This is a bit of a geeky post, but then this is a geeky computer blog, so … so be it. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of Nethack, and have been playing it on and off for over fifteen years (mostly off, but recently I’ve rediscovered it again). Well, finally, after all this time, I can say the following:

Goodbye marcw the Demigod...

You went to your reward with 5941448 points,
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
Vorpal Blade (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Heart of Ahriman (worth 2500 zorkmids and 6250 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
       8 emeralds (worth 20000 zorkmids),
       2 diamonds (worth 8000 zorkmids),
       2 rubies (worth 7000 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of ESP (worth 150 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of unchanging (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 2497 pieces of gold, after 93897 moves.
You were level 22 with a maximum of 95 hit points when you ascended.

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  1    5941448  marcw-Bar-Hum-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood.        95  [95]
  2    2623722  marcw-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu died on the Plane of Fire.
                Dissolved in molten lava (with the Amulet).           129 [287]
  3    1330849  marcw-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu choked on her food in Gehennom
                on level 33.  Choked on a disenchanter corpse.        248 [248]

Interestingly, I almost always play Valkyries, but decided to try Barbarians for a couple of games. The first game, I made it all the way down to level 24 without finding a single altar (except for a non-aligned one in the mines with a nasty priest next to it) before an Arch-Lich and Titan finished me off. The second game was this one. Most of the rest of the time, I do embarrassing things like choke on things or eat something I shouldn’t have. Need to be more careful, I suppose.

Well, that’s all there is to this post, but it’s exciting news for me. I’m still playing, and now trying other classes (read: dying a lot).

Well, sometime in the last week or so, JustLooking broke the 25 000 download barrier. It’s hard to be sure exactly when, since a lot of the downloads are via bittorrent, and I don’t have exact stats on all the places that it’s been uploaded to, but I have counted at least 6 500 torrent downloads in addition to the 20 000+ direct HTTP downloads on my actual server.

For a program of only six months of life, I’m reasonably pleased with this. It started out with only English, French, Italian, and Spanish in version 1.0, and has since added (in addition to doing those languages correctly): Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and Portuguese.

The program itself has gone from being a rather ugly little clone of the windows Win32 image viewing application to something a bit more Mac-like, and with its own growing feature set. While it’s definitely not for everybody (it is far better suited to people who like to manage images by hand in various directories on their machine), there does seem to be a growing user base, and I hope to most people happy with future versions!

I’m already beginning to plan out the next major version of the program, and while I won’t spoil all the fun, I’ve been reading everybody’s comments in the various articles on this blog. So this is your last chance: If there’s anything you would really like to see in version 3, add a comment to this article, and I just might add it!

I’d like to give a special thanks to those people who have helped me localise the program, thus far: Stefanie Schau, Laurent Molina, Roberto Bellina, Carola Clavo, Sergey Melnik, Markus Peltomäki, Emmanuel Lemor, Geir Werner Hagen, Mathias Sjöström, Henrik Östlund, Zhang Tongzhu, Emma Liu, Marco Frasca, Nitoc Taiwan, and Helvécio Mafra. Special thanks are also due to Yann le Coroller, who has been helping out with various user interface suggestions and ideas.

Here’s looking forward to the next 25 000 downloads and beyond, and to hoping that the program doesn’t get so popular that I can’t afford to host it any more on my servers!

Thanks to everybody for making this happen!