News You Can Bruise

I decided to do something similar to my adventure to find the first known mention of the ARPAnet in popular culture. I'd find books that mentioned Nethack but were not books on computers or game design.

This adventure was fun but noticeably less successful. There were a number of government documents and books about oil mentioning "nethack agreements", but this was just an OCR error for "netback". I also saw one "setback" become "nethack".

There was a collection of User Friendly comics and one of BBspot news stories. I found only one work of prose fiction that mentioned the game Nethack: "Dyl", a self-published piece of French SF by Mirko Vidovic. Here's my machine-aided English translation of part of the section called "Rogue":

The system, which had seemed to boot normally, was suddenly seized with hiccups. The screen was going mad. Instead of presenting the expected prompt, Dyl found himself in the middle of a game of Hack, the successor to Rogue, itself the originator of Nethack.

"The system has managed to intercept the launching of Sarge [the Debian release?], and substituted the utility routines which it considers best suited to a strategic confrontation. Something tells me that in these dungeons are two antagonists which expect me," whistled Dyl. "I will play the game, go down there and beat them both."

Michael P. Kube-McDowell's "Vectors" contains the string "nethack", but it's a cyberpunk nonsense word ("covered with nethack gear"), possibly used as an in-joke.

Marylin Schrock's "Wake Up, Church! The Enemy Is Within Your Gates!: Astral Projection and The Church" tries to bring 80s-style Bible-thumping fantasy buzzkill into the Internet era by, near as I can tell, taking claims of astral projection at face value and blaming it all on Satan. Its big section on "Astral Projection in Our Culture" (hey, Wikipedia didn't want it[0]) says: "The astral plane is the final level of the computer game Nethack. The player must sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor to a deity in order to win." Otherkin, mentioned on the same page, are apparently an even bigger problem than Nethack.

On the other end of the spectrum, a Christian nerd with the ominous nom de plume of "Anakin Niceguy" has self-published "Rethinking 'Getting Serious about Getting Married' : A Biblical Response to Debbie Maken's Book and to the Assault on Unmarried Men by Religious Leaders". I know that religious leaders were always mounting assaults on me until I got married. Here's the Nethack graf:

A bachelor may indeed have his "golf or other hobbies" but married people have their weddings, receptions, honeymoons, McMansions, oversized SUVs [several other stereotypical status symbols elided], and piano lessons for Junior to make the parents proud. As a lawful [sic] as these things are, I fail to see how they bring a soul any closer to God than the time a single man spends in front of the computer playing NetHack.

I'm not really sure what is up with Benjamin Rowe's "The 91 Parts of the Earth", but I doubt Marilyn Shrock would approve of its "Enochian magick". The Nethack graf makes Rowe (?) sound like H.P. Lovecraft's most milquetoast narrator:

Possibly in reaction to this, I now find myself slightly reluctant to try entering the Part again. I've put off starting several times already today, on the faintest excuse, and a couple of times with no excuse at all. (In fact, I'm going to do so again as soon as I save this file, and play Nethack for a few minutes.)

Dishonorable mention to Ralph Roberts' "REBOL for Dummies", which implies that Nethack is a text adventure, and to Timothy Albee's "CGI Filmmaking: The Creation of Ghost Warrior" which implies that Nethack is a MUD. Frankly, I expected better from you.

[0] But seriously, folks: the section is largely plagiarized from Wikipedia.

There's been too much original writing on this weblog recently! Time for some lazy linking to other sites.

I mentioned in my Wii Fit entry that I'm jogging 60-90 minutes a day while watching Internet videos. That's a lot of videos, folks. I've gone through Chrontendo, twice. I've seen pretty much everything on TGWTG. Sixty Symbols lasted me about three days. I need videos, folks. Give me your favorites in comments. I don't have enough to fill the gaping foot-pounding void of exercise. Preferably videos that are at least ten minutes long, because I can't be using the keyboard all the time while jogging. Meanwhile, podcasts have been accumulating because if there's no visual component I'm not distracted enough to forget about the mind-crunching boredom of exercising.

