c35d7f42be
[This verbose description is being committed with role.c only;
the dozen or so other affected files will use a much shorter one.]
Executive summary: using Unix (or VMS) with tty, start up via
nethack -u player
and follow the prompts. Seeing this in action will be much clearer than
any description. It might work as is with Mac and Be too, where you
don't need to bother with "-u player" to get "who are you?". Only half
of it will work with other ports using tty so far, and it does nothing
for ports which don't use tty.
I started out attempting to add an option which would let you defer
picking your character name until after you'd picked role and race and
so forth (so that you could let the game pick randomly, then use your own
role- or race- or gender-specific name for the result) but threw my ends
up in frustration. Instead, this allows you to specify race and/or gender
and/or alignment before role when interactively choosing them (ie, after
giving 'n' to the "shall I pick for you?" prompt), by adding extra menu
entries to the role menu, with similar entries in the other menus so you
can actually bounce back and forth picking whichever of the four role/race/
gender/alignment attributes in any order. (<Someone> has a patch to
control the order of the four prompts via option setting, but it's not as
versatile as this ended up being.)
That works pretty well, so I added a confirmation prompt when you're
done (which can be bypassed by picking new 'a' instead 'y' at the "shall
I pick your character's role [ynaq]?" prompt). And I introduced a chance
to rename the character during that confirmation, with a quite modest
amount of spaghetti being added into main() to support it. Picking a new
name which matches a save file will result restoring the saved game just
as if you'd used that name from the start. [One thing which hasn't been
resolved yet is whether anything special needs to be done when changing
name to or from "wizard", particulary for ports which allow/reject wizard
mode access based on character name rather than user name.]
Right now, renaming is only available if you've gone through the
"who are you?" prompt (thereby demonstrating that you're allowed to use
an arbitrary name), since some multi-user sites may be using scripting to
force the character name for players who share an account. There should
be a new SYSCF option to let sites explicitly allow renaming, but this
had already grown pretty big so that is deferred. (And I haven't yet
implemented sysconf for VMS so wouldn't have been able to test it....)
Unfortunately, role selection has been implemented in the interface
code instead of in the core--a big mistake, in my opinion, even if some
interfaces can give easy point and click control to the player--so this
has only been implemented for tty.
Also, renaming needs to manipulate lock files in the case where the
file name is based on the character name. I moved the file name part
into getlock() itself, removing some clutter from main(). But getlock()
handling in pcmain.c is something I won't touch with a pole of any length.
It needs to be cleaned up before the rename capability can be activated
for ports that use that main(). The rest of the rename support there is
present but bracketed by #if 0.
Lastly, the handling of generic character names like "player" and
"games" has been moved into plnamesuffix(), again to eliminate a bit of
clutter from main(). And plnamesuffix()'s potential for uncontrolled
recursion (if player keeps giving -Role instead of Name to askname()) has
been replaced by iteration. It could still go on forever if the player
is persistent or askname() goes haywire, but I don't think we really care.
The interface-specific changes are limited to player_selection() and
askname(), so folks can add this to other interfaces as desired without
flailing all over the place. But the changes to tty's player_selection()
were quite extensive. (Fortunately, some of it is just fixing up the
indentation to match changes in block nesting.) Like tty, win32 and gem
use build_plselection_prompt(). It now returns a string ending in "[ynaq]"
rather than just "[ynq]" so if they don't bother with these changes, they
should either fix that up or at least accept 'a' as a synonym for 'y'
during the initial "shall I pick your character's role?" prompt.
NetHack 3.5.0 -- General information
NetHack 3.5 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack.
It is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of
NetHack 3.4.
NetHack 3.5.0 has many new features.
* List new features here
A fuller list of changes for this release can be found in the file
doc/fixes35.0 in the source distribution. The text in there was written
for the development team's own use and is provided "as is", so please do
not ask us to further explain the entries in that file.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Please read items (1), (2) and (3) BEFORE doing anything with your new code.
1. Unpack the code in a dedicated new directory. We will refer to that
directory as the 'Top' directory. It makes no difference what you
call it.
