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!

Friendly Fork “UnNetHackPlus 4.8” released

Bulwersator has released the first version of a fork of UnNetHack called “UnNetHackPlus 4.8”.

Read the release announcement on Reddit or look at its NetHackWiki article with some screenshots.

Still alive

I have been asked by email what’s happening with UnNetHack and if  its development has stalled as did with NetHack or its other Forks.

This absolutely did not happen. It’s true that the last official release has been more than a year ago but you can see on this page that there has been lots of development going on since then.

The planned road map to the next release is as follows:

Next month, the Junethack tournament will be held for the third time and for UnNetHack the release candidate for the next major version will be installed on the public server for playing in this tournament.

After June, there will be a release of UnNetHack so all off line players will finally be able to enjoy the new features and dungeon branches that have been brewing for a year.

Fixed tileset for UnNetHack 4.0.0

There was a missing tile (“muddy swamp”) in the bundled tileset for UnNetHack 4.0.0.

You can now download the fixed tileset from Sourceforge.

Roguelike Radio Episode 64: Player competitions

I have been a guest on the Roguelike Radio Episode 64 on player competitions on tournaments. The discussed topics included the monthly Angband competition, the weekend Brogue competition, the Junethack and /dev/null Nethack tournaments, the biannual Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup tournament and the ADOM “Weakest Link” competition.

Extending the show notes on the Roguelike Radio site for NetHack-related links:

Junethack links:

• NetHackWiki article about Junethack.
• Static archives of Junethack 2011 and Junethack 2012.
• The source code of Junethack is available from GitHub.
• My Junethack presentation at IRDC 2012 in PDF format.

/dev/null links:

• /dev/null/nethack tournament‘s homepage.
• NetHackWiki article about /dev/null.
• Wikipedia article about Kingdom of Loathing.
• ZAPM‘s homepage and NetHackWiki article.

Various crazy NetHack ascensions:

• Ascensions streaks at NAO with Adeon’s 29 ascensions streak at the top.
• Several notable ascensions listed on NetHackWiki.