Morning all. It’s about that time for another news update. All of the new things that we’ve been working on lately, I’ve announced everywhere but here. Should probably fix that…
The big news – ‘The November NetHack Tournament’ is on. We’ve been working on the code and the scoreboard for awhile now, and will be ready to kick it off at midnight (UTC) on November 1st. This will become the new fall season NetHack tournament to fill in the void left by /dev/null shutting down (the tribute tourney we hosted last year was a one-time event). The new tournament is based off of NetHack version 3.6.2 (bleeding edge) and will incorporate the latest bugfixes and additions to the 3.6.x branch right up until the start of the tournament – no further code changes will be made during the tournament unless it’s an important bugfix. The event will last the entire month of November, and there will be plenty of individual and clan-based achievements you can earn. We’re working on custom content as well… not every idea or plan we have will make it into the first years’ tourney, but that’s ok. This will be a ‘work in progress’ for years to come. I’ll make another announcement here and through the usual channels once player/clan registration is available. In the meantime, feel free to hang out in #tnnt on freenode.net to discuss the tournament. This is also the channel where game livelogging and github repo update announcements will occur.
Other NetHack related bits – our ‘vanilla’ versions of both 3.4.3 and 3.6.2 are now considered ‘hdf’ flavors due to cosmetic and server functionality additions to each that set them apart from the base code. 362-hdf is bleeding edge and is updated regularly as the NetHack devteam pushes new content and bugfixes. 343-hdf is a continuation of 343-NAO (which NAO no longer hosts) with mostly cosmetic improvements. Both ‘hdf’ flavors do not change or alter game play nor core functionality in any way. The public repositories for both can be found here and here.
There have been recent bugfixes to a lot of the other variants we host as well. Always a work in progress. That’s all for now, but more to follow soon.