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iNethack2 2.1.5: Now with Animated DawnHack Tiles

Submitted by admin on

iNethack2 version 2.1.5 is now out! This is a pretty big update that I’ve had in the works for awhile.

The biggest part of this release is: DawnHack Animated Tileset.

Yes this is an animated tileset, based on DragonDePlatino’s DawnHack tileset, primarily using the author’s later DawnLike tiles for the animation frame.

What is DawnLike? DawnLike was a series of tiles that were based on the original DawnHack tiles but greatly expanded so they could be used with any sort of Roguelike/RPG. Included in those tiles were second frames for many of the tiles, to achieve a 2 frame animation effect.

When I first stumbled upon the DawnLike tiles, it gave me the idea to create an animated tileset for NetHack, which is something I’d never seen before for core NetHack. I thought it might be as simple as scripting something to create a “second frame” version of the tiles. Well, it wasn’t that simple for various reasons. One being that the DawnHack tiles have shadows added to virtually every tile, since they are all “baked” into the background square tile. These shadows didn’t exist in DawnLike. Also some tiles were missing from DawnLike, some were totally different, some were renamed, etc…

So I spent many hours recreating a second frame tileset of all the DawnHack tiles, using the DawnLike second frame as the source. This means every single monster and a few other tiles now have animation. Things like items and walls and other dungeon features for the most part don’t have (or need) animation.
The result is a pretty cool looking way to play NetHack! I’m really happy with how it turned out.

To play with this tileset, simply select “DawnHack Animated” from the iNethack2 Settings page in iOS’s Settings area (make sure you completely close iNethack2 first for it to take effect!).

That’s just one part of this update, here are the rest in this release!

  • The popup dialog windows for the introductory and ending text (attributes, dungeon overview, etc) now use a monospace font and custom dialog window. The result makes the text easier to read, and aligns things as they were intended on a text screen. Some things may still not fit in portrait mode (such as the ending score), but it will look good proper in landscape. Check  it out! Also when using Wizard mode, it will always use the monospace font so that special Wizard functions that rely on text being properly aligned looks correct.
  • Items that haven’t been identified yet will now have their tile in NetHack obfuscated. This really only affected the DawnHack tileset. Basically, that tileset had unique tiles for items such as “bag” “bag of holding” and “bag of tricks”, allowing you to visually identity what it was before actually identifying them in-game. This affects several other items like lamps/magic lamps, whistle/magic whistle, candle/tallow candle, etc, along with all gems. I could have simply removed the unique tiles, but they look pretty nice in DawnHack, so this makes those items appear as the “regular” version until you actually identity them proper. All other tilesets in game simply don’t have unique tiles per version of the item, so they aren’t affected. Thanks to Stu Smith who created this patch several years back that I managed to discover when googling this issue! 
  • The Credits page has been updated, and links in Credits and the Manual will now actually work again.
  • Fixed an issue with garbage letters showing for certain Wizard menus if you have Inventory letters turned on.
  • Fixed some alignment issues with various dialogs.
  • Lit_corridor now defaults to on. I may add this to the Settings screen in the future, but you can disable it with “O” in game.
  • Newly created shortcuts are now empty instead of a blank space so it’s more clear when you enter the shortcut value that there isn’t a space there.

I hope you enjoy this update! Thanks for all the suggestions and bug reports from players, it’s been really helpful! 

 

Some more details on DawnHack Animated’s creation if you are curious:

  • I attempted to keep the DawnHack version of the tiles when possible. For most there were animated versions, but some were missing, so I had to manually create versions.
  • Some tiles in DawnLike were named the same but were totally new tiles (for example Earendil). For some of those, the old version was simply called something else, so I stuck with the one resembling the original DawnHack whenever possible.
  • All the various NetHack dragons were missing from DawnLike, so I had to create all those myself. There was one Dragon tile called “lightwyrm” that resembled one of the DawnHack dragons, so I based them all on that one.
  • Like I mentioned, the creator of DawnHack had added shadows beneath nearly every tile, so most of my time was spent adding those to the new tiles. This gave me a deep appreciation for pixel artists!
  • Some of the colours of tiles were slightly changed from the original DawnHack (such as the eye colour of many characters). So for those, I updated the original DawnHack tileset as well. But it more or less looks the same as the original one.
  • Water and lava didn’t quite have a matching animation tile, so I created new ones. It looked odd for water and lava to NOT be animated once I saw all the characters animated, so I found it looks better with a bit more movement.
  • I may share the “second frame” tileset for download, but as of right now, it can’t really be used in any other NetHack as the code would need to be updated to support it.
  • If anyone wants to make an animated tilesheet for any other tileset, be my guest! I don’t think my eyes can handle it... But if you provide me with one I would gladly put it in the game if it looks good!

 

iNethack2 2.1.4

Submitted by admin on

It's only been a week since the last release, but this one has a lot of stuff:

  • New Tileset: DuskHack
    • A colourful and clean new tileset (seen above), available in the App Settings. Definitely worth checking out! Big thanks to reddit user Poor_Li for requesting this one, it looks great.
  • New Setting: View menu letters
    • Especially for the old school players, this will make inventory and menu letters visible, which is helpful for keeping track of similar items in inventory. Enable this in the App Settings. This was also mentioned by Poor_Li though I'd already been looking into adding it to make keyboard support work (hopefully eventually).
  • New Feature: Add new shortcuts to the shortcuts bar (finally!)
    • Long press any shortcut on the shortcut bar to bring up the shortcut menu. There is a new "Add new shortcut" menu item. It will add a blank shortcut next to the one you are on which you can then edit.
  • Statue tiles now show monster statues instead of the default statue tile!
  • Animations are now visible. There previously was no delay between frames so you usually couldn't see animations. That is fixed now. Wands and boulder traps become more fun. This also means you can watch the path you take when doing Travel mode, which is pretty cool.
    ​
  • Bug fix: Haptics would stop working if you left and then returned to the app. This is fixed.

