Nethack4 omissions

This is a list of the changes made in NetHack4 that have been left out of this development branch of NitroHack.

AceHack-style scoring system

• It's complicated and opaque, making it harder to play for high/low-score games.
  • Aiming for high score under this system would essentially be the same as playing normally, removing its novelty.

Intelligent Pets patch

• The one in NetHack4 is imported from AceHack, and Grunt has since released a more recent version on the NetHack Patch DB, which is the one I'd rather have.

Character #quit from save dialog

• This seems like a good way for people to accidentally quit their characters; at least it doesn't seem worth the minor gain in discoverability.

Floating eyes force misses instead of paralyzing

• It makes the game less exciting, even if it is bad design.

Remove no-confirm attack of Stormbringer

• Another NetHack variant replaces this with aggravate monster, whereas NetHack4 just removes the effect. I'd like the former but not the latter, since it makes the game strictly less interesting.

Remove map amnesia, change formal to informal ID for objects

• Map amnesia: It's easy to recover from, and removing it makes the game less exciting.
• Object amnesia: Pointless without AceHack-style scoring (see above).

Require m-direction to move into water or lava (redacted)

• Same deal as floating eyes (in fact, floating eyes are almost like walking lava tiles).
  • UnNetHack r1347 does this, but makes them options and uses a prompt, so I combined the option names from UnNetHack with the prompt-free stopping approach from NetHack4.

Better behaviour when walking into always-peacefuls

• Superseded by the new 'safe_peaceful' option:
  • "Better walking into peacefuls behaviour" chats to the monster, spends a turn and not for monsters peaceful due to race or alignment.
  • 'safe_peaceful: yes' says "You stop for the foo", does not spend a turn and applies to all monsters peaceful to the character.

Searching reveals mimics as I, rather than waking them

• I don't see the point, unless it's so searching doesn't trigger mimics to chase the player, which would make them less exciting to find.

aimake

• CMake has its limitations, but at least it's been around for a while and used by a lot of projects. aimake can't claim either, making it an extra point of failure that can be avoided if it isn't needed, which it isn't.

Automatically price-ID items owned by shopkeepers

• I really dislike price-ID in its current form, but it's features like this that gave AceHack a reputation of being a game that played itself.

Amnesia affects skills & spells instead of objects & maps

• I don't feel strongly one way or the other about this change, so I'll let it sit for now. It's worth noting that Cthulhu is the only source of amnesia in UnNetHack and thus also in this development branch.

AceHack-style naming changes

• Naming objects by description without having yet seen the object: I remember this having gameplay implications in AceHack, but I can't remember what they were exactly, so I'm putting this off for now.
• Allow objects broken to be named after the fact rather than during: This changes a lot of code and I'm not sure how necessary it is, so I'm putting this off as well.

Bag of holding prevents putting in other bags of holding, and drains charges from wands of cancellation instead of exploding

• This treads a fine line between reflecting the player's intent and outright playing the game for them, and I'd rather move forward with the status quo than waste time agonizing over their inclusion/exclusion.