News You Can Bruise for 2004 November 5

Permalink [Comments] (3) Fri Nov 05 2004 22:23 Nethack Dinosaur Patch:

At last I got some time to mess around with Nethack. But what to do? Something simple to start with. What is Nethack missing, I asked myself? The obvious answer was dinosaurs. It's got all sorts of fantastical creatures, but none of the truly fearsome beasts from Earth's own past. That was my internal sales pitch, anyway.

Study of the sources and this helpful document showed me the way to creating new Nethack monsters, and I was ready to zap my wand of meta-create monster. But which dinosaurs to pick? I thought about that old AD&D monster manual table that lists about 50 kinds of dinosaurs in great detail and somehow manages to make dinosaurs boring. No, I would only pick a representative sample of dinosaurs.

My patch provides but three painstakingly selected lizard-beasts: the fastest dinosaur ever, the smartest dinosaur ever, and the most popular dinosaur ever. The balance is probably off and there's a lot more that could be added (treatment of the fact that, while many dinosaurs have hands, they can't really do much with them; also, I guess you could saddle and ride the smaller dinosaurs), but it makes me happy.

development games/nethack biology/organisms/dinosaur

Comments:

Posted by Ryan at Sat Nov 06 2004 13:44

Oh man - best Nethack dinosaur patch ever!

I fully support your dinosaur choice.

Posted by Zack at Sat Nov 06 2004 14:54

Why is the baby tyrannosaurus oviparous when the other babies aren't? (Note: I do not know what that flag does.)

Posted by Leonard at Mon Nov 08 2004 12:32

The baby T-rex is oviparous because of lazy copy-and-paste. I fixed it. An oviparous animal can lay eggs if you're female and polymorphed into it (how the eggs get fertilized is not covered). This is why you should always play Nethack as a female; you can get pet cockatrices, dragons, etc. This is also why there is a baby T-rex in the first place.

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