[HN Gopher] The story of Rogue
___________________________________________________________________
The story of Rogue
Author : gaws
Score : 259 points
Date : 2024-12-03 23:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spillhistorie.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (spillhistorie.no)
| ggm wrote:
| The Sysadmins where I worked in leeds 82-84 invested a LOT of
| time doing codework on rogue. They also got high fu in Mud on the
| dec-10. When a PhD student worked out how to eject the memory
| resident part of Mud and get it back to zero, thereby losing the
| chief ops his power, he banned him from login for a month, and
| then once he got "finger of death" back basically harrassed the
| living shit out of his character inside the Mud.
|
| The Rogue work pre-dated Hack. I think when Hack came up, and
| there was persisting state of the dungeon and multi-user, it
| reached peak. I liked Rogue. I only know one guy who got all the
| way down. Shopkeepers were awesome, if you did wind up sneaking
| in the back wall of a shop and looting it, got very feral once
| they worked it out.
|
| Don't step on your dog, dawg. And DEFINITELY don't eat it if you
| do.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| My floppy based games were Rogue, Hack and Empire.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If playing _rogue_ (6) is not your style, don't forget Rog-o-
| matic, the 1984 expert system that would play it for you:
| https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.html
| internet_points wrote:
| haha, a rule based precursor to deepmind agent57
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Can't wait to share this with my Dad. He went to MIT in the 1970s
| where he first encountered Rogue. Some of my earliest memories
| are sitting on my Dad's lap, watching him repeatedly die to a
| Troll. It led to a lifetime love of Rogue and
| Roguelikes/Roguelites/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems.
|
| I just picked up Shiren the Wanderer 5 for the Switch, and it's
| just the most comfortable experience in the world for me:
| identifying shields, getting hungry, and dying repeatedly.
| dogline wrote:
| Now I have to look up what's available on Switch. I've tried
| other Roguelikes, but often they get tedious without a keyboard
| (Darkest Dungeon, Into the Breach). I still want a game I can
| play kicking back with the Switch.
|
| I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can
| just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.
| jghn wrote:
| My biggest beef with modern roguelikes, including everything
| you mentioned, is almost none of them make me think, "Wow,
| this feels like rogue to me". Which is not to say that I
| don't like some of them, but I like them for completely
| different reasons.
|
| Tangentially related: As someone who not just played the crap
| out of Rogue in the early 80s but also Wizardry 1, I was
| ecstatic to find out recently that the latter was rereleased
| on modern platforms [1]. It's the original DOS game with some
| better graphics. They included some new play options to make
| it less punishing, but one can disable all of them to have
| the authentic experience
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Provi
| ng_...
| dogline wrote:
| Yeah, maybe they're not "roguelikes", but more "dungeon
| crawlers". I like dungeon crawlers. Don't know why. The
| assembly language Rogue for the Coco, mentioned in the
| article, was one of my first games I spent a lot of time
| on, and maybe that stuck.
| jghn wrote:
| I did see that Epyx Rogue is available on Switch as a
| port from an Amiga version, but it's not without UI bugs
| [1]. Also previously when I mentioned Wiz 1 I'd forgotten
| the Switch was part of the sub-thread, it's available on
| switch as well. Have been playing the hell out of it
| lately :)
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/
| tried_t...
| throw4847285 wrote:
| There was a linguistic shift that happened and what the
| term Roguelike means changed dramatically. Roguelike used
| to refer to a game based pretty closely on Rogue:
| procedurally generated dungeons, perma-death, item
| identification, a hunger mechanic, a specific
| implementation of turn based combat. Even ASCII graphics
| were considered necessary for some people. There was an
| organization formed to police the boundaries of what
| constituted a Roguelike that was, for better or worse, like
| the Academie Francaise in its pedantry.
|
| In Japan, Roguelikes never went out of style in the same
| way because traditional dungeon crawlers kept being made.
| So Roguelike elements found there way into games as diverse
| as Azure Dreams and Baroque.
|
| It took longer for American devs to realize that the basic
| joys of a Roguelike: the novelty of procedurally generated
| content, the pressure of permadeath, and the risk/reward
| tradeoff of trying to go down one more floor. Once indie
| devs caught the Roguelike bug, it became an epidemic of
| inserting elements of a Roguelike into every genre
| imaginable. This new genre was deemed the Roguelite, though
| this didn't make the Rogue purists happy as they had a much
| more restrictive definition. And some people just call them
| all Roguelikes.
