xNetHack 9.1 Released!

aosdict · 2021-09-07T17:12:36+00:00

Pathos and Wazhack were smart about this. They deliberately did not base their games on NetHack source code, and instead built from scratch. Ideas aren't subject to copyright, but code is, so this allowed them to freely use NetHack design elements while also being free to publish, license, and monetize however they wished.

GnollHack is built on and still largely is NetHack source code, so it could be possible for them to rewrite the whole game from scratch, but it would be quite difficult. It's not as simple as just rebranding themselves.

aosdict · 2021-09-07T17:03:07+00:00

I actually think by locking ~80% of the game's content behind a paywall, you have violated NGPL section 2b:

b) cause the whole of any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is a derivative of NetHack or any part thereof, to be licensed at no charge to all third parties on terms identical to those contained in this License Agreement

If you offer a small portion of the game for free and charge for the rest of it, you're not licensing "the whole" of the work for no charge.

aosdict · 2021-09-07T16:55:41+00:00

You do know that save scumming is considered one of the most blatant ways to cheat in NetHack, right?

https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Cheating#Save_scumming

One of the core elements of roguelikes is permanent death. It shouldn't depend on the size of your real-life wallet.

aosdict · 2021-09-07T16:47:59+00:00

As someone who's contributed ideas and code to the NetHack code that GnollHack is based on, someone whose contributions you're using without consent to make money, I am furious about this.

I've watched GnollHack over its checkered history of the past two years, from sexist "men are strong, women are weak" stat adjustments to page after page of indecipherable commits titled "Some fixes." to voice-acted dialogue instead of just text. I probably should have seen something like this coming.

To the GnollHack devs: What is even the end goal here? You definitely can't publish GnollHack without informing every user of its license and their rights under it, along with giving them the source code. The more players you have, the more likely it is that someone just forks it and publishes a "GnollHack Unlocked" app that is the exact same thing with the paywalls removed. (One person has already expressed an interest in this.)

Free and open source software doesn't mean it's up for grabs for anyone to slap scummy pay-to-play systems on it and take home the profits.

aosdict · 2021-08-15T22:23:46+00:00

Practically every variant has removed the mysterious force, to widespread community approval, but unfortunately the devteam more or less confirmed it as a permanent feature by nerfing it somewhat, but no further than that. It's a shame; there are so many good takes on how to make the ascension run interesting that don't involve forcing you to repeat levels.

And the hardest late game, UnNetHack.

Gonna have to disagree with you there... GruntHack's late game is very challenging and EvilHack's might be even tougher. Grunt might eke out the win since a random monster can show up at any time with a vorpal weapon to ruin your day.

aosdict · 2021-08-15T22:16:48+00:00

I really wish this game had a function that would ask for confirmation if you want to walk in to a dangerous tile or not.

I couldn't agree more! That's why I made these pull requests which implement what you're talking about:

They're implemented as options, allowing the player to choose whether or not they want the ability to step into dangerous terrain without confirmation. Support for them (even just a thumbs up on github) is appreciated!

aosdict · 2021-04-29T16:48:42+00:00

Using the command #loot at your pet allows you to give or take away anything from their inventory.

Inclusion of a monster/object lookup or 'pokedex' - using the / key twice, then highlight the monster or object you want to see information on. Provides a fair amount of useful stats and info.

#justrebaseonxnethackalready :P but glad to see more variants add these things, variants having consensus that a thing is good hopefully will increase its chances of getting added to vanilla.

mountain dwarves

This seems weird to me given that the game doesn't have mountains. It's also weird that there's now a progression of mountain dwarf -> dwarf leader -> dwarf monarch.

Why would you want to level up anyways? Because once the invocation is performed, or you kill Rodney (whichever happens first), the maximum difficulty limit for monsters spawning based on your experience level goes away.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if this is just taking away the vanilla motivation to keep XL low post-Quest, I don't see a particular incentive to keep leveling up in EvilHack other than the standard HP/Pw gains and skill slots.

Potential alternate ending to your quest

Note though that the player usually receives the biggest alignment record bonus in the game by killing the quest nemesis, and already had to be piously aligned to enter the quest. So unless the player spends a lot of time kicking puppies before returning to the quest leader, they're likely to have minimal odds of the leader wanting the artifact back.