One of my favorite CS papers is 1984's ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, which describes a script that plays Rogue better than human players. You can get the source code, but good luck getting it to run. The Angband Borg works great--I remember leaving it running over an afternoon while in college--but because Angband is a game that rewards grinding, the Angband Borg loves to grind. It's incredibly dull--and the Borg isn't too exciting either! (I'm here all week!)

But now I've found out about TAEB::AI::Planar, an experimental AI player for Nethack. Compare that weblog post to the Rog-O-Matic paper and see how much the state of the art has changed since 1984. Don't miss the list of YASDs to which Planar is prone. You can even watch Planar in action (just not while you run, it's only 3 minutes).

So this year I remembered the Nethack tournament before the last minute, and over the weekend I made my third ascension. I say that pretty casually but I got really lucky in that game and at the end what did I have to show for it? I'm up against players who can ascend multiple games in a row, such that a single ascension only gets me to the midpoint on the scale of trophies. So let this be a lesson to you! Somehow.

The meta-adventure continues as I consider more of Zack's complaints about Nethack.

• Identification is too hard. Well, there are lots of tricks here, and it's not too hard if you know them. Basic price ID and the wand trick will get you a long way. BUT, that's a feature of Nethack and doesn't have to be a feature of any given Roguelike. *Angband and Diablo have identify scrolls for sale in the town. But those games also have very strict inventory limits, so you have to constantly identify and ditch items. They also have a huge number of unique artifacts, so there are many more things to identify than in Nethack.

  I've found that identification is very difficult in ADOM, because the Nethack tricks don't work and identify scrolls are much rarer. Also you can't name classes of items.

  If you want to make identification easier, you can add more tricks or add more sources of identification. You can balance this by adding more things that need to be identified. This ties in well with Zack's desire to see more equipment and more artifacts.

• It's easy to optimize your kit. *Angband negates this by 1) having an enormous number of monster attacks that you need to defend against, and 2) giving you lots of randomly generated equipment. If you're lucky you can optimize your kit, but there is no immunity in *Angband, so you still have to carry around resistance potions to deal with the Older Than Dirt Red Wyrm who can breathe for 400 points of fire damage every turn (this is one of the things I hate about *Angband actually).

  However you get rid of this problem, it's going to be by creating more aspects of equipment. Either there will be no way to get all these aspects at once, there will be so many ways to get partial coverage it will be difficult to figure out the best one, or some of the aspects will be negative (permacurses, vulnerabilties). It helps if you limit (ADOM) or remove (*Angband) permanent intrinsics. That way the player has to rely more on their equipment and less on something they ate.

• Artifacts are boring. They are, in fact. I think this is another result of Nethack's flatness and written-in-C-ness. It's easy to add another weapon to the artifact table but difficult to give it custom behavior. And often the custom behavior doesn't make the artifact better than a normal enchanted weapon. The vorpal sword is kind of cool but it's not worth lugging around.

  ADOM has more useful artifacts than Nethack, even though there's no custom behavior. *Angband has random artifacts that are cool, and Zangband(?) has a whole subgenre of usually-useless artifacts that can be triggered for some effect every N turns and have fun Knapsack Problem-esque names. Diablo II has super-cool customizable artifacts. I like Zack's idea of artifacts (or just random objects) gaining more power as you complete quests, but that's going to be a whole lot of side quests most of which won't be triggered in a given game. Sounds kind of MMORPGish.

  Magicbane, Mjolnir, and Stormbringer are the only Nethack artifacts that feel like artifacts, like powerful magics barely under your control. That said, most roguelikes don't give artifacts any special behavior at all. You could go a long way just by programming that big table of artifact effects from the 1st edition AD&D DMG.

• Starting equipment quality has too much variance. True, but if you're going to introduce variance into the game (important for replayability at different challenge levels), the beginning is the place to do it.