|
| Personally, I love both Roguelikes and Roguelites, whatever
| you want to call them. Slay the Spire is one of the
| greatest video games ever made, and that wouldn't exist
| without Rogue, even though on the surface it shares very
| little in common with its ancestor. Under the surface you
| find the same joys: risk/reward, high difficulty, just one
| more run.
| jghn wrote:
| Yeah, I did go down that rabbit hole several years ago.
| It is what it is.
|
| One big part of it for me are the graphics. If the
| graphics/UI aren't kind of shitty, it's not going to
| "feel like Rogue" to me. I don't need ASCII per se, for
| instance I did most of my Rogue playing on the Mac port
| in the early/mid-80s.
|
| This isn't the full issue for me though. Take Darkest
| Dungeon as an example. I love that game. And it checks
| all the standard boxes, even my "kind of shitty"
| graphics. But ... it's not Rogue.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Dungeons of Dredmor is kind of ideal: not ASCII but very
| functional. Same with the Shiren games I've played.
|
| Even if the graphics are clearly better than ASCII, what
| makes something feel like Rogue is that there's no
| attempt to hide the artifice. The grid is clearly a
| restrictive grid. Simple icons are used to represent
| various types of items. There's something very clearly
| "programmed." An unidentified item can be broken down
| into a handful of variables: item type, cursed or not,
| effect, etc.
|
| In fact, I wonder if Rogue is one of the reasons I got
| into programming. The first real thing I tried to code
| was a version of Rogue. The rules are so clearly defined.
| Playing it is kind of zen.
| djur wrote:
| I'd never thought about it that way, but you're exactly
| right. Roguelikes that feel like roguelikes always have a
| certain "open/transparent case" sense to them, even if
| the actual mechanics are hidden away from you a lot (such
| as in NetHack). They make a virtue out of not feeling
| curated and crafted (even though there's a lot of craft
| that goes into them), and the more narrative, cinematic
| quality, visual polish, etc. that gets added the less it
| feels like Rogue.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Honestly, I think the closest experience to a classic
| Roguelike is playing Minesweeper or Solitaire. Most of
| the time your next move is pretty clear, but you always
| reach a point where you have incomplete information and
| you have to way the risk/reward of, say, trying that
| armor on or zapping that tough enemy with a wand of
| polymorph. Not a lot of video games really lean into
| incomplete information as a core mechanic.
| Experimentation is necessary to figure out all the
| interactions.
|
| Though to be honest, I like my Roguelikes pretty limited
| in scope. I could never get into Nethack because it felt
| like the number of factors you needed to take into
| account outstripped my working memory. I found myself
| going to a wiki, which isn't my favorite activity.
|
| And if we want to really get nerdy about the history of
| game design, I have a theory about Dark Souls. Dark Souls
| is a roguelike/lite... but without the three gameplay
| elements considered most necessary to be a descendant of
| Rogue: there's no permadeath, it's not turn based, and
| it's not procedurally generated. And yet... no other game
| of its era leaned as hard into the idea of incomplete
| information, high challenge, necessity for
| experimentation, and risk/reward calculations.
|
| The history of games is so cool, because nothing ever
| gets forgotten. There's always some visionary who grew up
| on some genre of game considered outdated and niche but
| who can adapt that genre into a new form which can find a
| fresh audience.
| kibwen wrote:
| If you want a similar vibe but in a game explicitly designed
| for controller inputs, and if you like rhythm games, then try
| Crypt Of The Necrodancer (or its Zelda-themed spinoff,
| Cadence Of Hyrule).
|
| In the same vein of controller-native games, if you want a
| platformer that is the spiritual sucessor to Nethack, then
| you want to check out the Spelunky series.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| Hardcore purists categorize the genre into "traditional
| roguelikes" (could be mistaken for original Rogue if you
| squint) and "roguelites" (all the other genre mashups).
|
| In the traditional category, Switch has Shiren 5 and 6,
| Jupiter Hell, and Tanglewood. Maybe Dragon Fang Z and Void
| Terrarium, haven't played them. Crown Trick and Crypt of the
| Necrodancer/Cadence of Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite
| traditional and not quite "lite."
