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If Dwarf Fortress can get a fantastic GUI, does that mean we can get one for NetHack too? I can dream.
by ianlevesque 4y ago
If Dwarf Fortress can get a fantastic GUI, does that mean we can get one for NetHack too? I can dream.
- JohnFen 4y agoI had a great GUI for nethack at one time. I forget what is was called, though. There are a number of options, you should try them out. Personally, the text interface remains my favorite. The world I build in my head is far richer than any GUI can do.
- Rietty 4y agoI would check out Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup if you like roguelikes. It is similar to Nethack and has both tiles and an ASCII version.
- riffraff 4y agoDCSS is great, the web UI works flawlessly. https://underhound.eu:8080/#lobby https://underhound.eu:8080/#lobby It has a very different philosophy from NetHack tho, in that you generally have clear trade-offs between your choices (e.g. there isn't a "best" armor or weapon, you have limited skill upgrades and need to choose how to spend them etc..), compared to the "keep buffing up until you're god" you get in NetHack. Both are a lot of fun and frustration.
- versteegen 4y agoThe web UI is excellent, but not flawless... for example, Ctrl-Q is the key to quit the game (so you can start over with a new character). But... that's already taken by the browser.
- smw 4y agoYou can type * and then another character as a replacement for control.
- versteegen 4y agoThanks!
- nonethewiser 4y agowhy does the url include the port? I haven't seen that before. What does it mean about how the site works?
- incompatible 4y agoIt means they are running the server on port 8080, which is actually a popular choice if port 80 is already in use or if you don't want to access a "privileged port" in Unix.
- nineteen999 4y agoI would have thought 8443 was a more common choice for HTTPS on a unprivileged port rather than 8080, which is frequently used for unprivileged HTTP. But it matters little, its only cosmetics anyway.
- seedie 4y agoYour browser assumes that the server is reachable on port 80 if you are browsing a http site or port 443 if you are using https. The server mentioned above runs on port 8080. So the Browser needs this information which is then added to the url
- seanhunter 4y agoI know this is somewhat sacrilegious to say but I think for all the reasons you say DCSS is a much better game than nethack. Some years ago I went through a phase of being quite into nethack and ascended a couple of times, but really lost interest because there are too many situations where there is only one correct way to play. There’s also just a lot of arbitrary nonsense that they expected you (not sure whether this has changed) to have read the source code to know with zero discoverability in the game.
- riffraff 4y ago> I think for all the reasons you say DCSS is a much better game than nethack I would say.. maybe? IMO it's just fun in a different way.
- mrob 4y agoNethack tries to present the experience of exploring a rich and detailed world, full of interesting things to discover. The drawback is that you only get the joy of discovery once. Finding something like the technique to steal from shops is fun the first time, and then tedious every other time. To best enjoy Nethack, I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible. DCSS sacrifices Nethack's sense of wonder for better playability. Simulating a world is secondary to presenting a series of interesting tactical challenges. There's very little discovery involved, because the game openly tells you everything you need to know, and it's up to you to figure out how to apply that information. DCSS goes out of its way to remove tedium, even at the cost of realism. E.g. Nethack includes food, which serves as a kind of clock, but food availability is random, so it doesn't work very well. DCSS removes food and replaces it with an explicit countdown timer. Nethack allows selling items to shops. This means there's a reason to pick up trash items, which is annoying. DCSS does not allow selling items. Nethack has hidden traps, which can be found by searching. This means you can spend a lot of time searching, or you can tediously track which tiles are safe, noting where you and the monsters walk, which is even more annoying. DCSS makes all traps visible, and replaces hidden traps with "sourceless malevolence", which applies random bad effects as you explore. There are no secret techniques to bypass difficulty in DCSS. DCSS does not simulate a very believable world, but it's better as a game.
- aricz 4y agoI'll add Angband to the list. A hack-and-slash roguelike. 1 town, 100 dungeon levels, kill Morgoth and win the game. Diablo 1 was heavily inspired by this game (and Moria).
- thaumasiotes 4y agoThere are 256 dungeon levels. (Maybe including the town; I'm not sure.) Dungeon level 100 doesn't have stairs down, but you can get to level 101 by falling through a trap door on level 100.
- aricz 4y agoHah, nice piece of trivia, I didn't know. How are the item levels down at level 200, because droprates and stuff are based on dungeonlevel right?
- thaumasiotes 4y agoArtifacts, ego types, and most normal objects have to pass a depth check before being generated. But nothing in the game has a depth below 100, so there would be no difference between 100 and 200 from that perspective. It might be easier to find weapons with higher +to_hit and +to_dam values, or armor with higher +ac, but that would be unlikely to matter much, because you'd be using artifacts anyway. I don't know if rings of speed take dungeon depth into account. Most other types of bonuses in the game are capped. (e.g. a Ring of Constitution +6 is as good as Rings of Constitution get.)
- flenserboy 4y agoAngband is great, and was great to find after having played Moria on and off for a few years. The game that really caught me was one of its variants — Zangband. Not because of the Zelazny connections, but because of the sheer size of the gameworld and everything that could be found in it. It hasn't, however, apparently been updated since the mid-aughts.
- 4y ago
- unflaggedbird 4y agoAdding Brogue [1] to the list. Neat and very well balanced. [1] https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE
- nix23 4y agoI add "Caves of Qud" and "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead" to the list.
- Arrath 4y agoBoth excellent games.
- sohkamyung 4y agoThere are a number of GUI interfaces to NetHack on their wiki [1] [1] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Graphical_user_interface https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Graphical_user_interface
- ianlevesque 4y agoNice! Even a couple mobile versions.
- pabs3 4y agoUnfortunately some of these aren't very good in some cases, for eg you can't click on the map in the X11 version under GNOME XWayland and the Qt interface just doesn't start on Debian.
- stusmall 4y agoI spent more time in college than I care to admit playing either Falcon's Eye or Vulture's Eye. Can't really remember which.
- Endy 4y agoNethack already has a wonderful GUI. Characters are graphical (if it's on the screen, it's a graphic), and there's plenty of tiles you can use.
- cafeinux 4y agoBy your logic, every CLI program is a GUI program. That may be technically not wrong, but it doesn't really mean it's true, according to what people usually mean when they talk about GUIs.
- Alex3917 4y agoThe iOS app just got updated and I think it has new tiles. What we really need imho is a mobile interface like the one that Beamdog designed for the Switch version of Baldur's Gate. That way it could be played on systems like the Steamdeck.
- koolala 4y agoSee Pathos? It's streamlined but very inspired with great UI.
- boothby 4y agoI'm quite fond of Pixel Dungeon. It's quite simplistic compared to NetHack but it's good fun (if you like dying early and often) and looks nice. And, bonus, it's GPL3-licensed and hasn't seen an update since 2015, so not only are there a bunch of really creative forks out there, but they're also open source.
- chongli 4y agoShattered Pixel Dungeon is my favourite fork. The game is actively developed and has done a ton of cool things to change up the formula. Really great game to play on a phone!