  In this context Zack brings up the complaint, common to pseudo-RPG genres, that although saving the world is supposedly your job, nobody lifts a finger to help you. I actually wrote What Fools These Mortals to explain this, and the "Guide to the Mazes of Menace" tries to accomplish the same by downplaying the implications of the game intro dump.

  In a game design context, this occurs in Nethack for two reasons. First, Nethack comes from Rogue, and in Rogue you are "some punk kid with no particular skills and no holy mission" -- a rogue, if you will. Second, if you started the game with good equipment, the first part of the game would be too easy. It'd have to be made harder. Then you'd be back where you started. Maybe kick in a couple food rations for classes that start with no food, but I think Nethack gives you a wide variety of challenges here and it's a reasonable design decision.

I made another stupid Nethack patch.

Today, after over 15 years of playing Nethack, I finally won the game. I came back to Nethack a week ago after a year or so of playing Slash'EM and ToME, and found that my "crazy wizard" strategy was working a lot better than it used to. After a number of frustrating late-game deaths I managed to get a powerhouse of a crazy wizard who, despite (or because of) my careful planning, tore through the late game with nary a scratch. The charm monster spell is astonishingly effective in the late game.

Anyway, I've now joined the ranks of the ascended. Now to work on that foodless zen pacifist caveman.

Recently I saw signs that the bounty of Unicode characters is about to break into the world of roguelike games. Exhibit 1: Jean-Paul Calderone's primitive roguelike-looking game which endlessly recreates the boring "maze" levels of Nethack, but with Unicode monsters like the fearsome FISHEYE and VERY MUCH LESS-THAN. I tell ya, with Unicode you don't even have to come up with monster names. Just use the real character names.

More interesting (in fact, insanely addictive) as a game is chessrogue, in which the monsters move (and, if you have a Unicode terminal, look) like chess pieces. It actually feels a lot more like those "escape the robots" games than a Roguelike. Anyway, in chessrogue you have the Mega-Man like ability to acquire the powers of the pieces you capture. Unfortunately this is nothing beside your amazing power to screw up and get eaten by a pawn just when everything was going so well. There are no hit points or combat, no "The pawn hits!". You just get captured, like in chess, and the game is over.

When will Unicode start showing up in more Roguelikes? Some might say that the plethora of Unicode characters would make games hard to navigate, but I say bah. Lots of people play Roguelikes with little 16x16 bitmaps instead of ASCII characters. Now, there are 256^256 possible 256-color 16x16 bitmaps, a number so large that NYCB style guide forbids it from being spelled out here, but there are only 95,156 graphical Unicode characters. So it should actually be much easier to play a Roguelike with Unicode characters than with bitmaps.

After all this Unicode mania I started thinking about Unicode art. Surely this medium would be the annointed, universally accessible successor to ASCII art. But the Unicode art gallery has only three things in it, none of them very impressive. Is it the very limitations of the ASCII form that keep its practitioners penned within its 95 printable characters? Will the same prove true for Roguelikes?

Actually, addicted to Slash'EM, the Nethack variant. There are two main reasons. The first is that Slash'EM doesn't have nearly as much of Nethack's insane, dull near-endgame slog through the mazes of hell (literally). The second is the Doppleganger, a wondrous player-choosable species which has the ability to (expensively) self-polymorph at will and which gets intrinsic polymorph control at level 9. Thus making it more or less affordable for me to live out my ultimate Nethack fantasy of spending most of the game polymorphed into a xorn. "Walls? Where we're going we won't need... walls." Wheeeee!

Slash'Em also has a basilisk, which is a dream self-polymorph animal because it has the stoning powers of a cockatrice but it can also carry things. I don't know how they justify having a "basilisk" and a "cockatrice" be two different things, but I'm not complaining. There are other changes made to Slash'EM to balance out the ability to turn into a powerful monster more or less whenever you want, but I can deal with them. My point is, Slash'EM is a lot of fun.