|
| ...and that's about the extent of it. A lot of traditional
| roguelikes are hobby projects without widespread commercial
| appeal that never make off PC. Meanwhile, there are hundreds
| of quality roguelites on Switch.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| > Crown Trick and Crypt of the Necrodancer/Cadence of
| Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite traditional and not
| quite "lite."
|
| I always felt like an important aspect of "lite" was
| whether death was real permadeath or whether good
| performance in one game could make the next one easier. In
| that aspect, COTN feels like it's a roguelite in the
| default (non-all-zones) mode; you get to collect a bunch of
| upgrades that you keep for the next run, and you can also
| take the zones one by one. But all zones is hardcore
| permadeath.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I mean, Shiren is a roguelike designed from the ground up for
| console. I went back and tried the original Shiren (Mystery
| Dungeon 2) on the Super Famicom via an emulator, and it's
| amazing how much they just nailed the balance. In some ways
| it's simpler than Rogue, but in other way it's deeper.
|
| The folks at Chunsoft made some impressive games, and they
| single handedly kept the flame of the commercial Roguelike
| alive for decades (at least in Japan).
| code2code wrote:
| If you like a Roguelike that doesn't need a keyboard, then
| you might like our Amiga game Roguecraft, which is a
| Lovecraft-inspired coffee break Roguelike for the Amiga. We
| have plans to port it to the Switch, but it is easy to get it
| running on an Amiga emulator. =)
|
| https://thalamusdigital.itch.io/roguecraft
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Slay the Spire is great with a gamepad.
| Litost wrote:
| For any Slay the Spire fans, the Downfall fan expansion is
| well worth playing. The ability to go backwards through the
| game as some of the various bosses challenging the normal
| characters alone makes it a great variant. https://store.st
| eampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_...
| tombert wrote:
| Rogue holds up remarkably well. I installed it about a year ago
| out of "historical curiosity", only to find myself playing it for
| almost an hour.
|
| I will admit that DRL it a bit more my style nowadays, it's
| amazing to me that a game living entirely in my terminal is still
| pretty fun.
| nrjames wrote:
| I love any opportunity to suggest people try out Brogue. It was
| developed with the idea "What would have happened if development
| continued on Rogue?"
|
| Info here: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/
|
| Repo/downloads here: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE
| card_zero wrote:
| Or many more at
| https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Main_Page and
| https://forums.roguetemple.com, though Brogue is one of the
| best.
| julianeon wrote:
| If I had to pick one forum to be active on, it would be that
| one.
| itomato wrote:
| Isn't that Dwarf Fortress?
|
| https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress is an amazing management game in fortress
| simulation mode, but kinda struggles as a Rogue successor.
| The layers upon layers of simulation don't mesh into a very
| satisfying experience in adventure mode, imho.
|
| Brogue is somewhat minimalist and very tightly designed. The
| design of every item, monster, and dungeon in the game is
| inextricably interwoven into a cohesive whole. It evokes very
| similar feelings to Rogue while also doing its own thing.
| Less "continued development of Rogue" and more "Unofficial
| sequel."
| sph wrote:
| Anyone know what is the _sexy_ font used in this picture?
| https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I think it's just called AT&T PC6300. There are a bunch of
| variants but I'm somewhat confident it's in that family. The
| very high x-height and tiny, 45o slash are characteristic.
| sph wrote:
| Nope, the _y_ is markedly different than the screenshot:
| https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-
| fonts/fontlist/font?att_pc63...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Good call. The p looks way different too. Idk then!
| fjarlq wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's a Link MC5 terminal, which emulates DEC
| VT220 by default, but that font doesn't seem very VT220ish.
| https://vt100.net/dec/vt220/glyphs
| fsckboy wrote:
| emulating DEC VT's generally meant the full featureset of DEC
| ANSI escape sequences for cursor positioning, saving, colors,
| bold, etc. It would not include emulating fonts.
|
| i googled and found this picture of a Link MC5 screen, though
| it's monochrome, don't know if they would have changed that.
|
| https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg.
| ..
