First NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament

bhaak1 writes "The first — and hopefully annual — NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament called Junethack started last Sunday and runs until the end of August 14th.This tournament features Vanilla NetHack and several of its forks: SporkHack, UnNethack, AceHack and as a special bonus game — never seen on a public server before — NetHack 1.3d, the first version of the game called NetHack, released 1987. There are various achievements to gain, even for those poor souls that can't win this complex and sadistic game. The source code of the tournament management and website software is available for hacking on GitHub if you prefer hacking code to hacking monsters."

no comments?

[eyenot]

because everybody else on /. ran off to join the tournament.

ADoM

[Kagura]

People are still playing ADoM, and they're doing it on PuTTY (telnet/SSH) servers. Come join us at #adom on irc.freenode.net !

Re:

[PwnzerDragoon]

ADOM always was my favorite rougelike. Not that there's anything wrong with Nethack, it's just that ADOM is clearly superior.

BTW, the pseudo-sequel to ADOM, JADE [www.adom.de], finally got a public release in the last couple weeks. There's not really much game to it, it's more just a taste of what's to come, but it's good to know it's not going to end up vaporware after all these years.

Re:

[eyenot]

holy shit, JADE is released? fucking no WAY!

Re:

[Chris Burke]

Nethack has a finite number of levels of finite size, and the total is well below what you'd need to run Linux in stones on the ground or whatever other form of 'computer' you wanted to make. So sorry, Nethack does not run Linux.

Timely.

[bmo]

>started last Sunday

Slashdot. Yesterday's news next week.

--
BMO

Re:Timely.

[Elbereth]

Hey, you have to give the editors time to vet each and every story before it's posted. The kind of journalistic integrity that we Slashdotters demand takes a lot of time and effort. Do you think they just sit around all day, giving every story a rubber stamp of approval? That way lies dupes, trolls, thinly-veiled advertisements, and inflammatory nonsense. I for one am glad that they... oh never mind. I can't keep up this level of irony.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It does take the editors some time to determine if the story is sufficiently related to Bitcoin before approving it.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

They must have missed that this tournament doesn't have a bitcoin prize, but that's an easy mistake to make.

Re:

[IorDMUX]

>started last Sunday Slashdot. Yesterday's news next week.

Well of course. All the editors joined this past week, so it took this long to actually get the story out.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of slashdot and nethack, why doesn't this site talk about D&D more?

I know it's mainly become a tech site, but wasn't it originally supposed to be about fun nerdy stuff like linux, D&D, lego and whatnot? It's barely been mentioned since Fourth dropped, do you really think there's been no D&D news? There is a 'games' section.

Especially nice if its vintage awesome mega-dungeon stuff like in nethack. My campaign learned a thing or two from it, yes it did.

Re:

[ais523]

I think it's because 4th edition came out, and it was basically an entirely different game from the ones that came before it, with a few references back. It's not necessarily a bad game, but it's not a continuation of the previous versions, and it rather split the playerbase (between the ones who keep playing 3rd edition or variants of it, and ones who've moved onto the new game). If Wizards hadn't called it Dungeons & Dragons, there wouldn't really be a problem. As it is, though, it's a bit like, say,

Re:

[ToasterMonkey]

I know it's mainly become a tech site, but

No... listen to some morning radio call in talk shows, and study their format. Then you will perfectly understand what Slashdot is.

Nostalgia burst.

[Sinthet]

Time to join and do nothing productive til the 14th.

Oh boy

[Hatta]

I sunk 4 years into vanilla Nethack before I finally ascended. Don't think I have it in me to take on many variants...which are needed because Nethack wasn't complex enough already?

Re:

[f()rK()_Bomb]

netback is basically a solved puzzle at this stage, there's a calculated optimal amount of moves to win. humans are only a couple of hundred turns away from it, I think its like 2k or so turns.

Re:

[ais523]

It was me who calculated the optimal number of moves to win, at 2016. (I'm not completely convinced that the calculation is correct, though.) The current human records are 2135 with bones-stuffing (i.e. deliberately suiciding an advanced character to drop a whole load of valuable items into the game where another character can pick them up), and 2596 without any bones abuse, both by Maud. (For those wondering, the realtime record holder is Sayo (an alternate account of Adeon), with 1 hour 16 minutes.) It's

Re:

[hoover]

Ascension in 2k moves? Incredible. I've been playing nethack since the late 80s / early nineties and haven't even managed to find the damn wizard (and if I found him, he'd probably kill me ;-)

Re:

[ais523]

My own variant AceHack (which has been unexpectedly Slashdotted, it seems; I'm glad I'm not hosting it myself) is designed to improve the interface, while keeping the gameplay the same or slightly easier. (Most of the other variants are indeed designed to make the game more complex/harder.) It's also something of a protest against the way that vanilla NetHack is effectively unmaintained nowadays; although it is apparently still being developed (I've got replies to bug reports as recently as last week, inclu

Re:

[alexo]

Thanks for your post.

