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A comment on First NetHack bot ascension. Parent comment

Re:First NetHack bot ascension by cturner on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @01:15PM (#8992022)
It's incredibly complicated. That's probably less of a big thing now than it was in the 80s or 90s. In the 80s or 90s it was just amazing that a game could be that intricate.

The sigil-based graphics are part of what make the complexity possible. And - the dev team have coded in all manner of combinations of things, many of which get you killed in plausible/amusing/annoying/complicated ways.

There's a culture of players looking at the source code while they play. The source is really antiquated C.

If you decide to have a go, I'd recommend printing out a copy of the manual, avoiding the spoilers for the first couple of dozen games at least. Just try to learn your way around the dungeon just from that manual, and experience the complexity and sense of mystery.

It's not a particularly 'good' game - grindy. A vogue at the moment in roguelikes is for games with as little complexity as possible. For example, I've spent far more time studying the C code to this game than I have playing it: http://trogrd.tumblr.com/post/61949503427/zoo

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Re:First NetHack bot ascension by riffraff on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @02:19PM (#8992587)
> The sigil-based graphics are part of what make the complexity possible

I don't think that is relevant, I have played the GUI version for many years, and it's perfectly usable.

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Re:First NetHack bot ascension by darkmighty on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:46PM (#8994631)
This is the reason those games can be so complex. Want to make a character fly 10m? Just move his character ('@') 10 grid steps. Want to make a camera? A char 'c' will do it. It's awesome that this allows you to easily program whatever you wish but you still get a visual representation of what's happening.
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Re:First NetHack bot ascension by WildUtah on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @02:08AM (#8995691)
An Expansive Camera in Nethack is the character '(', not a letter 'c'.

A letter 'c' is a cockatrice or a pyrolisk; those are both quite dangerous so I suggest you learn to recognize them for your own good.

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Re:First NetHack bot ascension by mentat on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @03:10PM (#8992975)
The intended point was probably that they enabled the complexity in the interface pre-GUI.
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