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I cannot name it off the top of my head, but I am sure its
| here:
|
| https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
| sph wrote:
| This only lists PC fonts, which doesn't include UNIX
| terminals. I admit I haven't checked them all just yet.
| brianzelip wrote:
| Not it, but see this related modern work!
| https://departuremono.com/
|
| And a recent and informing podcast episode about it,
| https://changelog.com/podcast/618.
| swayvil wrote:
| Just played Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup last night. The spirit is
| alive and well.
| card_zero wrote:
| CDDA for me at the moment, version 0.H Herbert was released
| last month.
|
| https://cataclysmdda.org
| anthk wrote:
| I can't compile CDDA:Bright Nights with clang 11.
| sph wrote:
| And you can play, or spectate some else, in your browser:
| https://crawl.develz.org/
| every wrote:
| NetHack is alive, well and possibly a bit over documented:
|
| https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
| chongli wrote:
| Yes and still under active development [1]! We also just
| finished the 2024 November NetHack Tournament (TNNT) [2]! I
| played in the tournament for the first time this year. I had
| one near-win with a very challenging Monk (I was doing a bunch
| of conducts [3]) who unfortunately died to the infamous Wizard
| of Yendor (Rodney as we call him). I also had a winning run
| with a Wizard which unfortunately finished a few hours after
| the deadline at the end of the tournament, so sadly that one
| didn't count!
|
| Next year I hope to have a bit more time to play so that I can
| record a win in regulation time!
|
| [1] https://github.com/nethack/nethack
|
| [2] https://tnnt.org
|
| [3] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Conduct
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I wish they had earlier versions.
| every wrote:
| Perhaps something like this:
|
| https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Game_history
| tolciho wrote:
| https://britzl.github.io/roguearchive/ collects a bunch of
| roguelike (or -lite?) links.
| rgreekguy wrote:
| Angband should still be under development, too.
|
| A new one I was recommended the other day: UnEpic World. It's
| also on Steam and itch.io, started development in 1992! By
| Fins!
| card_zero wrote:
| I guess you mean UnReal World (and Finns).
|
| I see Errka has recently released "Ancient Savo", which looks
| somewhat like a rewrite of URW:
|
| https://enormous-elk.itch.io/ancient-savo
|
| Here he is celebrating the release.
|
| https://www.enormouselk.com/sites/default/files/styles/w730/.
| ..
| rgreekguy wrote:
| Yes, sorry for messing up the name. I have no clue about
| the new game, I saw it in their page, but I only played a
| bit of UnReal World.
| debo_ wrote:
| You can play the entire family of angband games at
| https://angband.live
|
| And yes, mainline angband is still under active development.
| There are a couple of very popular variants too
| (frogcomposband and sil-q.)
| anthk wrote:
| I play Slash'em daily.
| every wrote:
| I do all of my NetHack gaming via ssh to Hardfought[1]. They
| offer the current vanilla and previous ones all the way back to
| 1.3d. However they specialize in variants. My favorite variant
| is xNetHack[2]...
|
| [1] https://www.hardfought.org/ [2]
| https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/XNetHack
| seanssel wrote:
| On the topic of traditional roguelikes, Caves of Qud is getting
| its 1.0 release tomorrow. Been in development for over 15 years
| now, and it's fantastic. Can't recommend it enough.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/
| kibwen wrote:
| Thanks for this notice, I've been periodically checking for
| years waiting for a full release before allowing myself to dive
| in. :) Though with Path of Exile coming out Friday, it's a bad
| time to have a social life...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I've been periodically checking for years waiting for a
| full release before allowing myself to dive in.
|
| Huh? It's already released in full. You want development to
| stop? That would make no sense, and be contrary to the
| development of pretty much every other roguelike.
| Lurker1978 wrote:
| >Huh? It's already released in full.
|
| Nah, 1.0 will add an actual ending to the main quest and
| then it'll be a full release.
| kibwen wrote:
| Please don't put words in my mouth. I am referring to the
| developer's own roadmap, which has been slowly ticking off
| boxes for years: https://www.cavesofqud.com/roadmap/ Nobody
| is asking for development to stop. I've been waiting for a
| game that is, by the developer's own judgment, complete on
| a fundamental level.
| cdchn wrote:
| Wow I thought it was going to be later next year. Been
| anxiously awaiting this before starting another play through.