Several things:

1. I'd say that at this time, the Dev Team is more damaging than contributing to the continuing existence of Nethack.

2. Why do you say that Sporkhack is no longer developed?

Re:

[bhaak1]

The main developer of SporkHack has been busy and the second (the same that also admins NAO) doesn't code game changes only level compiler and UI improvement.

This one also said a while ago that "SporkHack is in hibernation" [google.com] on RGRN.

So, SporkHack's developers are surely still around (if there's some security issue they'll react) but at the moment SporkHack is effectively not being developed.

Re:

[slaker]

I dunno. I'm one of those Dwarf Fortress people too. It's one thing to die in Nethack because you fell on the dead cockatrice you were holding. It's another thing to play Dwarf Fortress and find out that one of your guys is running around missing an eyelid because of combat damage, or that you've gone an insane, inspired quadriplegic dwarf who keeps trying to sneak out of his bed to go work on whatever the hell it is that's inspiring him to create, so that his caretakers keep having to drag him back.

Beware

[nekozid]

http://junethack.rawrnix.com/user/zid [rawrnix.com] I have a headstart!

PLAYING games?

[MacGyver2210]

I would be much happier with a contest to design and program clever variants of my own rather than playing them.

Re:

[Denor]

Something like the Seven day roguelike [roguelikedevelopment.org]?

My greatest accomplishment

[slaker]

I've made the observation online many times before, but I consider the time that I Ascended a Wishless Tourist in Nethack a greater personal accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.

Re:My greatest accomplishment

[BobNET]

I would have had my degree a year sooner if I hadn't wasted all that time playing Nethack.

I would have ascended in Nethack if I hadn't wasted all that time getting my degree.

These comments sound all too familiar

[Alan R Light]

I sure wasted a lot of time playing Nethack. But I enjoyed it.

Nethack?!

[StupiderThanYou]

Why not play a real game [angband.oook.cz]?

Re:

[bhaak1]

The Angband people are only jealous that NetHack is better at grinding even though this is the main game feature activity of Angband.

Just read this easily followable grinding guide for raising the perfect pudding in NetHack [google.com]. ;-)

Re:

[StupiderThanYou]

Whatever. I just couldn't let a NH thread go without at least a token religious war ;)
Nice link, btw.

I haven't played that for years...

[NotQuiteReal]

But I still remember the gist of the game...

You type in something like: jjkkljjkk

And the response is something like: "You killed your dog"

Picture from the event

[dkleinsc]

You have entered a room full of nerds!

@@@@@
@@@.@

Dkleinsc the Stripling St:03 Dx:05 Co:10 In:12 Wi:14 Ch:01
Dlvl:1 $:2000 HP:10(10) PW:0(0) AC:10 Ex:0

Re:

[korgitser]

On second thoughts, make that:

Dkleinsc the Stripling St:03 Dx:05 Co:10 In:12 Wi:14 Ch:01
Dlvl:1 $:2000 HP:10(10) PW:0(0) AC:10 SEx:0

Why not Slashem?

[chthon]

Which is just Super Lots of Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic? Although in my experience it is a little bit too difficult compared with Nethack.

Re:

[bhaak1]

It's quite simple. We didn't find anyone that runs a public server with Slashem on it. It wouldn't be a big problem to add a new public server. The way the code is written, we can add other servers and even count all games that have been played on those servers since the start of the tournament.

For the difficulty of Slashem. It really depends what you play and how.

Slashem has hard roles but on the other hand there are also roles that after an initial difficult phase are much easier than any role in vanilla

Re:

[xhrit]

nethack already had everything but the kitchen sink - and then they added the kitchen sink. slashem is just like nethack but with 12 additional types of kitchen sinks...

Re:

[hawk]

It was for variants with *development*.

Slashem isn't developed; it's aggregated :)

Re:

[bhaak1]

And the other NetHack tournament /dev/null/ [devnull.net] has been doing it before Crawl since 1999.

Junethack is loosely based on DCSS' tournament model. We're using existing public servers (we only need access to the xlogfile with all the game information and the options file for verifying the player's identify which on most public servers are public anyway).

We don't think that we are directly in competition neither with the DCSS tournament nor /dev/null. One of the goal of this tournament is raising awareness of NetHac