simplify and drop support for some of the platforms that the 3.4.x versions would have run on. That doesn't mean that NetHack still can't run on some *really* old hardware :-) The README file in the top level directory of the NetHack source tree has a complete list of systems we know NetHack 3.6 runs on and ones that previous versions did run on but have not been verified. We'd be very interested if anyone can provide "proof of life" on any of these historical OS versions.

A number of treasured NetHack community patches, or our variations of them, have been rolled into the base NetHack source tree in this version, meaning that they're no longer optional, including: menucolors; pickup thrown; statue glyphs; dungeon overview; sortloot.

Downloads here.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2Original Submission #3

 
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  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:26AM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:26AM (#274350) Journal

    I never ascended, but I have a savegame somewhere with a very powerful SLASH'EM wizard summoning hordes of monsters for an extinctionist (or quasi-extinctionist) game. I might have to fire it up again, haven't touched that in several years.

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