Thanks to the community for the help and suggestions, many of which are part of this update. 

Again thanks for playing. Another update is coming soon!

iNethack2 2.1.3

Submitted by admin on

It's been awhile since I've released an update to iNethack2. This release features two new features:

  • Inverted Black & White Mode (seen above): For players playing with text tileset (ASCII, IBMGraphics), this will invert black and white for those of you who prefer a white background. This setting defaults to OFF so go to the app settings to enable it. Note: you can also use this with graphical tilesets but it will probably look a bit weird.
  • Haptics! Now when you take damage the phone will vibrate to indicate damage. This defaults to ON so if you don't like it, you can disable it in the app settings page.

Thanks to @silentrocco for both suggestions.
 

I have other updates I'd like to do in the works. Stay tuned and thanks for playing!

iNethack2 2.1.2 (with NetHack 3.6.7)

Submitted by admin on

Just released an update to iNethack2. Actually, this is the second update since my last post. So here is what was released over the last 2 versions:

  • IBMGraphics Mode! Select it from the tilesets in the settings. Using a IBM font for that authentic look. Rogue level looks crazy now.
  • Tiles32 Classic tileset added. This tileset looks like the old common tileset that was in NetHack 3.4.3. Less 8-bit looking. Pick it from the settings page like normal.
  • Fixed a bad bug that could mess up your stats. Thanks to the few anonymous people who posted in the feedback form about this one. Basically NetHack wasn't being informed it was loading a saved game and thus it was doing things it should only be doing when a brand new game was started. This was caused during the 3.6 update. Fixed now!!
  • "Seduce" mode is back in. I guess it wasn't in the compile options during the 3.6 update. Incubus and Succubus will be problematic again.
  • Link to the guidebook is now up-to-date. Thanks Keni for noticing!

Please check it out in the app store.

(Also someone had mentioned in a feedback message that "eating giant corpses doesn't increase strength". This is actually a core NetHack change; it's now not always guaranteed to increase strength. )

iNethack2 Now On Nethack 3.6.6

Submitted by admin on

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!

iOS 15 Crash with iNethack2

Submitted by Akolade on

There is an issue caused by iOS 15 which is causing iNethack2 to crash when using the direction picker (such as when throwing something or zapping a wand, etc).

Working on a fix now. Already have it fixed, in fact, and fixed a couple of other minor things I noticed too. Should have it submitted to the app store soon. Sorry for the trouble!

Thanks to those who reported this to me.

Tags: 

iPhone X

Submitted by Akolade on

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.

iNethack2 2.0.6: New Dawnhack, Travel option

Submitted by Akolade on

It's been awhile, so I figured I should do at least a small update to the game. New version just released has the following two additions:

  • New version of the popular DawnHack tileset (created by the talented DragonDePlantino), labelled as "DawnHack (New)". This version has crisper tiles, some tile corrections, and removes the tiles that show you what certain gems/stones/etc are (which would normally not be identifiable via the tile). 
  • Travel setting: if you don't like the "travel" feature of Nethack where the game will use pathfinding to walk to a space you tap on (when the screen is scrolled off of your character), then you can now disable it

Both these new settings are in the settings page as usual (iOS Settings App -> Scroll down to iNethack2).

In other news I have been checking out the Nethack 3.6.0 course code, trying to see the effort in upgrading the core code of iNethack2 to use the latest Nethack source. Not real timelines on that yet but I am definitely going to try integrating the new core code and see what issues (if any) there are with the iNethack2 code.

Also if anyone is experiencing crashes, do let me know and any info about what was happening in the game at the time would help track them down. I haven't had much luck causing crashes on purpose so I haven't been able to fix anything so far.

Again thanks for playing!

iNethack2 2.0.5: Hearse, Pickup Thrown, Bugfix

Submitted by Akolade on

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!

 

iNethack2 2.0.2: ASCII, Boulders, Bugfix

Submitted by Akolade on

A new update for iNethack2 is now available in the App Store.

There was a bug introduced by iOS9 which made it so you couldn't scroll the log window (unless you changed the screen orientation). That has been fixed.

While I was in the code, I went and added a couple things for you hardcore ASCII players. 

There is a new setting in the settings screen to set the boulder symbol. This was an option in regular Nethack from the config settings, so I've basically added it to the app settings screen. No more annoying ` symbols on Sokoban! Go ahead and make it a 0 (zero) and lessen the strain on your eyes.

Speaking of strain on your eyes, I also went and added "ASCII (monochrome)" which is the ASCII "tileset" in all grey, just like the old days. Enjoy if you dare.

The last thing I did was add some text to the Manual screen that explains how to change common settings (like Boulders) since most people don't think to look in the Settings app. Probably no one ever reads the Manual page either, but there you go.

Enjoy!

 

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