2. If there is no flaw in the packaging, many sub-directories will be
automatically created, and files will be deposited in them:
a. A 'dat' directory, which contains a variety of data files.
b. A 'doc' directory, which contains various documentation.
c. An 'include' directory, which contains *.h files.
d. A 'src' directory, which contains game *.c files used by all versions.
e. A 'util' directory, which contains files for utility programs.
f. A 'sys' directory, which contains subdirectories for files that
are operating-system specific.
g. A 'sys/share' subdirectory, which contains files shared by some OSs.
h. A 'sys/share/sounds' subsubdirectory, which contains sound files
shared by some OSs.
i. A 'sys/amiga' subdirectory, which contains files specific to AmigaDOS.
j. A 'sys/atari' subdirectory, which contains files specific to TOS.
k. A 'sys/be' subdirectory, which contains files specific to Be OS.
l. A 'sys/mac' subdirectory, which contains files specific to MacOS.
m. A 'sys/msdos' subdirectory, which contains files specific to MS-DOS.
n. A 'sys/os2' subdirectory, which contains files specific to OS/2.
o. A 'sys/unix' subdirectory, which contains files specific to UNIX.
p. A 'sys/vms' subdirectory, which contains files specific to VMS.
q. A 'sys/wince' subdirectory, which contains files specific to Windows CE.
r. A 'sys/wince/ceinc' subdirectory; header files for Windows CE
s. A 'sys/wince/ceinc/sys' subdirectory; ditto
t. A 'sys/winnt' subdirectory, which contains files specific to Windows NT.
u. A 'win' directory, which contains subdirectories for files that
are windowing-system specific (but not operating-system specific).
v. A 'win/share' subdirectory, which contains files shared by some
windowing systems.
w. A 'win/Qt' subdirectory, which contains files specific to Qt.
x. A 'win/X11' subdirectory, which contains files specific to X11.
y. A 'win/gem' subdirectory, which contains files specific to GEM.
z. A 'win/gnome' subdirectory, which contains files specific to GNOME.
A. A 'win/tty' subdirectory, which contains files specific to ttys.
B. A 'win/win32' subdirectory, which contains files specific to the
Windows Win32 API.
The names of these directories should not be changed unless you are
ready to go through the makefiles and the makedefs program and change
all the directory references in them.
3. Having unpacked, you should have a file called 'Files' in your Top
directory. This file contains the list of all the files you now SHOULD
have in each directory. Please check the files in each directory
against this list to make sure that you have a complete set.
4. Before you do anything else, please read carefully the file called
"license" in the 'dat' subdirectory. It is expected that you comply
with the terms of that license, and we are very serious about it.
5. If everything is in order, you can now turn to trying to get the program
to compile and run on your particular system. It is worth mentioning
that the default configuration is SysV/Sun/Solaris2.x (simply because
the code was housed on such a system). It is also worth mentioning
here that NetHack 3.5 is a huge program. If you intend to run it on a
small machine, you'll have to make hard choices among the options
available in config.h.
The files sys/*/Install.* were written to guide you in configuring the
program for your operating system. The files win/*/Install.* are
available, where necessary, to help you in configuring the program
for particular windowing environments. Reading them, and the man pages,
should answer most of your questions.
At the time of this release, NetHack 3.5 is known to run/compile on:
Apple Macintosh running MacOS 7.5 or higher, LinuxPPC, BeOS 4.0
Atari ST/TT/Falcon running TOS (or MultiTOS) with GCC
Commodore Amiga running AmigaDOS 3.0 or higher with SAS/C 6.x
(but see Makefile.ami about DICE and Manx)
DEC Alpha/VMS (aka OpenVMS AXP), running V1.x through V7.1
DEC VAX/VMS, running V4.6 through V7.1
HP 9000s700 running HP-UX 10.x, 11.x
IBM PS/2 and AT compatibles running OS/2 - 2.0 and up with GCC emx
Intel 80386 or greater (or clone) boxes running MS-DOS with DPMI.
Intel 80386 or greater (or clone) boxes running Linux, BSDI, or
Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP
Intel Pentium or better (or clone) running BeOS 4.5
Sun SPARC based machine running SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x, or Solaris 7
NetHack 3.5 will also run on the following, but a cross-compiler hosted
on another platform, such as win32, is required to build from source.
Pocket PC devices running Windows CE 3.0 and higher
H/PC Pro devices running Windows CE 2.11 and higher.
