Archive for April, 2017

Hardfought NetHack server updates

By K2 on April 29th, 2017 at 12:55 am EST

Lots of updates here over the last 4-5 weeks, plenty to share…

NetHack variants – we’ve added a few more games to the mix, those being NetHack Fourk 4.3.0.4, FIQhack 4.3.0, and dNetHack 3.14.0. The authors for both Fourk (jonadab) and FIQhack (FIQ) have been very proactive to fixing bugs and tweaking gameplay in preparation for this summers’ Junethack tournament, so if you’re interested in playing the latest and greatest versions of these, we’re the place to do it. There have been regular updates to NetHack 3.6.1-dev as well as GruntHack, and Tangles has been busy fixing the curses interface across a variety of variants, along with squashing bugs as we find them.

Scoreboard – thanks to dtype, we now have scoreboard functionality like what NAO has (top scores and Z-scores). All seven variants now have their scores and Z-scores tracked, with links to each games’ dumplog (Fourk and FIQhack dumplog links are currently broken, it’s on the list of things to do now working). It checks the xlogfile of each variant every few minutes. As long as you score 1000 points or better, you’ll show up. You can reach the scoreboard via the top menu under ‘NetHack’.

Miscellaneous – I’ve upgraded the servers hardware, and have added a real-time server status panel that displays CPU load, memory and bandwidth usage as well as a couple other bits (see ‘Server Status’ in the top menu). I’ve also added a web-based IRC module that allows connection to our IRC channel on freenode.net. There’s also a web-based hterm process that allows playing NetHack and any of the variants we host, through our website. If you’re keen on saying ‘screw it’ to productivity at work, you now have the means to do so.

More to come as we near the Junethack tournament, so stay tuned.