A Discussion on Roguelikes

[Moaner]

You know, as embarrassed as I am to admit it, Stone Soup is the first real roguelike that I've actually stuck with for more than a few hours(not counting Shiren HAHA).  All this talk is leading me to believe Nethack is a more enjoyable game and I think I'm going to have to give it a go.  Assuming the official Guidebook is the best source of info on the game I added it to my blackberry so I can read it at work.  Any super newbie Nethack hints for someone who is familiar with the genre but not the game itself? 

Also, may we add roguelike to the dictionary?  Is that even possible anymore?

[Trippy]

Also, may we add roguelike to the dictionary?  Is that even possible anymore?

It is but you have to make a request in the stickied dictionary thread in General.

[Yegolev]

Any super newbie Nethack hints for someone who is familiar with the genre but not the game itself? 

Use the -X option?

[grebo]

I was doing great, had almost 100 arrows/bullets and launchers to match.  Bow was +!/+!.  Had wand of Disintegration, decent jewelry...Even had plenty of food!

then I decided to see how strong an Orc Warrior was.  Lesson learned, Kite everything.

[MrHat]

Now. Someone put this on my iPhone.

:-p

[sidereal]

This sounds much, much worse than angband, which has a much more predictable difficulty arc, almost never kills you randomly (98% of the time after you die, you say 'whoops' not 'wtf'), has a town, and doesn't load you down with useless items.

It's amazing how much gameplay you guys will give up so your bats look like a little bat instead of a little letter 'b'.

[schild]

This sounds much, much worse than angband, which has a much more predictable difficulty arc, almost never kills you randomly (98% of the time after you die, you say 'whoops' not 'wtf'), has a town, and doesn't load you down with useless items.

It's amazing how much gameplay you guys will give up so your bats look like a little bat instead of a little letter 'b'.

It's amazing how much presentation you'll give up so that bats can be the letter 'b.'

[sidereal]

Uh, what?  That implies that the bats being letter b is a draw.  It's not.  It's just an acceptable sacrifice for all of the other benefits.

[Tarami]

Uh, what?  That implies that the bats being letter b is a draw.  It's not.  It's just an acceptable sacrifice for all of the other benefits.

Think of it as a variant of the usual "you're wrong."

[WindupAtheist]

This sounds much, much worse than angband, which has a much more predictable difficulty arc, almost never kills you randomly (98% of the time after you die, you say 'whoops' not 'wtf'), has a town, and doesn't load you down with useless items.

It's amazing how much gameplay you guys will give up so your bats look like a little bat instead of a little letter 'b'.

I just play ZangbandTK. It has the town and stuff and looks better anyway.

[UnSub]

In many ways this thread reminds me of the MUD history thread.

That is all.

[WindupAtheist]

Roguelikes are a minority nerd interest that by and large the participants know is a minority nerd interest.

[lamaros]

In many ways this thread reminds me of the MUD history thread.

That is all.

With less backseat deving and more enjoyable anecdotes!

[Murgos]

In many ways this thread reminds me of the MUD history thread.

Despite the different forums the two are directly related.  The first MUDs were these same games modded for multi-player.

[Yegolev]

Yet this thread is a mere four pages and relatively civil.  Obviously multiplayer is de debbil.

[UnSub]

Yet this thread is a mere four pages and relatively civil.  Obviously multiplayer is de debbil.

It's well established that other players are always the problem.

[lamaros]

Yet this thread is a mere four pages and relatively civil.  Obviously multiplayer is de debbil.

It's well established that other people are always the problem.

Might as well be universal, here.

[WindupAtheist]

My 15 year old kid brother has been on a Diablo/Diablo 2 kick and to my surprise wants me to slap ZangbandTK on his computer. (My install is a bit customized with different sound effects and stuff.) Just not "that crappy version where you're an at-symbol" he says. Haw.

I look forward to it breaking his soul.

[grebo]

Is ZangbandTK still available somewhere?  I can only seem to find the Ascii one, anyone have a link?

[WindupAtheist]

http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=3624

This download is where I originally got it. It has some weird choices of sound effects (annoying Simpsons and Ren & Stimpy rips) that are simple enough to alter or remove using the in-game options. There are also a handful of undefined creatures/items that will look like ascii characters when you first see them, easily fixed the same way. There are a TON more sprites included than the game actually needs, and I've ended up tweaking things as I've gone along. There are multiple tilesets that can be selected from "setup" at the start. It gives a preview of each. Isometric is best.

Two things: One, it needs to sit directly on the C drive for some reason. (The executable is in the Omniband folder.) Two, it tends to run fast. I've gotten used to one click per step to keep from zooming all over fuck, but you might want to slow it down. Potentially annoying, but overall this is the best graphical roguelike I've been able to get my hands on.

If anyone wants my somewhat cleaned up version and isn't worried that WUA is out to haxx0r them, I have a 9mb zip file I can email out. I scanned through every creature in the game to make sure they all have appropriate sprites, got rid of the more annoying sound effects, and downloaded a bunch of wav files from public sound effect archives. I added stuff like clicks for footsteps, consistent sounds for spellcasting/traps/status effects/recovery, and multiple combat sounds. When you're killing stuff it sounds more like "tink, smack, chop, smack, urf!" instead of just "tink tink tink tink tink" to the point of insanity.

