Hearse support - alternative to WebTiles

[joel_jpa]

Won't Hearse support be nice for offline mode? It would give the main perks of playing multiplayer without the hassles like downloading WebTiles, lag etc. Check out Hearse at http://hearse.krollmark.com/, a bones client mainly for Nethack.

I've found discussions related to it at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.games.roguelike.misc/jsDAOgQ36rs/wpp1BaZECEMJ: one by Darshan Shaligram himself in 2010 saying the old Crawl had it at one point. I don't know much what involves implementing this but I doubt just contacting the Hearse developer would suffice (am I right?) since I'm aware that any form of DCSS multiplayer ought to require maintaining the official DCSS account, highscorelist, bones here rather than at Hearse.

Note that I never tried Hearse--all I know is what I read about it: when you die, it uploads your bones and downloads someone else's (number of files can be customised?) from the server. There's the issue of how many to fetch but that depends on how its on the usual multiplayer here--which again, I've not played before.

I think this would make it more accessible to people who play mainly the offline version. In Nethack, such a feature with its potential implications can be double-edged but here it wouldn't be an issue other than making it even more harder.

[Sprucery]

Hearse works for Nethack because you get all the goodies with the bones, but who on earth would like to download other players ghosts in Crawl?

#removeghostsormakethemoptional

[ZipZipskins]

Hearse works for Nethack because you get all the goodies with the bones

It would seem you and I have different definitions of the word "works"

[Sprucery]

Heh, well, to be honest I didn't like bones files in Nethack either :)

[joel_jpa]

Isn't it for the very same reason we have WebTiles? "You will have the chance to meet ghosts of other dead players and gain a huge amount of experience for beating them." and "Your games, scores, deaths and wins will be recorded and parsed by the official statistic tools." are two reasons from the main site, the others won't apply to Hearse. Just checking whether people are interested in getting the feel of multiplayer like me. I also don't like the idea for Nethack, the possibilities of it ruining a game and it potentially being almost like cheating outweigh its benefits.

[Dioneo]

It'd probably be easier to have an option where the game generates semi-random ghosts for offline mode.

[tasonir]

I do like player ghosts for the bonus experience, although I haven't really looked too deeply into how much experience it works out to be, so it's probably pretty trivial/insignificant in the long run. An early one at the right time can be significant for a floor or two, but perhaps that's about it...