sporkhack

I was inspired by the subject line of a co-worker's email: "+1 Gauntlets of Coding".  It was just an email with a link to wrist braces for carpal tunnel syndrome, but I really like the sound of Gauntlets of Coding.  I_have a couple ideas: when wearing Gauntlets of Coding, you movement speed will increase only when using the travel command.  Or, it gives you jumping.  Both are pretty big stretches at puns about using goto statements to either travel faster, or jump through code...  yeah...  I'll probably make Gauntlets of Coding a compile-time option, defaulting to not include them.

Moving on...

Sporkhack!  I've been spending more time playing sporkhack, and I have to say, what a fucking brilliant game.  So many changes.  From partial resistances, to sacrifice gifts based on XP level, to chaotic Knights, to variable telepathy range, to new items like gold dragon armor, shield of light, Dirge, etc... fucking brilliant.

Where some variants put a lot of effort into nice ncurses interfaces, sporkhack is all about gameplay. I'm seriously considering ditching the slashem source as my code base for my variant and starting with sporkhack instead, since there are just too many features from sporkhack that I like, and most of them are the bag of poo:

I do have two gripes about sporkhack, and they are very, very minor.  One, I don't like the new character creation screen.  When I start a new nethack game, I know what I want to play as, so I just run: $ nethack -u greg-rog-hum-fem for example, and the game starts.  Even if you do that in sporkhack, you still get taken to this screen:

So you have to press "." to start playing.  I realize how this starting screen can be helpful to new players, since it lets you know what combinations of role, race, and alignment are allowed, but I guess I'm just old and stubborn and like the vanilla nethack character creation system better.  Also, I sometimes run into a bug where, when starting a new game, I get stuck in a corner with no map.  I even tried starting as an archaeologist to see if I could dig my way out, but no dice:

Has anyone else run into this?  I'm using the sporkhack-svn package from the Arch User Repository, so it's possible that this bug is specific to that code.

...

When it comes to debugging, my strategy revolves entirely around printk (printf if I'm in userland).  I don't use gdb because I don't know how.  I've always wanted to learn... but it just seems too daunting of an exercise.  Sometimes I'll resort to objdump or readelf in a bind, but mostly, I just print out whatever things I'm curious about.

Is there a good way to dump debugging messages in nethack, other than using the pline function?  If not, I'll write a patch that will log debug messages to a log file.  Then anyone could just call something like nh_trace( LOG_WARNING, "blah blah blah %s, blah %d", ... ) instead of using pline, which interferes with gameplay.