Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release Admirers of Roguelike games have a new distraction: Version 5.0 of NetHack dropped last weekend. NetHack and its ilk trace their origins back to Rogue, a game for Unix systems launched in 1980 that took the DNA of very early text games like Star Trek and Colossal Cave Adventure and mashed that up with tropes from Dungeons & …
It's so easy to get so engrossed in these games that you forget the work you're supposed to be doing (and being paid for). However, as most of us original players are prolly retired now, that no longer matters.
Good to see it's cross platform. See you when I resurface :)
I'm ashamed - no, dammit, proud - that my first action on reading the news of this 5.0 release was to download the Amiga binary, and run it on my old A4000/040 desktop (albeit under WinUAE emulation, the original hardware being somewhere deep, deep in my garage). Yes, I could have just downloaded the native Windows binary but where's the fun in that?
It works perfectly and is just as addictive as I remember.
I remember playing it many moons ago on pc may have been in the 386.or 486 era, but I am pretty sure I also played it in a browser at some long past moment.Or do I need to start taking dementia tests?
Edit: I can hold off on the dementia tests for a little while yet... https://dos.zone/nethack-1992/
Don't think it has been updated to the latest version yet however.
Plus the idea that a standard becomes obsolete the instant the next one is released is wrong; for example, C23 is just about usable now thanks to maturing toolchain support. I've recently started using it in a hobby project; everything I actually maintain is still in C99 or C11. And equally there's little reason to stop using older standards if you don't need anything from a later standard, as the main compilers (GCC, Clang) continue to support them, while on less mainstream platforms or with other compilers (even the popular tcc), C99 might be as far as you can get.
On the other hand, I spent some time around 2011 trying to get the GNU Coding Standards updated to recommend C99, at a time when that standard was widely implemented and indeed used in most GNU code; but it wasn't until 2016 or so that this was accepted.
So many gems in https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixes5-0-0.txt
> eating garlic makes nearby monsters flee
> monsters that drowned would never leave a corpse (holdover from decades ago when it wasn't possible to recover anything from a water location)
I was never really good playing rogues (not careful enough, I am my own worst enemy...) but just skimming the glorious list makes me smile (and remember crazy nethack situations in times long forgotten).
Died on the tutorial level with zero points..
Seems like a decent improvement, there's definitely more help within the game, and the curses interface has had enhancements when run at sizes larger than 80x25.
There's also a large amount of re-architecting to support cross compilation, so building for minority platforms should become easier. Plus an optional 'simplified' hints based build system, although currently I wouldn't call it entirely simple unless you already possess some knowledge of the source code and compilation (it appears easier to use the old build method, starting from a point of minimal knowledge), and it's not a huge surprise that by default the source seems aimed at old rather than new BSD systems.
