Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment A rancid idea (Score 1) 319

To say that a country is thriving at the expense of suffering and loss of life is a grotesque and rancid idea.
It incentivises continued conflict in order to maintain benefit for the country.

To say that "Countries that fail to follow suit risk disaster" raises serious moral and humanitarian concerns direction
the world is heading.

Comment Re:IWGB helped me. (Score 1) 30

I wouldnt say it was "Sorted Out" - I had to sell my home - it was that or end up bankrupt and homeless - and still unable to work due to the burnout it caused. The house sale was traumatic in itself and i had to borrow off family until it the sale completed. The positive i suppose was that we had enough to just about clear the mortgage and move to a cheaper home in Wales. Though - it has no kitchen and needs a lot of work doing to be properly liveable. An amazing view though and no mortgage or rent to pay.

Comment Re:It always puzzled me... (Score 1) 30

Gamers are a fickle bunch and speaking as someone from inside the industry there are still some that can be very mouthy and entitled when they dont get what they want. Larger companies with public IPO also have the press to deal with - bad news affects share price. There are certain dates throughout the year eg : christmas , easter and other public holidays where new updates and releases are expected. Things cant go out the door buggy, and if they do the punters get upset and the press report it. If features get cut to meet deadlines that doesnt pan out well either. All of these things are a sign of bad management and planning but also sometimes shit does just happen. I dont know if what the solution is to appeasing all the expectations of gamers and the press - but Im personally a beleiver in promising less and delivering more. Crunch culture sucks, it burns out developers fast - were usually not paid proper overtime and free pizza and cake isnt healthy doesnt make up for the long nights time after time Over time that gets refelected in the product.

Comment IWGB helped me. (Score 5, Interesting) 30

Just chiming in - I went through a year long ideal , also in the games industry i worked for the company in the UK that make a well known space exploration and trading game. Id been there nearly 11 yrs. Covid and lockdowns provided a stock surge 10x the current price. When the bubble broke they had a management reshuffle - and shed over 200 people. Similar problems with the return to work policy also. I can only assume that since id been there so long the payout would have been quite sizeable - thats when they tried to sideline me and bully me out - I fought them with IWGB for over a year, there were discrimination issues due to my disablity which they were exploiting. IWGB helped me get a settlement, i could have got more but the year long fight burned me out (im still in burnout) and i couldnt stick it any longer to take it to a tribunal. Just wanna say - even if your company doesnt officially recognise unions , you are still legally protected and if you find yourself in an unfair situation its well worth having them by your side - you are entitled to have them represent you in any meetings and there isnt much your employer can do about it.

Comment Re:On a VAX? (Score 2) 46

I would say yes! 3.2 is from before when they split race and role. In 3.2 you could play as an Elf; in more recent versions, you can play as an Elf of many different roles. 3.2 is also before they introduced magic proficiencies, so you couldn't get better at classes of magic individually. And 5.0 greatly improves Gehennom, in many versions of Nethack it's the least interesting part of the game, an interminable slog through 20+ maze levels where most of the monsters don't post you much threat, until you finally get down to the bottom of the dungeon and the fun picks back up again....

Comment Re:good lord (Score 3, Interesting) 46

I'd say Hack is harder than Nethack. What matters is how much of the game you know. In Hack, if you have bad luck you are basically screwed; in Nethack, prayer can get you out of lots of trouble, you just have to know it's there to rely upon and not to use it too often.\

Nethack also has many ways you can use resources, even bad resources, to survive. Take bad or useless potions and dip them in water to dilute them into plain water, get them blessed to make them all into holy water, then use that to bless your other items to get much more use out of them. Wash scrolls to make them into scrolls of blank paper, then use a magic marker to write the scrolls you want on them. Combine these two tricks to make blessed scrolls of identify and find out what many, if not all, of your items are. Drop extra rings down sinks for clues as to what they are. Use wands to write on the ground for clues to their identities.

This is a different play philosophy from Hack, where in large part you take what the game gives you and do the best you can with it.

Comment Re:Version (Score 2) 46

Dragons have tough skin and also count as Large creatures, so most classes will have difficulty. But Monks are made specifically to fight unarmed. There is a conduct for playing without ever having hit with a wielded weapon, and people have earned every conduct, so, I'd say yes. I don't know what you mean by "the" dragon though; Nethack has no shortage of the scaly beasties.

Comment Re:hm (Score 2) 46

Nethack now supports cross compilation, so it might be possible to build for BeOS from a different kind of machine. Or maybe they use Haiku?

Comment Re:I only just updated to 3.7.0-132 a while back (Score 4, Informative) 46

Some of those things that I've found:

* A tutorial is offered on starting a game
* There can be themed rooms now, including (seen with my own eyes) non-rectangular ones, icy rooms, nested rooms and statue gardens (where the statues can actually be monsters).
* Iron bars can now be normal dungeon dressing. Before, they had only been seen in very few instances in Quest levels.
* Monkeys in minetown can now try to steal items from you (those may have been in a previous version)
* player monster corpses can generate on traps

I've also heard that the mid-game Gehennom area (aka Hell) is much less monotonous now, with all kinds of special terrain. I'd say it's mostly an incremental release, no major game systems have been added, but I guess the game's pretty set in stone now. I do miss the days when Nethack 3.0 greatly reworked the game, and Nethack 3.1 its dungeon, but then there's lots of room for new classic-style roguelikes to fill in those blanks.

Comment Re:modernized to C99, then unmodernized to using L (Score 4, Informative) 46

(Disclaimer: submitter of the post, and also the person who's blog was linked to it, although that was added by the editor and not me.)

I would take the bet that *zero percent* of Nethack is vibe coded. The Devteam are not the kinds of people, I believe, to be easily swayed by (spits) _passing fancies_ like Claude. Lua (I've been told) can be compiled as straight C, so it doesn't introduce further dependencies. The previous special level building system of Nethack used yacc and lex, and was rather complex. I'm sad that these classic Unix tools are no longer part of the build process, but using Lua may make it easier to expand Nethack in the future.

Fun fact: Lua was part of Angband's code for a brief time.

Submission + - NetHack 5.0 Released (nethack.org)

MilenCent writes: Venerable 39-year-old roguelike game and computer geek touchstone NetHack has released version 5.0! In addition to play changes it's left for players to discover, this version updates the code to compile with C99, makes it much easier to cross compile the code for other systems than the one running, and now uses Lua for its dungeon generation. Happy hacking!

Slashdot Top Deals

Only God can make random selections.

Working...