I realize that I have two disjoint readerships of my weblog and that this entry makes absolutely no sense to one of them. Sorry.

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.

Here are some fun Nethack patches, including the obsessive-compulsive photography patch and the awesome, but could be more awesome, pirate patch.

"I've created a monster! With my scroll of create monster!"

Nethack is complicated enough to have developed its own set of urban myths (dungeon myths?). Myths and Facts about Nethack zaps the myths with a wand of cancellation.

More interestingly, it turns out that most of the weird Nethack shopkeeper names are names of towns in various parts of the world.

Oh, and the Kingdom of Loathing now has a Nethack dungeon.

"The Alamo"

Willfully obscure entry. Oh, all right, here.

At my going-away party, Seth talked about weird diets. The conversation came around, as it always does, to the USDA's National Nutrient Database. We talked about using the NND data to construct a diet navigator, something that would let you enter some wacky criteria and then create a solid in the 6661-dimensional space of diets, representing the diets that fit that criteria while providing all of your RDAs. This would, eg. allow you to scientifically determine once and for all whether it would be possible to do a vegetarian Atkins diet. Who are you going to believe, some hack on a message board, or linear algebra?

We also talked about making Nethack trendier by adding an Atkins diet conduct. To keep this conduct you could eat all the animal corpses you wanted, but not vegetable-based foods, or potions of booze or fruit juice. Alternatively, there might be a vegetable timeout.

Also check out newCROP, which has an enormous list of food crops, as well as the disturbing list of Famine Foods.

Time for the weekly (as in, there was one last week and there's one this week) ice cream recipe. The latest addition to the cookbook harnasses the great taste of mango for the most Roguelike ice cream yet (slime mold ice cream not forthcoming). If I had the Ben and Jerry's marketing sense I would call it "It Takes Two To Mango" or something, but instead I have a obsession with obscure nerdish in-jokes. (Note that my conception of having "marketing sense" is merely to be obsessed with obvious mainstream in-jokes.)

Ingredients

• 1 ripe mango, peeled and diced
• 2 small ginger roots, peeled and grated
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup cream
• 1/8 cup orange or tangerine juice
• Lemon juice (probably optional)
• Large pinch salt
• Cardamom
• Saffron
• Almond flakes or almond extract

Preparation

Put the diced mango and the ginger into a bowl with 1/4 cup of the sugar. Cover it and let it macerate for an hour or two, then apply a couple squirts of lemon juice.

Heat up the milk and the cream, blah blah blah. Stir up the mango/ginger concoction and pour in the dairy and the citrus juice. Add all of the other ingredients and stir. Let it cool, put it in the ice cream maker, and mango!

Discussion

I did not have any cardamom, saffron or almond because I have a bad habit of making up these ice creams when I'm in Trader Joe's and purchasing only the main ingredients, in this case mango and ginger (not that Trader Joe's is likely to have cardamom or saffron). However, Sumana's mother says they are mandatory.

I heard from various sources that freezing ice cream makes it less sweet because the cold deadens your taste buds. Well, it must also do something else because the mixture for this recipe and even the freshly churned product tastes sort of bland, not like mangoes and with a weird aftertaste; but the frozen ice cream itself is very good and mangoey (still a tiny bit bland without the spices, though). I'm interested in hearing how this happens.

Each mango conceals an enormous pit, ready to spring out at you. If you have never cooked with mangoes before, beware! Even experienced mango wrasslers are sometimes overcome by the size of the mango pit and thrown to the linoleum. OK, I just made that part up. But mangoes do have very large pits.

My favorite sign I saw on the driving trip to Utah was a sign seen when coming into Los Vegas that said "You will always remember Lance Burton, Master Magician." It's like someone named a Nethack incubus "Lance Burton, Master Magician".

A million years ago, I made an offhand comment about the theology of Nethack. The thing I was thinking of was the weird conception Nethack has of atheism, which it doesn't distinguish from theism that doesn't want any divine intervention. But another part of it is a gameplay problem common to adventure games: your character has a powerful backer who has a lot invested in your success, yet who sometimes acts against that interest in the name of a less compelling interest, like greed or aggravation.