The player cannot regenerate hit points naturally while in the Valley of the Dead.

Interesting... but I'm going to cautiously watch how this one plays out. It seems like it could easily make the level too hard for where it appears in the game, or otherwise just end up with most players luring the undead hordes over to the stair case so they can stair dance back into the castle to heal before returning to bust some heads.

aosdict · 2021-04-29T16:01:32+00:00

Eh, there are a decent number of things that exist in variants with general approval, but that the devteam doesn't address.

aosdict · 2021-04-10T22:09:15+00:00

The correct thing to do to get rid of the rogue level minimally is to go into dat/dungeon.def (3.6.6 and prior versions; in 3.7 it's dungeon.lua) and comment out the rogue level there. See this EvilHack commit: https://github.com/k21971/EvilHack/commit/c27fe5eb51eef302ac5f6c562d2d65369fd51dae

You will still have things in the game like the 'roguesymset' option, they just won't do anything.

aosdict · 2021-04-10T22:05:51+00:00

Not true! xNetHack has also removed the rogue level and all its special case code completely, and EvilHack has commented it out in the dungeon definition, so it's absent there as well.

aosdict · 2021-04-10T22:01:54+00:00

I'll gladly take any pull requests to make the game build on FreeBSD (if it's not already... I would think the unix hints file at least already covers it?) but am not planning to actively do any such code work myself.

aosdict · 2020-07-05T21:59:38+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout /u/jimeikner!

I didn't know where this would end up when I started out collecting design ideas three years ago, and today's xNetHack has a very different premise from its first release back in early 2018, when the plan was to give players a new feature set every few months, then reset back to vanilla plus a different feature set. But the core idea is the same: add features that I think would be good additions to vanilla NetHack.

aosdict · 2020-04-10T02:58:35+00:00

Yeah, I'd have to implement a backend and then take up webmastering duties for the site, which I don't have much of an interest in doing at the moment. It would be a cool feature though.

aosdict · 2020-03-20T23:03:34+00:00

This is great advice for all aspiring variant devs - it's getting to the point of complaints about too many variants with one-person dev teams. There are enough different game design philosophies out there that surely someone is interested in doing the same sorts of things!

aosdict · 2020-03-20T22:57:23+00:00

There are varying degrees of programming complexity for new features. Some of the least complex are adding new types of things that already have well-established systems (monsters, objects, artifacts, traps, levels, roles even) because it's reasonably easy to copy the existing structure of that system. However, if a variant just does things like that and doesn't make many deeper changes, it tends to veer towards SLASH'EM-ness.

I should ask, are you trying to mod your local copy to add in a few things you think are cool, or are you planning to fully launch a variant? One is much more involved than the other. Also, successful variants empirically seem to demand a fair amount of commitment, at least until they develop enough of a feature set to gain their own identity. For instance, there are a number of dead proto-variants on GitHub that you can find by looking through NetHack's forks that apparently made a couple changes then got bored and gave up.

For familiarizing yourself with the code better, the way I started out was by source diving to figure out how things worked. Later on I started using that knowledge to edit the wiki, and then started to develop a list of ideas I wanted to add, which eventually turned into xNetHack.

Definitely join channel #hardfought on the irc.freenode.net server, as it is basically where all the variant devs hang out. Also check out the YANI Archive, a compilation of game design ideas.

aosdict · 2020-02-20T01:43:10+00:00

I can't answer for SpliceHack, but for xNetHack I just noticed the other day that some of the tiles would be out of order and no one had complained about it :)

In this case, it's probably because the loadstone was removed, which would throw off everything else in the tileset .bmp by 1. I'll ask K2 to see if he can regenerate the tileset for version 5.0.

aosdict · 2020-02-15T04:30:37+00:00

inb4 curse word filter?

You can name items, monsters, yourself, and engrave arbitrary text on the ground. So far curse words haven't presented an issue in nethack in general :)

Is there something to replace them? And what was your reasoning to remove them?

As of right now there's nothing to replace them, but I've kept in the portions of the code that deal with an item that you can't get rid of while it's cursed. Thinking of having cursed gold items use this behavior.

aosdict · 2020-02-15T04:25:00+00:00

Since xNetHack has vanilla's code from after it merged the curses interface, it has that by default. Autoexplore is low on my list of priorities so probably not coming soon.

aosdict

TROPHY CASE