The future of Nethack

[Krice]

I think after waiting for 10 years of new version we should stop it. Nethack is ready. There is no need to make another version and we should leave it as it is. Other developers have tried to improve Nethack, but they have failed in that attempt. Besides the developers of Nethack should now be about 50-60 years old. I guess they don't have any motivation to waste time on programming some ascii game.

[getter77]

Eh, the Dynahack guy is at it as of ARRP this year---and I'm pretty sure the other fork folks for Un and whatnot still have things to wrangle.  Succession isn't a bad thing either really, Dungeon Crawl has definitely arrived far beyond what folks would've reckoned with Linley now with the likes of Stone Soup and CrawlLight I guess to an extent.

I do think that forever chasing Nethack's old shadow as something of a white whale is perhaps not the best idea---in theory there should be another link in the chain or progression by now much as how Nethack arose from Hack and so on.  Though I guess that was the point in Diggr(Incavead) largely and PRIME is still ramping up quite a bit on top of probably others that escape my thoughts at the moment...

[guest509]

I have only a passing interest in what the Dev Team may or may not be doing anymore.

New games are coming out that interest me quite a bit more.

[Krice]

I have only a passing interest in what the Dev Team

This is another problem. We don't know what they are doing if anything. Do they even have any plans to release another version? They should have a blog or something.

[miki151]

It's been obvious for a long time that vanilla Nethack is abandoned. The Dev Team behaves more like they're dead than retired. You should instead check out the variants. DynaHack looks very promising.

Ps. Nethack is still my favorite game of all time.

[guest509]

Yeah, but the whole 'dev team' mystique is still there, you know?

[Ancient]

My favorite NetHack variant is SLASH'EM which really is not developed anymore. On the other hand NetHack has NetHack 4 which in my eyes is worthy successor.  This approach nets me new version of NetHack every so often. Problem solved! :-)

[itkachev]

I think after waiting for 10 years of new version we should stop it. Nethack is ready. There is no need to make another version and we should leave it as it is.

That's absolute crazy talk. These last couple years Nethack development is picking up speed at a crazy pace.

The question isn't when a new Nethack version will be released, the question is which of the new versions to pick as the 'official' Nethack fork.

(I like Nethack4 personally, if only for the careful attention to UI.)

[Quendus]

What are the UI improvements in Nethack4?

[Krice]

the question is which of the new versions to pick as the 'official' Nethack fork.

Why should we pick, when none of them are real.

[Holsety]

the question is which of the new versions to pick as the 'official' Nethack fork.

Why should we pick, when none of them are real.

He means as successor, the same way Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup took over from Linley's Dungeon Crawl.
To be fair, that might be a clever idea. Between Un-, Nitro-, DynaHack and 4, there's certainly improvements...
Now there just needs to be community consensus. Good luck with that lol.

[...] There is no need to make another version and we should leave it as it is. Other developers have tried to improve Nethack, but they have failed in that attempt. [...]

Could you elaborate on this?

[miki151]

Now there just needs to be community consensus. Good luck with that lol.

No need for that, it's just a matter of survival of the fittest.

[guest509]

I would just freakin' love for all these nethack devs to band together and form a new dev team. There would be compromises, sure, but it would be sweet.

Team Nova. NovaHack.

[Krice]

Could you elaborate on this?

When developers pick an existing project and start to "improve" it it usually doesn't become better as a game. Often the opposite happens and the original feel of the game is lost. These people have good intentions, but it doesn't mean they are great or even good game designers. The worst option is a group of open source -minded developers who lack a single, focused idea of a good gameplay and just throw in some stuff.

[bhaak]

I would just freakin' love for all these nethack devs to band together and form a new dev team. There would be compromises, sure, but it would be sweet.

I'm not sure if you are aware of it but both UnNetHack and NH4 already consists of more than 1 developer.

And even before that, there was (and regarding DynaHack and UnNetHackPlus still is) lots of code going to and fro between the different active forks.