The stereotypical example of this is the shopkeeper who wrings his hands and says "You must save Freedonia!" and then tries to nickel-and-dime you on the beef jerky you're trying to buy so you can freaking save Freedonia! I've often felt Nethack deities were acting the same way: look, do you want me to get the Amulet of Yendor or not? Then give me a hand, stop me from turning to stone!

That's why I wrote this songgame: What Fools These Mortals. It lets you simulate being the deity in a game of Nethack. The unexpected thing was, while writing the game, I actually figured out why the Nethack gods are so capricious: it's a lot more fun to smite the player than to help them out, and they're probably just going to die anyway, so why not? This also explains the attitude of the shopkeeper: he's seen heroes come and go, and if he gave beef jerky discounts to everyone he'd go out of business (I don't know why the shopkeeper's financial affairs are persistent across games, when nothing else is, but maybe not all the heroes are you).

Anyway, try out the game; it's got some fun stuff. The code is a mess, but it should be easy to hack if you're so inclined.

Many years ago, I drew a calculus comic called The Adventures Of e. The derivative of The Adventures Of e is surely The Trouble With Otis, an algebra comic. Like The Adventures Of e, The Trouble With Otis has a not-as-funny sequel. Only now do I realize that the world of these comics is strangely roguelike, with characters and symbols moving around and talking.

For Halloween, Kris shaved his macho goatee and dressed up as the Checkerboard Nightmare ("The Checkerboard Nightmare" makes it sound serious and brooding, like "The Batman"). This reminds me of when I was in sixth grade and I constructed a Nethack acid blob costume out of lime-green gauze and plastic sheeting. I don't think I've dressed up for Halloween since. There was just no way to top that.

NewsBruiser 1.2.0 is out! Now, to waste the rest of the day playing Nethack!

I am having the most amazing Nethack game ever. I found a wand of wishing with two charges in a shop, and with it got a silver dragon scale mail which I used in conjunction with a ring of polymorph to rob other shops (including a ring shop). Now I'm diluting useless potions and so far I've unleashed 3 (!) water demons in quick succession, all of which have been greatful and given me wishes. My chances of that happening are less than one in ten million.

Ah, I just unleased an unfriendly water demon, which probably ends my stream of luck.

NewsBruiser release will be delayed due to sickness. I've got it on the run, but I've still got 5-10 hours of work to do on it; more if I want to do the XML format entries and config in 1.0.

Example of my delirium: I was playing Nethack and interpreting the foibles of the random number generator as the surrealism of a sentient being, eg. "Why was that jackal carrying around eggs?"

It may interest you to know that in the Nethack source there is an extensive routine for pluralizing English nouns.

That's just one of those things that comes to my mind once in a while and which I have to post here so that I'll stop thinking about it.

Oh, and another funny message: if you kill a monster inside a shop and it leaves a corpse, the shopkeeper gains ownership of the corpse. So when you pick up the corpse, he says, "You be careful with my corpse!"

Funny Nethack bug: If you hit a shopkeeper with a cockatrice corpse and then reanimate him with Stone To Flesh, he loses his name. So when you talk to him it says " complains that business is bad." He also no longer recognizes his shop, so you can't buy anything from him (but you can just walk out with everything in his shop).

The theology of Nethack is somewhat confused. I'd elaborate, but it's almost time for "My Word!".

The LUG is having a Nethack tournament on xorn (kuato's replacement, donated by VA). Nobody is particularily good, but I'm way ahead of everybody else. Dan's going to beat me when his character finally dies, though. He's been working on one character since yesterday afternoon.

I made some fixes to the browser greetings program. In particular, bots are properly logged now. The bot log (not Notlob) is publically avaliable, even though right now it only has the test entry.

Also I realized that the stats on the character for the Frank Zappa Nethack tribute are a little out of whack. Oh well.