|
| The writing for this game is just something special.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Will the 1.0 release include the switch over to the Godot
| engine?
| seanssel wrote:
| https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640/eventcomments/43387350.
| ..
|
| Doesn't look like it, unless something changed since that
| comment.
| beardyw wrote:
| Odd to see no mention of Collosal Caves. Were they unaware of it?
| anthk wrote:
| Different gender but yes, there's some spirit on it. Zorkmids
| for instance. Or objects' affecting the environment.
| floren wrote:
| It's explicitly mentioned in the section "Back to the
| seventies", right near the top of the article.
| beardyw wrote:
| Sorry, missed it :(
| pimlottc wrote:
| It makes me feel better to know that one of its own creators
| hasn't even beaten it. I never got anywhere near even finding the
| amulet when I was a kid, but it didn't make it any less fun!
| dave333 wrote:
| Hated the Rust Monsters on level 8 that would destroy any decent
| armor you had managed to enhance and rarely survived the Umber
| Hulks on level 18 with their ability to confuse you and the huge
| damage they did. Never found the amulet. Got fantastic keyboards
| skills for vi directional commands at least for a non-touch
| typist.
| tpurves wrote:
| I went back to Rogue as an experienced Nethack player. Managed
| to finally win it after a good number of attempts. You have to
| get lucky with some early gear finds, and then spend absolutely
| as few turns as possible on the lower levels (otherwise, you
| won't survive long down there) to grab that amulet and get out.
| Rogue, Nethack and Nethack variants like evilhackk are all
| great games.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Wonderful article, and I really enjoyed rogue. I was first
| exposed to it when doing a port of BSD to the Data General NOVA
| and it was part of the distribution.
|
| I would pick one nit with the history though, CRT computer
| terminals were absolutely considered a "whole screen" output
| device. This was because IBM had made the 3270 terminal which you
| could download a form to, the operator could fill it out (without
| any computer involvement) and then hit 'submit' and have a single
| transaction get sent to the mainframe.
|
| Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply paperless
| teletypes, but the majority had some level of 'forms' capability
| which involved cursor addressing, different character highlights
| (blinking/underling/bold), and usually some basic box drawing
| characters. All in the service of allowing a 'fill-in' form that
| someone could be trained on quickly without having to explain
| "computers" to them at all. When the computer started up, the
| terminals would light up showing a form.
|
| In terms of the tree of life for games, I put rogue, Walter
| Bright's empire, and Civilization (also called empire in some
| cases) as the roots for so many video games in the game industry.
| spauldo wrote:
| IBM terminals are a completely different thing than what the
| popular minicomputer systems had. From what I understand, the
| 3270 wasn't a simple serial device. IBM had the advantage that
| they had control of the entire ecosystem, so their hardware and
| software worked together much like Apple stuff does today.
|
| Minicomputers (and some mainframes) generally used the kind of
| terminals as described in the article. Those things were
| everywhere.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Apologies for not being clear, 3270s are VERY different from
| the terminals that connect to mini-computers and the VT-
| series from DEC.
|
| That said, the _product capability_ that mini-computers were
| going after was to replace mainframes, and mainframes had
| 3270s and they could do this really cool thing. There wasn 't
| anything particularly special about the 3270 terminal
| controller or the capabilities of the 3270 that couldn't be
| implemented in an alternative way. For a mini-computer
| terminal to get a similar customer experience they needed to
| be more than just paperless teletypes.
|
| That started with the VT05 which was introduced in 1970 and
| had directly addressable cursor. Replaced by the VT50 in '74
| and then the VT52 in '75 when things really started to get
| cooking. As the DEC-10 and later VAX started being sold to
| customers _instead_ of them buying an IBM machine things
| really took off.
| dwattttt wrote:
| HN's very own WalterBright?! I had no idea he'd inspired Sid
| Meier's Civilization. There's more to thank him for than I
| realised.
| smarks wrote:
| > Yes, there were a few "dumb" terminals that were simply
| paperless teletypes
|
| Ah yes, the proverbial "glass TTY." There were a few years in
| the late 1970s where printing terminals (actual Teletypes such
| as the ASR 33, and matrix printing terminals like the
| DECwriter) were fading out and "dumb" CRT terminals came in.