Palm Size PC 1.1 devices running Windows CE 2.11
Previous versions of NetHack were tested on the following systems,
and we expect that NetHack 3.5 will work on them as well:
AT&T 3B1 running System V (3.51)
AT&T 3B2/600 & 3B2/622 running System V R3.2.1
AT&T 3B2/1000 Model 80 running System V R3.2.2
AT&T 3B4000 running System V
AT&T 6386 running System V R3.2
Data General AViiON systems running DG/UX
DEC vaxen running BSD, Ultrix
Decstations running Ultrix 3.1, 4.x
Encore Multimax running UMAX 4.2
Gould NP1 running UTX 3/2
HP 9000s300 running HP-UX
HP 9000s700 running HP-UX 9.x
IBM PC/RT and RS/6000 running AIX 3.x
IBM PS/2 and AT compatibles running OS/2 1.1 - 2.0 (and probably
Warp) with Microsoft 6.0, and OS/2 2.0 and up with IBM CSet++ 2.0.
Intel 80386 or greater (or clone) running 386BSD
Mips M2000 running RiscOS 4.1
NeXT running Mach (using BSD configuration)
Pyramid 9820x running OSx 4.4c
SGI Iris running IRIX
Stardent Vistra 800 running SysV R4.0
Stride 460 running UniStride 2.1
Sun-3s, -4s, and -386is running SunOS 3.x
Sun-3s and -386is running SunOS 4.x
Valid Logic Systems SCALD-System
Unless otherwise mentioned, the compiler used was the OS-vendor's
C compiler.
With the demise of Windows NT on the DEC Alpha, no attempt has been
made to build NetHack 3.5 on that platform.
No attempt has been made to build or run NetHack 3.5 on Windows Me
at this point. It may work, but then again it may not.
A build for Intel 80286 machines and DOS "real mode" overlaid versions
has not been produced for NetHack 3.5. Nobody on the porting team has
the time or the software to attempt the necessary tuning that will allow
it to achieve the balance of having just the right amount of available
memory, and still have acceptable performance. The sources necessary
to do so are still included in the source distribution, so if someone
has access to a real-mode compiler and lots of spare time on their hands,
you may be able to get things working. Of course you do so at your own risk.
- - - - - - - - - - -
If you have problems building the game, or you find bugs in it, we recommend
filing a bug report from our "Contact Us" web page at:
http://www.nethack.org/
When sending correspondence, please observe the following:
o Please be sure to include your machine type, OS, and patchlevel.
o Never send us binary files (e.g. save files or bones files). Whichever
platform you are using, only a small minority of the development team has
access to it, and you will rapidly annoy the others. If you have found
a bug and think that your save file would aid in solving the problem,
send us a description in words of the problem, your machine type, your
operating system, and the version of NetHack. Tell us that you have a
save file, but do not actually send it.
In the rare case that we think your save file would be helpful, you will
be contacted by a member of the development team with the address of a
specific person to send the save file to.
o Though we make an effort to reply to each bug report, it may take some
time before you receive feedback. This is especially true during the
period immediately after a new release, when we get the most bug reports.
o We don't give hints for playing the game.
o Don't bother to ask when the next version will be out. You will not get
a reply.
If you don't have access to the world wide web, or if you want to submit
a patch for the NetHack source code via email directly, you can direct it
to this address:
nethack-bugs (at) nethack.org
If you've changed something to get NetHack to run on your system, it's likely
that others have done it by making slightly different modifications. By routing
your patches through the development team, we should be able to avoid making
everyone else choose among variant patches claiming to do the same thing, to keep
most of the copies of 3.5 synchronized by means of official patches, and to
maintain the painfully-created file organization. (This process has been working
since the time when everyone just posted their own patches to 2.3. At that time,
there were no archived bug-fixes to give to people who got 2.3 after its initial
release, so the same bugs kept being discovered by new batches of people.)
We have been successful in preventing this from happening since the 3.0
release. Please cooperate to keep this from happening to 3.5.
It is inevitable that we will reject some proposed additions of new features
either because they do not fit our conception of the game, or because they
require more code than we consider they're worth. If we reject your feature,
you are free, of course, to post the patches to the net yourself and let the
marketplace decide their worth.
All of this amounts to the following: If you decide to apply a free-lanced
patch to your 3.5 code, you are on your own. In our own patches, we will
assume that your code is synchronized with ours.
-- Good luck, and happy Hacking --