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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.
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.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:15PM
It was weird to me that in the era of a million-and-a-half for-profit indie roguelikes, the most prominent traditional roguelike just sat idle.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:18PM
Also, I just realized they're still hosted on Sourceforge. So make sure you watch for malware and other garbage when you download.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:27PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:01PM
The repository isn't the problem though. Sourceforge's bullshit comes from wrapping windows binaries with "installers".
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:42PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:58PM
While Moria and Angband have had many variants through the years.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:48PM
And I still have yet to beat vanilla Angband. Delved to maybe level 60 before "It breathes, you die".
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:00AM
So I hit Quickband instead. Sure, you die daily, but each dive is fun!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Thursday December 10 2015, @01:14AM
My angband of choice is still zangband [zangband.org], despite not being updated in a very long time. It's still in the Debian repos, and I always install it. Partly it's because I liked the Amber books it's based on, but mostly it's just because, of all the variants I've tried, it's still the one that is the most fun to me. It's a little absurd, but I loved its different races and classes (also based on Zelazny's Amber universe), and the open world in addition to the dungeon crawl added a new dimension to it.
One of the things I liked about it is it seemed to focus more on fun than worrying about total balance. Some race/class combinations were extremely hard, especially at the beginning; others were easier; and sometimes that hard-to-play low level character turned into a walking death machine by mid- to late-game. For example, a couple of the classes I liked were the Chaos Warrior and the Mindcrafter*. Of the two, the chaos warrior is much easier to start out with, but your chosen deity (or whatever it called it) can randomly mutate you on level up, so depending on RNG, you might end up even more overpowered, or completely screwed.
On the other end, the Mindcrafter starts out as cannon fodder. Terrible melee and no useful spells at the start, you spend a lot of the first dungeon levels running away from things and level-scumming for things you can actually kill. Stick with it to midgame, though, and you get some awesome spells, both combat and utility, that make the whole thing pay off. In addition, it has a slew of races with no race/class restrictions, so if you want to you can make it harder on yourself with a kobold mindcrafter or sprite warrior, or just go for silly and make a skeleton monk or vampire paladin.
I've tried a bunch of others, even variants that are built off of zangband itself, and found no other that was as fun to me. Though I did find the multiplayer angband variant (MAngband) amusing for a while.
* Not to be confused with a Minecrafter.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:58PM
I always preferred Ancient Domains of Mystery [ancardia.com].
Just ran Nethack 3.6.0 yesterday, wielded a cursed sword, and died on the first level.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:01PM
Ah, good times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:09PM
You like spending money then.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:18PM
ADOM Classic is free and you can download it here: http://www.adom.de/home/downloads.html [www.adom.de]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:15PM
I'm not really sure what isn't included in the free graphical release, but both the free graphical and the classic text versions are downloadable here:
http://www.adom.de/home/downloads.html [www.adom.de]
Geez, what is it with Anonymous Cowards and fact checking?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:23PM
It takes a really long time to think of everything.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:44AM
Moreover, thinking of everything necessarily implies thinking of Maude at some time.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:53PM
.....................................
....@.......k...................+
...........................d.........
And something is bad wrong when this tribute triggers a "Lameness filter encountered." error. This is a cromulent tribute to one of the all-time greats. Gimme a break.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:01PM
I still play it in character mode, which is my preferred mode.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:36PM
I have a copy for my Hp iPaq, and I take it with me on trips (business or leisure) to this day. It supports a stylus and is superior to the android version in nearly every way I can think of--unless you get an android with 4x the screen size to support finger sized input. Even so, it's not as convenient. The iPaq's battery lasts a lot longer, too...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @10:01PM
Why is there a door in the middle of nowhere?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:40AM
Maybe rock piercers have removed the walls around it?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:56PM
That could be a book rather than a door.
(You know you've been playing Nethack too long when you recognize this without having to look it up.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:38AM
Twelve years later and all we get are a few no-brainer patches pulled into the base build? Disappointing, to say the least. The most I can hope for is the "foundation established so that we can build on it going forward" part.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:26AM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @07:35PM
Drop anything and everything you're doing and try one now!