| When I arrived at university in 1980 the computer center was
| filled with dumb terminals like the ADM-3. There were a few
| smart terminals (they could run Emacs!) but they were hard to
| come by.
|
| Within a couple years, though, the dumb terminals were all gone
| and were replaced by "smart" CRT terminals that had the more
| sophisticated features. So the lifetime of the glass TTY might
| have been only 5-10 years.
| anthk wrote:
| Empire and XConq are basically the same, but the last one it's
| written in TCL/Tk+C and expanded a lot.
|
| Sadly isn't maintained very well today, as I found bugs on
| restoring a save file made from the last GitHub build.
|
| And it's a pity because anyone who liked VMS Empire would love
| XConq in the spot.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > It was a very different approach from the way you would
| approach things today, where you would certainly abstract out the
| platform and try to make a game that looked and felt as close to
| identical as possible.
|
| It would be often wiser not to try, especially today : for
| instance few games are going to work as well on a small
| touchscreen as on a large monitor with mouse and keyboard.
| reveal975 wrote:
| Kinda OT but do people know why there are so many people
| misspelling "rogue" with "rouge"? See it a lot online.
| quuxplusone wrote:
| The "gu" combination is just tricky/rare in English, while the
| combination "ou" is common enough to be an attractor. See also
| "tounge" and "chaise lounge". "Lounge" and "rouge" also share
| the property of being legitimate spellchecker words in their
| own rights.
|
| We don't see this phenomenon happen with, say, "plauge" for
| "plague", because the diphthong "au" (as in "tau") is
| pronounced differently from long "a". But "ou" (as in
| "thorough") could be pronounced exactly the same as long "o".
| (And compare "restaraunt", as in "aunt".)
| dhosek wrote:
| One of my classmates flunked out of Harvey Mudd freshman year
| thanks to obsessively playing Moria. First semester he failed 4
| out of 5 classes and the administration normally would tell him
| not to come back in the spring, but they decided to give him a
| chance to do better. Second semester he failed all 5 classes.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| I'm reminded of Bright's
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1977_video_game), a turn-
| based PvP strategy game. My friend's 1989-ish instance was
| sadistic enough to batch execute four turns per day. Every
| player had to rush to a TTY every _six hours_ to give new
| marching orders. If you study or sleep too late, your forces
| and factories could be wiped out.
|
| The obsessives, living on campus newly free of supervision,
| were line printing maps and writing logistic planning tools
| that foreshadowed EVE Online's "spreadsheets in space."
| anthk wrote:
| I still play it. Also, XConq it's a modern rendition of
| Empire, written in TCL/Tk.
| wduquette wrote:
| Heh. My first rogue-like was Moria on the 4-College VAX-780, at
| CMC, which is a short walk from Harvey Mudd. We had both Moria
| and Walker Bright's Empire, and I tried both of them. I didn't
| really get deeply into Moria until later, when the first MSDOS
| version came out; but after that I was obsessed with Moria and
| its follow-on, Angband, plus many different variants of
| Angband, for many, many years.
| tzs wrote:
| When Rogue reached Caltech in the '80s it quickly became so
| popular that it got banned during the daytime so people doing
| real work could use the computers.
|
| The version of Rogue then was quite a bit harder than later
| versions and it was almost unheard of for anyone to actually get
| the amulet and get back out. Then this one student started
| regularly making the high score list, and soon had pushed
| everyone else off. Then he got the amulet and got out. Then he
| did that enough time to have the high score list full of games
| where he got the amulet.
|
| Then he stopped playing, until someone else would get on the high
| score list. Then he'd come to the computer center and play for
| maybe a half hour until he'd pushed them off the high score list.
|
| This was driving everyone else completely nuts because he was, as
| mentioned, playing in the computer center. The way the terminals
| were arranged there was no privacy. Everyone else could watch him
| play, but no one could figure out _why_ he did so much better
| than the rest of us.
|
| He eventually explained it. He didn't actually do any one thing
| significantly better than the rest of us. For any given thing he
| was just _slightly_ better. But he was _slighted_ better at _many
| things_ and that added up.
|
| For example if most people were coming back through a room they
| had passed through the other way earlier they would take the most
| convenient route between the doors. That generally would not be
| simply the reverse of the route they had taken the first time
| through, because the first time they were exploring the room.