[grebo]

WUA, I sent you a PM thing w/email.

I'm still loving Crawl, but I wouldn't mind something, I don't know, maybe a bit easier?  Chewing through a room full of orc warrs/mages/priests takes a while as a spriggan and there is never any reward!  (other than mangled orcs everywhere of course).  My current game has me on D10 or so in the orc mines and I have yet to find a single spellbook.  If not for my dagger of poisoning and blowgun of shoot lots of poison at every damn thing I would have perished long ago.  Everything gets poisoned to death, except lava statues which just suck!

[WindupAtheist]

Sent.

You also get a copy of my new kobold death knight to kill off, since he was there when I made the zip. 

[Yegolev]

I set a new record with ZangbandTk: I died on level 0.

[WindupAtheist]

Get beaten up by a mercenary in town, or did you go exploring on the surface? The roads between towns are usually reasonably safe, having only level one-ish monsters, but the total lack of cover means I still usually want to be at least level 3 or so before leaving the first town zone.

I really want to make a skeleton ranger with death magic, but I can never really get one off the ground. My last attempt died at character level 6 on the 2nd level of the dungeon. Meanwhile getting a death paladin past char level 10 remains relatively simple.

EDIT:

Awesomeness. I rerolled my kobold until I got the background of being "one of several children of Mughash the Kobold Lord" since you start with the most money that way. Then at character level 17 I killed my own father. He had his big army of kobolds, and having charmed a crypt creep which proceeded to summon more crap, I had an army of undead. Cue a big epic battle with dozens of combatants.

[Yegolev]

Something killed me while I was holding down NUM4 on the overworld map.

[CharlieMopps]

This sounds much, much worse than angband, which has a much more predictable difficulty arc, almost never kills you randomly (98% of the time after you die, you say 'whoops' not 'wtf'), has a town, and doesn't load you down with useless items.

It's amazing how much gameplay you guys will give up so your bats look like a little bat instead of a little letter 'b'.

It's amazing how much presentation you'll give up so that bats can be the letter 'b.'

I kinda think that's the point with these games. When playing one of these games and I see a "D" I get a feeling that I just don't get from playing a game like everquest where I have a 100 foot 3D dragon standing in front of me. Also, because these games are turn based, I have time to contemplate my imminent death. I see the D and see the exit to the room... maybe I can make it around that corner before it uses its breath weapon... or should I try my teleport ring that may just move me closer to it...

Add to that... they just don't make dungeon crawls anymore. Remember ultima underworld? That game was great.

[WindupAtheist]

Something killed me while I was holding down NUM4 on the overworld map.

I had a couple "I held down left click to run between towns and a crow ate me before I knew WTF was going on!" deaths early on. If you right click (or shift+num) the direction you want to go, your character will run, clipping along with no further input and automatically stopping when he either comes to a corner, comes near an object, or sights a creature. Then if you don't want to engage the creature, because it's far away or whatever, you can scoot away with squirts of left click/numpad until it's safe to run again.

Anyway, my skeletal ranger is off and running at character level 12 and has a couple of nice items. It only took the silly newb deaths of two of his predecessors to get there. Rangers start with no armor and just a short bow and a dagger, and as a skeleton I certainly wasn't going to roll high enough social status to have bonus starting money for anything better. Surviving long enough to get some armor and a real melee weapon is a bitch.

If you have at least a couple levels under your belt and either infravision or "see invisible" as a racial, you might want to poke around the forest zone due west of the starter town. It's full of the usual level one crap, but Smeagol always spawns somewhere in that zone unless he's been encountered and killed in the dungeon already. He blinks around a lot, but about the worst thing he'll do is pick your pockets. If you have access to death magic, the malediction spell will fuck him up fast.

Oh, since I've sent this game to a number of people on the board I should also point out: When you're pickpocketed and the thief teleports away, they're still somewhere within the level/zone and killing them WILL get your money back. Just don't leave the level/zone until you've tracked them down.

[Ingmar]

This sounds much, much worse than angband, which has a much more predictable difficulty arc, almost never kills you randomly (98% of the time after you die, you say 'whoops' not 'wtf'), has a town, and doesn't load you down with useless items.

It's amazing how much gameplay you guys will give up so your bats look like a little bat instead of a little letter 'b'.

It's amazing how much presentation you'll give up so that bats can be the letter 'b.'

I kinda think that's the point with these games. When playing one of these games and I see a "D" I get a feeling that I just don't get from playing a game like everquest where I have a 100 foot 3D dragon standing in front of me. Also, because these games are turn based, I have time to contemplate my imminent death. I see the D and see the exit to the room... maybe I can make it around that corner before it uses its breath weapon... or should I try my teleport ring that may just move me closer to it...

Add to that... they just don't make dungeon crawls anymore. Remember ultima underworld? That game was great.

Also in Nethack, at least, things are far easier to identify (for me) via letter/color than they are by the crappy tile art. None of the graphics options are enough of an improvement to entice me away from my system mastery of the ASCII stuff.

