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Classic Games (Games) Games

NetHack 3.6.0 Released After a 12-Year Wait (nethack.org) 76

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
An anonymous reader writes: For the past 12 years, NetHack 3.4.3 has been the most recent version of the classic roguelike dungeon exploration game. On 7 December 2015, the official NetHack DevTeam announced the release of NetHack 3.6.0. While the release contains some new features, the most exciting part of the announcement is perhaps the DevTeam's move toward a more open development model: "We've migrated our internal source repository to Git, with plans of providing a publicly available 'current maintenance version' in the future." Bugzilla will be used for defect tracking.

NetHack 3.6.0 is dedicated to the memory of the author Terry Pratchett. Besides the Tourist character class inspired by his stories, NetHack now contains "a huge number of quotes from many of the Discworld novels."
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NetHack 3.6.0 Released After a 12-Year Wait More

NetHack 3.6.0 Released After a 12-Year Wait

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  • Just in time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @02:30PM (#51083273)

    Released just in time for the Hogswatch sales season! Yay!

  • Celebrate!! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @02:30PM (#51083281)

    This calls for a round of the NetHack Song!!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlPgy0ysoJk

  • has the lawyer knocking yet? (Score:3)

    by Lead Butthead ( 321013 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @02:43PM (#51083375) Journal

    NetHack now contains "a huge number of quotes from many of the Discworld novels."

    Has the estate lawyer come knocking yet?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Terry was a fan of Nethack. I think his surviving family members will have no objection against honoring his memory in a game he loved.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ackthpt ( 218170 )

        As Terry's daughter is overseeing his properties I expect she won't go all Rowling-Warner on something like this.

      • You clearly have credentials to access that .gif, but the rest of us get:

        "Forbidden

        You do not have permission to access this document."

  • I smell a wumpus (Score:4, Funny)

    by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @02:46PM (#51083405)

    Good thing I have my quiver of crooked arrows.

  • Happy the game is in still Development.... I really thought all work stopped completely and 3.4.3 was going to be the last version ever made by the Dev Team.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 )

      Happy the game is in still Development.... I really thought all work stopped completely and 3.4.3 was going to be the last version ever made by the Dev Team.

      I'd still fire up the old version and play it. So many happy memories. I also was lucky enough to enjoy the color versions of NetHack, Larn and Moria on the Amiga.

  • It's good to see the veil lifted on Nethack development. Give ESR a little bit of credit for helping them out.

    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6389&cpage=1#comment-1207141 [ibiblio.org]

  • Finally some real news on slashdot (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yeah, this is actually newsworthy. And with actual link to the devteam's page, without 3 levels of blogspam indirection.

    • "blogspam indirection" (whatever the fuck that is, I assume you mean content aggregation) usually happens when a story is popular enough to generate clicks. This is nethack, it isn't a story about donald trumps pubic hair.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "blogspam indirection" (whatever the fuck that is, I assume you mean content aggregation) usually happens when a story is popular enough to generate clicks. This is nethack, it isn't a story about donald trumps pubic hair.

        Different AC here: I think what the parent is suggesting is that Slashdot submitters collectively endeavor to up their game and link to the source of the information. He's being a bit of a dick about it, but I think the idea is sound.

        Submitters: If it's a science post, link to the pape

      • What he means by "blogspam indirection" is the process of linking to an ad filled "article" that does little more than expose the reader to more advertising before it finally links you to the real content that the original submitter could have linked to directly.

  • VR Support (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @03:06PM (#51083535) Journal

    Will they be adding VR support soon?

  • Kind of sad, really (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @04:01PM (#51084005) Homepage

    Honestly I had hoped that nethack would rest easy. After all, the game was essentially finished. There wasn't anywhere left to go and things were great. There's something to be said for a stable game that doesn't change no matter how often the players do. Unfortunately there is a rather loud group of people who want new, new, new and if it's old it sucks. "If it's not being developed, then it sucks!" and this attitude is a real problem IMO. ESR himself states quite plainly "I am pissed at them for being secretive and doing fuck-all with the codebase" as if there was a problem with that. This is the same attitude that led to Mozilla Firefox going off the rails, developing for the sake of developing instead of doing what's needed.

    I've already heard nethack referred to as "an early, brutal roguelike, not recommended" which put a dagger in my heart. Now they're putting a bunch of Pratchett quotes in? Sheesh.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SQLGuru ( 980662 )

      Who says the players change? I've had it installed on one device or another since I first found it (early 90s.....before that it was Rogue).

      Pet name: WandTester
      If he lives past level 4, he's usually especially powerful. Also, it sucks to run into him and my ghost.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

        Who says the players change? I've had it installed on one device or another since I first found it (early 90s.....before that it was Rogue).

        You missed "Hack" between NetHack and Rogue. Hack was allright, NetHack was originally a reasonably close follow up but has diverged with all the extras. Some will like those, others will miss the simplicity of Hack.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes. --More--

    • The game was far from essentially finished. In fact, it never will be finished. User interfaces get better, exploits are discovered, and NetHack fixes and incorporates this to remain challenging and fresh. In fact, the update is quite timely as there are a lot of issues with NetHack 3.4.3 which now get addressed!

      This doesn't mean it gets the streamline treatment modern AAA titles get. In fact, rather the contrary. The new nasties are *really* nasty. NetHack now is a lot more unforgiving than NetHack 2.3 I b

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      As much as I like NetHack (and I really do), it honestly does have a number of widely-acknowledged and somewhat serious shortcomings. Among other things: the chance-to-hit formula is so broken that it causes entire _categories_ of features (such as shields and two-handed weapons) to go mostly unused; Elbereth was severely unbalanced in 3.4.3 (the new version takes several measures to try to fix this -- it remains to be seen if they will be enough, I suspect not); spellcasting roles generally have to spend

  • World of Nethack (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The game is now massively multiplayer. With all the new armor and weapon choices your character can now look like @ or @ and even @ !

  • Looks like they decided 12 years ago where to host their binaries :)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      Maybe longer ago than that, yes. And yes, the dev team is aware of the recent issues with sourceforge and intends to move away from it, but they didn't want to delay the release until they do that, because 12 years is long enough, or somesuch.

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