GnollHack 4.1.0 Pre-Alpha Graphical User Interface Technology Demo Available Now
- Thread starter Tommi Gustafsson
- Start date
Tero Karttunen
New member
Wow, this looks great!
I loved:
Samurai was killed by hallucinogen-distorted little dog called Hachiko
Far out! That's so cosmic!
I loved:
- The sounds and music were great and really transformed the old-school silent experience to something else altogether. Most of the sound effects were spot on; a few were a little over-the-top (for example, the explosion sound and the ram).
- Gnollish Mines looked fantastic, especially with a lighting source and light effects
- Graphical health bar was a very visual way to keep track on your health (consider also adding a thin hunger-o-meter so I know when it is safe to eat the giant?)
- Map zoom was quite welcome and needed, although I could not find a zoom level to fit my screen size perfectly
- As the tileset size is rectangular, not square, large tiles feel slightly unnatural to me when zoomed in. In large rooms, as the result, diagnonal movement is not really diagonal on screen. If I want to move to a space that is directly to my southwest, I need to move three squares down and four squares to the left. I realize that the same thing happens with most character fonts, but for some reason, the effect seems pronounced to me with large graphical tiles.
- The graphical attack animation felt a little sluggish to me, so I modified the frame delay from 20 to 5 in options. This makes gameplay faster - almost too fast as we have four text lines by default and game does not slow down for --more-- prompts, but any mistakes made this way are my mistakes as a player, of course.
- When a player hits a key that is not bound to anything, he gets the system error message sound which ruins your sound atmosphere. Maybe you could make it silent or simply flash the screen or something?
- Live opponents are hard to distinguish from corpses (in ASCII graphics they turn to % characters which have good contrast), leading me to dancing around and trying to slay already dead opponents.
- When trapped in a bear trap or a pit, the game does not give you any hints that you will get off if you continue to struggle. The sound is implying that the player is doing something bad or futile and the game does not courage the player to continue.
- An ability to see the dungeon structure and take a look at different levels if I cannot recall how many levels up or down some previously visited place is located.
Samurai was killed by hallucinogen-distorted little dog called Hachiko
Far out! That's so cosmic!
Thank you for your comments, Tero.
I think Ctrl-O or #overview does this. It's a NetHack feature.
rahn
New member
Hi Gnollhack! This update is really exciting, I haven't played in a long time but I'm really excited this project is continuing. I had a question - with this new graphical option with fancy soundsystem and animations, could it be said the project is headed in a Windows-centric direction? Is there any hope for Linux or macOS players to see that additional polish?
Of course the ASCII version is just fine and I prefer it over old static tiles. But I was just wondering.
Of course the ASCII version is just fine and I prefer it over old static tiles. But I was just wondering.
We are looking for alternatives to make it work on other operating systems. However, frankly, there are not easy options to make it cross-platform. The problem is that the NetHack code base does not easily compile on newer platforms, such as Android. So, it is a monumental challenge to get it working on all modern platforms, but we are constantly investigating possibilities, if it is somehow possible.
Hi, just to add to Tommi's comments, we actually have already a perfectly working technology to make Linux and MacOS desktop versions of the game (SDL2+OpenGL2+Nuklear), but that seems to port a bit poorly to mobile platforms. Ideally, we'd like to achieve the mobile audience, as a retro game like this is probably best suited for mobile platforms, but it may be that we have to do with whatever technology we manage to get working with GnollHack/NetHack.
The current graphical version is based on NetHackW (Windows GUI), but moving to SDL2 and OpenGL seems pretty straightforward, although it does require quite a lot of new coding to implement menus etc. in NetHack, all of which had already been done in NetHackW. But we'll investigate this further and hopefully we find a good all-around solution to cross-platform development.
The current graphical version is based on NetHackW (Windows GUI), but moving to SDL2 and OpenGL seems pretty straightforward, although it does require quite a lot of new coding to implement menus etc. in NetHack, all of which had already been done in NetHackW. But we'll investigate this further and hopefully we find a good all-around solution to cross-platform development.
And one could add that you can already now play the Windows version on Mac and Linux using Wine and PlayOnMac. But of course having a native version would be nicer.