Junethack 2014 – Post Mortem

This is the post-mortem for Junethack 2014.

The Junethack site was broken on the opening day because of a stupid last minute hotfix. The developer responsible for this has been punished with writing a PHP project not under 10000 lines of code.

The addition of dNetHack one week after the start was easy to do, also because of the developer being very cooperative and forthcoming.

In the UnNetHack and NetHack4 forks several bugs were found and fixed. AceHack and GruntHack were used this year for extensive unique death message generation.

Clan overcaffeinated and demilichens fought hard over the “unique death” clan trophy. In the end, it was a close call for demilichens to win in that category and also overall, as clan Justice was really close on their heels for the clan competition win.

We don’t offer any means of communicating between users on the site itself and this is intentional. We want them to self-organize and this year this went as far that clan overcaffeinatede and demilichens reached a mutual agreement not exploit some easily achievable but highly boring to do deaths for the “unique death” clan trophy.

Members of both clans wrote up their impressions on the tournament and gave some suggestions on how to improve the unique death trophy. This will certainly have an impact on how the unique death normalization will look like next year.
http://74.135.83.0:8018/nethack-stuff/junethack-unique-deaths-comments-2014-jonadab.html
http://mathematicalcoffee.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/junethack-2014-is-over.html

Another piece of feedback by a player can be read here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/29m6wz/next_year_take_part_in_junethack_it_has_been/
And now for the boring statistics part:

195 players registered on the server, 146 linked their account with the public servers, and 119 actually played at least one game (last year: 157, 134, and 118).

6416 games were played on all 9 public servers during the tournament by registered users, 12323 were played by all players including those not taking part in the tournament (last year: 5210, 10, and 12313).

14627 games (including games by not registered players) fell into our start scum filter. This is lower than last year (20855) and much lower than the all-time high of 171760 from 2012.

50 different players ascended a total of 154 games (last year: 60 and 173).

Tournament games by variant (numbers from 2013 in brackets):

NetHack 3.4.3:	2111	(2849)
SporkHack:	164	(134)
UnNetHack:	811	(975)
AceHack:	1298	(520)
GruntHack:	1411	(574)
NetHack4:	111	(158)
DNetHack:	221	(-)
NetHack 1.3d:	289	(-)

Detailed info can be found on these three pages:
https://junethack.de/activity
https://junethack.de/ascensions
https://junethack.de/scoreboard

There are some minor improvements coming up for the next tournament. This year has shown again that the clan management code is in serious need of a refactoring, the user home page has too much information available elsewhere and some of the other pages have become so long that they are hard to navigate. Hopefully we’ll have good solutions for these problems by next year.

Thanks for playing, see you next year!

Junethack 2014 – the 4rd NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament

The fourth installment of the annual NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament called Junethack has started on Sunday June 1st 2014 at midnight UTC and will be running until June 30 midnight UTC.

This tournament is trying to appeal not only to the hardcore serial ascenders but also to players that get constantly mangled and beaten to death in unrealistic brutal situations by this sadistic game (that means probably you) by offering various non-winning achievements and encouraging people to try and play NetHack forks.

This year, we have again NetHack 1.3d as part of the tournament. The UnNetHack and NetHack4 forks had updates since last year, so be on the look-out for dangerous changes in those games ;-).

You participate in the tournament by playing Vanilla NetHack, SporkHack, UnNethack, AceHack, GruntHack, NetHack4, or NetHack 1.3d on the supported public servers and linking those accounts on your Junethack user page.

You can get in contact with the organizers of Junethack here, on reddit, on rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and in the #junethack IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network.

If you want to help out in the development of the tournament, you can check out our code from GitHub.

Register at the tournament homepage and start venturing into the Dungeons of Doom!

Update 07 Jun 2014

DNetHack has been added as a supported variant to the tournament. You can play it at dnethack.ilbelkyr.de. Take note that now the cross variant achievements take one more variant to get. Although those players that already got those achievements will not lose them.

UnNetHack 5 Android port on the Google Play Store

UnNethack 5 is now available on the Google Play Store.