|
| He on the other hand would take a route that only involved
| stepping places where he had stepped the first time through. That
| way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike people
| who stepped in new places.
| jhbadger wrote:
| That's true of so many things, including science and
| programming. We can deal with the fact that some people are
| geniuses and just orders of magnitude better than us, but often
| it's people who are just slightly better than us in most things
| that end up doing the thing we want to do before us.
| zenogantner wrote:
| ... and the compound interest of being consistently slightly
| better makes these people much better than others in the long
| run.
| bzzzt wrote:
| > He on the other hand would take a route that only involved
| stepping places where he had stepped the first time through.
| That way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike
| people who stepped in new places.
|
| Maybe that gives you a slight edge, but it involves having near
| perfect recollection where you've stepped. That's not a small
| feat.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Not if you construct your paths in a systematic way. I think
| in rogue all rooms are rectangular, so it should be easy
| enough to construct a memorable reversible algorithm.
|
| Go clockwise, along the walls. Want to reach something in the
| middle of the room? Go straight down from the top wall. If
| there's stuff in your way, go around it on the left side if
| possible, else right.
| chongli wrote:
| Going along the walls means you'll take far longer to
| traverse wide and shallow rooms. That means running into
| more traps and using up more food. This dual pressure of
| traps and food puts a very strong emphasis on economy of
| movement. Generally you should be taking the shortest path
| between points of interest (doorways, loot, stairs).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Learning to consistently win nethack completely changed my
| intuition for low chance risk. Common actions that are 99%
| reliable but with serious consequences for failure are sure to
| be run-losing. Even something 99.9% is too dangerous to do more
| than a handful of times per run if you're trying to streak.
|
| Of course you don't know these numbers directly unless you get
| deep into the wiki/source. But you don't know the odds when
| driving on a rainy night either.
| crznp wrote:
| Nice! Crossing avalanche terrain (eg: backcountry skiing) is
| a low chance/high consequence activity. It is easy to learn
| the wrong thing: I did this before and it was fine, therefore
| it is safe.
|
| You counter that with observations, forecasts and incident
| reports, but intuition based on personal experience leads you
| astray.
|
| A game is much better because you can fail and you just have
| to restart the game. Make an RDR2 mod.
|
| (edit: more intuitive anyway. It might not be easy to
| accurately show different snow conditions while also being
| fun to play)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| My bad high score list experience came when I was running rogue
| under a debugger.
|
| I'd figured out where the score was held, and quickly poked
| "-1" into it so I wouldn't draw attention to my unconventional
| approach by getting on the high score list, and then tried to
| see if I could figure out what was going on with scroll/potion
| naming...
|
| ...and then I quaffed something bad, and died, and when the
| tombstone came up, I discovered score was _unsigned_.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| What a coincidence that this should be posted on the 12th
| anniversary of Pixel Dungeon, which is an entertaining free and
| open source roguelike for Android. There's an actively developed
| fork called Shattered Pixel Dungeon developed by Even Debenhams.
| It looks splendid and still gets new gameplay mechanics from time
| to time.
|
| https://shatteredpixel.com/shatteredpd/
|
| PS. This isn't a paid advert - I've just wasted a lot of time
| dying to sewer crabs in this game and want to make sure you have
| the opportunity to waste your time too ;)
| rozim wrote:
| Didn't the Unix version have some interesting encryption going on
| w/ the saved game file circa 1984 +/- 1y?
|
| IIRC it folded in: - the players uid and - the files inode
|
| To prevent the file from being usable by other players, and
| preventing the user from making a usable copy of it...
| smarks wrote:
| Right, the point of being able to save a game was to pick up
| later where you had left off. However, the game attempted to
| prevent you from restarting from a saved game if you made a
| mistake or got killed or something.
|
| I think the scheme was fairly clever but it wasn't terribly
| sophisticated; nothing like public-key crypto for instance. It
| did have a number of countermeasures that attempted to prevent
| cheating, such as restarting from a modified save file. For
| example, I believe it hashed all the bytes of the file, plus a
| bunch of metadata -- possibly including the uid and the file's
| i-number, as you suggest -- and also things like the file
| modification time and maybe even the i-node change time. Then
| it would write this hash back into the file. I seem to recall a
| bit of cleverness to avoid problems because writing the hash
| could potentially modify things like the file modification
| time. Maybe it just retried until the modtime didn't change.
