Something for the hardcore Unix Gamer
The Title of this thread isn't something I mean as a "real gamer" thing, because really, I'm not a gamer. My Wife is sort of a Gamer, but not in the sense of what I've seen in some people.
Anyway, I wanted to post about this, because really, I haven't ever been much into RPGs, or anything else near that except for Magic: The Gathering, the card game. And technically, that's a "CCG" (Collectible Card Game) and I hate WoW, don't like the way it's done, and, the vast majority of players seem like morons....
However, I've always kind of thought Unix games were neat. That's mostly why I'm posting this here in the OS forum; The game I'm going to talk about, is one of those oldschool text based games.
If you've ever installed Linux of ANY kind, or BSD, you've most likely seen that basically EVERY distro of BOTH OSs, comes with some form of a game called Nethack. Well, I tried it a few times, and thought that the non-GUI version was cool looking, and, one day a while back, I was installing FreeBSD on a VERY low end system.
I sent a question to "FreeBSD-Questions" asking there about some games that FreeBSD had that could be played on very low end hardware, and I got quite a few replies.
One reply I got, mentioned something called "DungeonCrawl" and I had mentioned it in the post asking about it. Basically, here's what happened:
I was installing FreeBSD, and the hardware was.... Well, it was the test machine I used to have that recently crapped out on me, and this thing was SLOW.
It had 192 MBs of RAM, and even then, that was because I'd installed a 128 MB RAM stick in it. It came with a 9 GB Fireball HD. I'd never even HEARD of this crap before. The machine belonged to my Mom. She told me it was "making weird noises" and after asking what kind... She said it was like a grinding noise. I figured "OK, that's probably the HD dying" and, one day, it was turned on, and I heard the thing. It was the HD grinding.
I knew the drive was about to die, and said "Mom, You need to order a new Computer. You could replace the HD, but this thing is old and won't even run new software".
The Processor is a 433 MHz Celeron.... Yea... I told Her the truth; I said "Mom, You could easily buy a brand new HD for this thing, but, to be Honest, the Processor is crap, and the Video Card is an 8 MB ATI POS, and the RAM is REALLY low. You're better off buying a new machine" and She finally did.
I took the Computer and slapped in an 80 GB HD, and installed Slackware and FreeBSD on it, and used it as a test machine.
Well, one day, I was reinstalling BSD because I wanted to have it set up a certain way, and a new version of FreeBSD was out, so, I just formatted it. There was no Data in there really except a few Perl scripts I had backed up so it was no big deal.
Anyway, once I had FreeBSD installed, I started looking through "sysinstall" to install packages. I went into games and saw one called "DungeonCrawl" and installed it.
Once it was done, I loaded it, and thought "Oh cool, it asks me for my name, and even though it's text only, it has a UI!"
I type in gore, and then it says to select a race and type and all that, and then I see this Dungeon that's made out of text. The "#" Character is used to draw the walls, and different Monsters are made with different Characters and so on. I thought it was cool.
So, anyway, the other day, I hadn't played in months, and I loaded it up. My Wife also got into the game, and we play together all the time. She has it installed on Her Windows 7 machine, and I have it on my FreeBSD box and just use Putty to log in over SSH and play.
Well, a while back, I had Debian installed on another machine, and I noticed that Debian has a Package for it too. So I installed it. This version was different thought; The layout was basically the same, but the game itself, has more to it. I saw it was a newer version. You could cast spells and shoot them around corners, and, it had WAY more stuff.
So, now, I'm posting about this here.
Basically, it doesn't matter what OS you have. If you have Windows 9X, Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, or Windows 7, it works.
If you have Linux, it works. In fact you may have a version of it in your distro's Package Manager.
If you have BSD, you have it ready to go too.
In FreeBSD and PC-BSD, simply do this:
Log in as root on either a TTY, or, have a user that you've added to group "wheel" and become root with "su" and then, once you're root, do this:
pkg_add -r dungeoncrawl
Hit Enter.
Once you see it downloading, it installs it, and then, once it's finished, you can play it.
If you're using Csh, or TCsh, remember to type "rehash" first of course, but other than that, (I use Zsh personally, but this is another topic for another thread) you basically can load up an Xterm, Wterm, Aterm, E-Term, or any other type of Shell, like Konsole, or GnomeTerminal, or, in XFCE, "Terminal" or, if you don't want to, you can use "ALT+CTRL+F2-ALT+CTRL+F8 and log in there, and just type dungeoncrawl.
The game comes with a pretty nice looking man page, which will get you started pretty fast too:
man dungeoncrawl
This is something that will tell you about the game, how to use it, and what each race and class and type does, and so on.
By the way, one thing I should mention; You won't ever play the same game twice; Every time you load this game, it randomly draws the dungeon. And by random, I mean random. I've literally started games where It was one room with no doors, so I had to sit there pressing "." and "5" on the number keypad to "search" and find a hidden door to get out.
Anyway, the version that Debian comes with, is a lot like the one for Windows, and it's newer, and then there's the one FreeBSD comes with, which is more oldschool. So depending on what you have, you have access to multiple versions.
The game itself, is totally free. You just download the version you want for whatever OS you have, and start playing.
For Windows, you use either the cmd.exe or Powershell if you have it, and on Unix based stuff, any terminal works.
Here's a few links to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linley's_Dungeon_Crawl
http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_crawl
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=CrawlWiki
You may notice here and there the word "Stone Soup" and wonder WTF that is. Well, Stone Soup is basically a version of Dungeon Crawl with a Tiled UI. Nothing more. So you can grab that as well.
I included multiple links as I think you'll find that if you DO start playing this game, you'll probably end up wondering what something is. Well, This site:
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=CrawlWiki
Is VERY good for finding info. It's the Dungeon Crawl Wiki, and you can look up everything on there.
A few things I want you to know also:
When you find weapons, such as daggers, swords, and so on, you're taking a risk if you try Wielding them without using a scroll of Identify on them. They may be cursed. If so, you're stuck with them until you find one that gets rid of it.
Scrolls can be seen in the Dungeons as "?" looking things. When you read them, you won't know what it is until you read it. Sometimes nothing seems to happen, and, ALWAYS keep those! Sometimes nothing happens because it's a remove curse scroll, which means you won't know what's going on until you accidentally read one that curses your weapon. When you have something cursed, those remove it.
Also, you can sometimes read one that says "You sense the presence of curses on" and then you'll check your inventory, and see what you have that's cursed.
Don't always drop cursed items; They may be worth keeping until you can un-curse them.
Also, unless you're a "Mummy" you have to eat food.
Other than that, read the links, read the man page, and you'll be fine.
The game looks pretty cool, and, the link I posted, this one:
http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/
Shows a screen shot of what the game looks like.