This version currently features an ASCII view of the map, the standard unchozo32b tileset and the brand new DawnHack tileset. Future versions will include the Geoduck and Absurd tileset.

Showing the map in ASCII

UnNetHack 5 – “Doing Releases like a pro” released!

Announcing the release of UnNetHack 5.

Source code, Debian package and Windows TTY and GUI executables can be downloaded here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/unnethack/files/unnethack/5.1.0/

This is a major release, more than one and a half years in the making and therefore has an awful lot of changes and new features. So here is only a summary, the (mostly) complete ChangeLog is in the download packages or can be read on-line at https://sourceforge.net/p/unnethack/code/HEAD/tree/tags/5.1.0-20131208/ChangeLog

The last release was originally planned to be released after the end of this year’s Junethack but this deadline was missed and then the amount of commits skyrocketed. This was also due to the increase of UnNetHack’s DevTeam. We are now more than ever and are not going away and stop doing releases.

Two new branches have been added: The winter-themed “Sheol”, filled with tons of new, strange monster and dangers and the orc-infested “Ruins of Moria”.

Some first attempts at increased role and race differentiation has been incorporated in this version:

• Tourists get automatic type identification for shop items
• Healers can see how wounded monsters are
• Knights get a weight bonus for body armor heavier than studded leather armor
• Archeologists can enchant fedoras to +7
• Elven/vampiric players do not regenerate health while touching iron/silver with bare skin (respectively)

Several long standing annoyances have been approached:

• Sokoban luck penalty has been removed and instead tracking of solving Sokoban without any tricks has been added
• The Quest turn limit has been removed
• The probability of the Fort Ludios portal was increased; it exists now in around 93% of the games
• Only the Sanctum and the Astral Plane are unmappable levels
• New paranoid options have been added, asking for confirmation when walking into known lava and water squares
• The Valley of the Dead features several portals leading to Vlad, the Dragon Caves, and Sheol, making navigating Gehennom less tedious
• Dragons auto-ID after observing breath attacks or after being probed

New conducts:

• Permanent hallucination conduct option: perma_hallu
• Disable death drops conduct option: deathdropless
• Disable Elbereth conduct option: elberethignore
• A new menu for choosing conducts at the beginning of the game (currently only TTY)

And of course lots of bug fixes.

Happy Hacking!

Reddit Roguelike Challenge 6: Nethack, UnNethack and SporkHack

The current Reddit Roguelike Challenge on Reddit is about NetHack forks.

Post there how far you got and what score you achieved or tell the story of your gruesome death.

Happy hacking!

Android port of UnNetHack 4.0.0

Gurr has taken the code of his Android port of NetHack 3.4.3 and applied it to UnNetHack 4.0.0.

You can now download the APK file of UnNetHack 4.0.0 for Android 2.1 and up for direct installation from the SourceForge download page of UnNetHack.

There will be soon a version of it that can be downloaded directly from the Google Play Store.

Showing the map in ASCII

Showing the map in modified Abigaba tiles

Showing the software keyboard

Junethack 2013 – the 3rd NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament

The third installment of the annual NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament called Junethack has started on Saturday June 1st 2013 at midnight UTC and will be running until the end of June.

This year’s installment features additional cross variant achievements for reaching some goals in all or half of the variants, new clan trophies (logarithmic points, most Medusa kills, most games with all conducts broken), a (rudimentary) mobile version of the site, and last but not least, the UnNetHack 5 release candidate.

This tournament is trying to appeal not only to the hardcore serial ascenders but also to players that get constantly mangled and beaten to death in unrealistic brutal situations by this sadistic game (that means probably you) by offering various non-winning achievements and encouraging people to try and play NetHack forks.

You participate in the tournament by playing Vanilla NetHack, SporkHack, UnNethack, AceHack, GruntHack, or NetHack4 on the supported public servers and linking those accounts on your Junethack user page.

You can get in contact with the organizers of Junethack here, on rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and in the #junethack IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network.

If you want to help out in the development of the tournament, you can check out our code from GitHub.

Register at the tournament homepage and start venturing into the Dungeons of Doom!