| Not too difficult since the granularity was one second.
|
| In principle this is easy to defeat if you know the hash
| algorithm, and if you knew how to use the Unix system calls to
| change a file's modification time. Since the original rogue
| program was closed source, the hash algorithm was secret. But
| eventually somebody reverse-engineered it, and programs emerged
| that were able to successfully copy save files.
| smarks wrote:
| Oh MANNNN I spent so much time playing rogue back in the day. I
| got decently good at it, but it was hard. I don't think I ever
| actually won. I do recall a strategy of clearing out the easier
| levels in order to gain treasure and magic items. At a certain
| point you wouldn't be able to defeat all the monsters, so you'd
| try to find the stairs as quickly as possible. On the occasions
| where I'd get really far -- far enough to start looking for the
| amulet! -- I'd get trapped by some powerful monster like a Titan
| and get killed instantly.
|
| Such a letdown. You'd play for hours and it would all be over in
| an instant. That damned tombstone.
| eichin wrote:
| I worked down the hall from Ken Arnold (he was one of the later
| additions to the project, mentioned about half way down the page)
| at HP/Apollo around 1990; aside from being an inspirational
| Senior Troublemaker, he kept an eye on Rogomatic - an advanced
| rogue-playing "bot" - and would make minor tweaks to Rogue itself
| that didn't change things for _human_ players, but were
| adversarial for the bot...
| gbudee wrote:
| That's fascinating! Do you recall any examples of such tweaks?
| To my mind, making the decision more complicated for all
| players, human and bot alike, would probably have been
| justified. But I suppose for a 1980s computer scientist
| targeting only the bot was an extra-interesting puzzle.
| nicoloren wrote:
| Rogue is a very cool game, but what get me into the genre is
| Angband and Nethack.
|
| I played them with ascci tiles on my computer at the french
| university in 2002-2004 and my classmates where all playing
| Warcraft 3, Diablo or Call of Duty and they where very confused
| to see my little games!
|
| I think that ascii characters are a good interface for this kind
| of game because the brain has to work to imagine the game which
| makes the memories of games more memorable.
|
| I still play Nethack some times and I must try Brogue. I never
| had the time to get into Dwarf Fortress.
| amaurose wrote:
| I still fondly remember how inclusive the minimalism of games
| like NetHack actually were. NetHack was the first game I played
| after moving to Linux, roughly 1995. I say inclusive, because I
| played it with a Braille display. Many aspects of the simplicity
| of the 90s led to unintentional accessibility. I also used to
| read guitar tabs in plain ASCII when they were still exchanged on
| NNTP groups. These days, _every_ guitar tab site I find is
| "polished" and therefore no longer accessible.
| snackbroken wrote:
| This[1] bookmarklet strips everything that isn't preformatted
| plain text from a page. It seems to work on both gametabs[2]
| and ultimate-guitar[3] and probably others that don't try to
| get fancy with their typography. Hopefully it is of some use.
|
| [1](javascript:(function(){const tabs =
| document.querySelectorAll('pre'); document.head.remove();
| document.body.remove(); document.body =
| document.createElement('body'); for(const tab of tabs){
| document.body.appendChild(tab);};})();)
|
| [2](https://www.gametabs.net/)
|
| [3](https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/explore?type[]=Tabs)
| wduquette wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned Larn/ULarn, which I
| played a lot back in the day. Each level was about the size of a
| Rogue level, but levels weren't completely random. There were a
| number of basic level templates, each of which could be modified
| in various ways. Some were random mazes; in others, the basic map
| never changed, but doors got added or deleted in various places.
|
| My basic strategy was to save my coins until I could get the
| Lance of Death, the "Walk through Walls" spell, haste self spell,
| and "permanent" spell, which made current buffs permanent. Then I
| could romp and frolic through the levels.
| stef-13013 wrote:
| I really enjoyed the Epyx Atari ST version... Do you know if
| source code (assets, ...) are available somewhere ?
| jrnichols wrote:
| Rogue reminds me of the Zork series. A simple text interface with
| your own imagination. The best GUI ever.
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(page generated 2024-12-05 23:01 UTC)