[rattran]

Also in Nethack, at least, things are far easier to identify (for me) via letter/color than they are by the crappy tile art. None of the graphics options are enough of an improvement to entice me away from my system mastery of the ASCII stuff.

Nothing more menacing than a vicious &  Plus, you need to know the letters to use blessed genocide.

[WindupAtheist]

I can mouse over something in my current game and it's name and health bar will come up, and the Recall window in the lower left corner will have the name, text description, list of known abilities, and kill count for that creature. Most of the other roguelikes I've played have an interface that doesn't even know what the fuck a mouse is. There's just no excuse for that sort of bullshit.

[grebo]

The Stone Soup Crawl interface is very clean as well, with decent mouse support.  Only gripe I really have is that the text message area gets erased every turn, would be nice if new messages could scroll on to the top instead of having to constantly hit Ctrl+P to read WTF the message was that just flashed by.

I started a Deep Elf Conjurer and that combo is fairly godly, if you can survive the first few levels.  Mephitic Cloud(3x3 confusion/poison cloud) is great crowd control and sprinkle in some other spells from books you hopefully find and you can handle just about anything.  Once I finish saving up for a book of Wizardry(haste!!!!) I will not have much to fear from what I'm currently fighting.

Soon as this guy dies though(and he will) I plan to play a bunch of Zangband.

[Sophismata]

Those who don't mind the ASCII graphics might want to check out Incursion, a Roguelike that uses the SRD (3 & 3.5 edition D&D ruleset). You have a lot more control over your character than is typical, and character building can help avoid or alleviate standard problems - like the RNG never giving you decent loot.

It's alpha/beta, but I enjoy it and play it almost as much as ADoM (one of my other favourite Roguelikes). I recommend a basic knowledge of D&D though. Bonus points if you played before 3rd edition and can recognize some of the more crazy monsters.

[WindupAtheist]

So I was on my skeleton ranger Deadeye (Diablo reference FTW) and I just had a moment where I was at one HP facing off with a nearly-dead boss, and everything came down to one arrow. It hit, he died, and I came away with an artifact shield. Also picked up a Trump weapon scimitar, so all in all things are looking up.

Casting the Animal Taming spell on anything that self-multiplies is handy, since the offspring are also friendly and you can quickly fill a whole region of the level with creatures that are your pets. Any serious enemy will wade through a bunch of worm masses or whatever, but it slows them down and the dozens of tiny hits can soften them up. Deadeye would surely have cacked if a whole shitload of tamed giant lice hadn't thrown themselves under the feet of what was chasing him, delaying it long enough for him to get some health back.

[Quinton]

Those who don't mind the ASCII graphics might want to check out Incursion, a Roguelike that uses the SRD (3 & 3.5 edition D&D ruleset). You have a lot more control over your character than is typical, and character building can help avoid or alleviate standard problems - like the RNG never giving you decent loot.

It's alpha/beta, but I enjoy it and play it almost as much as ADoM (one of my other favourite Roguelikes). I recommend a basic knowledge of D&D though. Bonus points if you played before 3rd edition and can recognize some of the more crazy monsters.

Okay, what the hell is it with people writing roguelikes as graphical applications in win32?

I'm not sure what in the world this guy is trying to do with his binary only linux port, but wtf:
setresuid32(-1, 0, -1)                  = -1 EPERM (Operation not permitted)
iopl(0x3)                               = -1 EPERM (Operation not permitted)
open("/dev/mem", O_RDWR)                = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
getuid32()                              = 1001
setresuid32(-1, 1001, -1)               = 0
geteuid32()                             = 1001

Not at all confidence inspiring.  Glad I ran it as an untrusted user.  Crashed nonetheless.

but, seriously, wtf:

There is a known issue with the Linux version where sending the game fullscreen will change your desktop resolution to whatever you have the fullscreen resolution in the game set to. This is being researched presently. In the mean time, the obvious workaround is to set your desktop resolution the same as the game's resolution, or to use NVIDIA Settings or your system's equivalent to reset the resolution after running the game.

You shouldn't need to be running fullscreen, you should be using the tty.

I mean what's the point of a roguelike if I need a 3D driver or to set screen resolutions or use a win32 machine or stupid crap like that?  Ye gods...

That said, this one sounds like it has some neat ideas.

Wow, kids today: (stuff from http://www.incursion-roguelike.org/TechPaper (Web Version).htm)
- The current memory management scheme is very poor, keeping every level of the dungeon in memory at once.
- Incursion sometimes experiences slowdowns even on my extremely fast 1.8 GHz development machine
-

[Quinton]

Also in Nethack, at least, things are far easier to identify (for me) via letter/color than they are by the crappy tile art. None of the graphics options are enough of an improvement to entice me away from my system mastery of the ASCII stuff.

Yeah, it took a while to recognize the critters, but once I learn what's what I find the ascii critters far easier to identify than the (usually terrible) tiles the tiled versions of most roguelikes use.  I agree, in principal, that actual art would be better than just ascii characters, but unless the art quality is sufficient to make things make sense, I'll be happy to stick with text.