NetHack 3.1 -- General information

NetHack 3.1 is a new generation of the dungeon exploration game NetHack.
It is a distant descendent of Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.0.
It is the product of two years of very intensive effort by the NetHack
Development Team and its porting sub-teams.  Many parts of 3.0 were
rewritten for NetHack 3.1, and many new features were added.

There are a number of dramatic new additions or changes in the game:

A general "mythology" was adopted for the game.  The various tasks in the
game are now articulated in the context of that mythology, and this gives
the game a greater coherence and unity.

The dungeon design was changed.  Unlike the linear form of the dungeon in
3.0, the dungeon in 3.1 is tree-structured, with dungeons that branch off
the "main" dungeon.  These branch-dungeons have each unique features which
distinguish them from one another.  As a part of this new design, a dungeon
"compiler" was added, which enables some control of the game's dungeon
design from a data file.  A goal for the future is making that control
complete.

The special levels facility of the game was greatly enhanced.  It is now
highly versatile, and we took advantage of its extended capacity to add many
new special levels.

The game's display code was completely re-written.  The display is now based
on a line-of-sight principle.  It is much more efficient than the old
display code, and a lot more interesting.

Intelligent creatures in the game can now wear armor, and they can wield
and use weapons in combat.  They can also use wands, spells, and throw
objects.  This must be taken into consideration in choosing a game strategy.

We sought to increase the differences between the various character
classes, so as to make playing each of them a distinct experience.  To this
end, special character-specific tasks and dungeons were introduced into the
game.

These are some of the most prominent global changes.  But there are many
other changes in the game, and they are not less dramatic.  To mention just
a few:  The shop code was revised.  Shopkeepers are smarter, and they know
how to repair damage to their shop.  The endgame is now a multi-level
dungeon, full of surprises.  The artifact code was rewritten, and gaining
access to the Amulet of Yendor requires the coordinated use of special
artifacts.  Many new creatures and objects were added to the game.  We leave
it to you to discover the rest for yourselves.

We dedicate the game to the many players of 3.0, with special note of those
who communicated with us and contributed their ideas to the development of
this new version.

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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 all *.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/amiga/splitter' subsubdirectory, which contains files
        for the Amiga splitter program.
    k.  A 'sys/atari' subdirectory, which contains files specific to TOS.
    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/winnt' subdirectory, which contains files specific to Windows NT.
    r.  A 'win' directory, which contains subdirectories for files that
        are windowing-system specific (but not operating-system specific).
    s.  A 'win/tty' subdirectory, which contains files specific to ttys.
    t.  A 'win/X11' subdirectory, which contains files specific to X11.

    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.  In
    particular, you are prohibited by the terms of the license from using
    NetHack 3.1 for gainful purposes.

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 BSD/Sun/SunOS4.x (simply because
    the code was housed on such a system).  It is also worth mentioning
    here that NetHack 3.1 is a huge program by comparison with 3.0, let
    alone 2.3.  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 page,
    should answer most of your questions.

    At the time of this release, NetHack 3.1 is known to run on:

        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
        Bull DPX/2 2x0 and 3x0 running B.O.S 02.00.xx
        Bull DPX/20  1xx 4xx 6xx or 8xx running BOSX V3.2
        Bull XPS100 running System V R3.1 (Rel VS/25 only)
        Data General AViiON systems running DG/UX
        DEC vaxen running Ultrix and BSD
        Decstations running Ultrix 3.1 or 4.0 using the cc compiler only
        Decstations running Ultrix 4.2 using either cc or gcc (1.39 OSF)
        Encore Multimax running UMAX 4.2
        Gould NP1 running UTX 3/2
        H-P 9000s300 running HP-UX
        IBM PC/RT and RS/6000 running AIX
        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 and 4.x
        Sun-4s running Solaris 2.x (aka SunOS 5.x)
        Valid Logic Systems SCALD-System
        286 box running Microport SysV/AT (not extensively tested)
        386-486 boxes running Linux/386BSD/BSDI

        Apple Macintosh running MacOS
        Atari ST/TT/Falcon running TOS (or MultiTOS) with GCC
        Commodore Amiga running AmigaDOS 1.3 or greater with SAS/C 6.2
                (but see Install.ami about DICE and Manx)
        DEC Alpha/VMS (aka OpenVMS AXP), running V1.0 and V1.5
        DEC VAX/VMS, running V4.6 through V5.5-2, T6.0
        IBM PC compatibles running MS-DOS with MicroSoft C or DJGPP
        IBM PS/2 and AT compatibles running OS/2 1.1 - 2.0 with Microsoft C
                5.1 or 6.0, and OS/2 2.0 with GCC emx 0.8f or IBM C Set/2
        Intel 386,486 desktop machines running Windows NT

                        - - - - - - - - - - -

If you have problems building the game, or you find bugs in it, the
development team may be reached as

                    nethack-bugs@linc.cis.upenn.edu

Please be sure to include your machine type, OS, and patchlevel.

Patches especially should be directed to this address.  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 3.1 synchronized by means of official patches, and to maintain
the painfully-created file organization.  (Remember the mess when everybody
just posted their own patches to 2.3?  There were no archived bug-fixes to
give people who got 2.3 after its initial release, so the same bugs kept being
discovered by new batches of people.  We were successful in preventing this
from happening to 3.0.  Please cooperate to keep this from happening to 3.1.)

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 its worth.

All of this amounts to the following:  If you decide to apply a free-lanced
patch to your 3.1 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 --