Hi!

Almost exactly 8 years ago (?!) I said I was looking into the Nethack 3.6 update for iNethack2, and it’s finally here! Sorry it took so long.
First of all, huge thanks to Joe Doucette for doing the initial update from the 3.4.3 version to 3.6.0. When I saw that it was working, it gave me the drive to actually work on iNethack2 again.

This new release is up to date with the official release of Nethack 3.6.6.
In addition to the changes that Nethack 3.6.6 introduces (which I won’t detail here), there are several other updates:

Updates:

• New tilesets: Nethack Modern, Pixelhack.
• Updated other tilesets with the new 3.6 tiles (mostly statues).
• Removed Nextstep tileset.
• Improved behaviour for game saving: The app will no longer “quit & save” every time you move it into the background. Instead it makes use of the Nethack “checkpointing” system to create a save every time the app loses focus. If you close the app entirely, it will create a regular save. This means you can now fairly safely exit the app when in the middle of a menu. For example: you are granted a wish and want to know what to wish for.. You can leave the app (don’t close it entirely!), go to the Nethack wiki, and come back and wish for a “cursed rusty -3 dagger” or whatever you please. Because of this change, remember to completely closed iNethack2 if you are changing any of the settings in the settings page for them to take effect.
• Double Tap can be disabled by sliding the Double Tap Sensitivity to zero (far left). Before it acted the same as if you set it to maximum sensitivity.
• Tweaked some colors for certain menus such as the #Enhance menu so its more readable.
• If you had predictive-text enabled on your phone, it will no longer show suggested words in the keyboard, which was almost never useful for Nethack.
• New app icon. The @ is blue now. Why not?

Bugfixes:

• Throwing and other actions were missing the prompt at the top of the inventory screen (because the text was black on black..), this is fixed
• If you tried to throw without having any weapons in your inventory, you weren’t given the “* More” option, meaning you couldn’t throw food at your pet. This is fixed! This affected other types of actions as well.

Note: Saved games from the previous version (based on Nethack 3.4.3) will NOT work with this version. Sorry! If you have a good game going you may want to hurry up and die/ascend before upgrading.

Nethack 3.7
What about 3.7 you say? Well the plan is that once the 3.7 is no longer in beta, then I will update iNethack2 to have the 3.7 core code. Hopefully going forward this isn’t too difficult to maintain.

I have some plans to the iNethack2 code other than core updates as well.
Wishlist includes:

• Keyboard support
• IBMGraphics mode (those nice smooth extended-ascii walls from my youth)
• Other things to make the UI nicer..

Please enjoy and let me know if you find any terrible bugs or anything like that. Thanks!

The last update to iNethack2 is unfortunately messed up on the iPhone X. The status text appears under that nasty notch.

There is a fix in the works which is just going through testing now. Will release it as soon as it is approved! Sorry for the trouble. It should still work in landscape, but even then the top corner curve is obscuring the text.

Damn fancy new phone. The X is clearly a Xorn.

It's been awhile but iNethack2 is still alive and well and now it has a few fixes and a minor new feature.

First, Hearse stopped working awhile back with a change to iOS related to accessing external sites without HTTPS. So you might have noticed that bones files were no longer downloading. This is fixed now.

Next was a bug where the onscreen keyboard sometimes wouldn't dismiss when a dialog window opened. This is fixed too. Nobody seemed to notice this one somehow.. maybe it was just me?

Lastly I have integrated the "pickup_thrown" patch, available in the settings screen as Autopickup Thrown (as seen the the screenshot). Use it in tandem with Autopickup, and you will automatically pickup anything you throw! Makes it a bit less annoying to use missile weapons.

Lastly lastly, no 3.6.0 yet. I'm not sure how much work that will take without diving into it. 

Thanks to everyone who found these issues and offered suggestions!

So far the most common FAQ about iNethack2 is: how do I change the tileset?

Here's how:

• Exit iNethack2
• Go to the Settings app on your Apple device
• Scroll down through the list of your apps and pick iNethack2
• You can change the tileset here, as well as your player's name, Hearse settings, and many other things

There you go! Enjoy the different tilesets. Abigaba Chozo B (the default) has always been my favorite, but I've been playing with DawnHack a lot lately and it really gives the game a different feel. When I want to relive the days of playing Nethack in High School computer class in Windows, I'll switch to Tiles32.

Or if I want to relive playing the original game on my PC in Junior High, ASCII it is.