History
The long-running /dev/null/nethack tournament was unexpectedly shut down in September 2017. When this was announced, some players from TeamSplat banded together quickly with the help of the hardfought.org server to put together a tribute tournament, which was intended to be the same as devnull but updated to 3.6.0.
The tribute tournament was never planned to run for a second year; instead, respecting devnull's wishes to shut down completely and not keep its name going, plans for a new tournament were laid. This new tournament would be based off the newly available development version of NetHack, and would remain a primarily vanilla-like tournament, unlike other tournaments like Junethack which focus on variant play. It was also decided to keep the tradition of running the tournament throughout November, when a lot of veteran players come out of the woodwork checking to see if there's a tournament.
For the 2021 tournament, the TNNT website (not the game itself) was reimplemented from the ground up, primarily to get it written in Python instead of Perl, for maintainability reasons. This year also saw a big change to scoring — players and clans are no longer assigned points for each kind of accomplishment, and instead of only showing the top player in various game metrics, a series of leaderboards show all players and clans competing in them.
So TNNT is devnull?
TNNT is not devnull. As per krystal's wishes, the devnull name, tournament structure, and game changes have been retired. TNNT is a fresh start - any game changes are based on a clean vanilla nethack codebase, and the various components of the tournament were designed from scratch.
What about the devnull challenges?
As with the rest of devnull, the challenges have been permanently retired and are not implemented in TNNT. However, TNNT does add some of its own gameplay content, including features that don't exist in any variants. It's a bit of a work in progress. We may keep adding a bit of new content every year.
If you are looking for the code powering the devnull tribute challenges, to use as a patch for your own purposes, you can find the devnull tribute scoreboard repo here, and the devnull tribute game code here.
What's the new content in TNNT?
To not spoil players that are new to TNNT, the additional content that has been added to the game has been purposely omitted from this site. For those that wish to learn about all of the new game content in TNNT, please visit the TNNT entry on the NetHack Wiki .
Contributors
- aoei: Co-creator of the Python web backend (and erstwhile maintainer of the Perl backend).
- aosdict: Creator of the achievements system, various in-game features, and co-creator of the Python web backend.
- K2: Server admin and jack-of-all-trades programmer, maintainer, and designer.
- Mandevil: Creator of the original TNNT scoreboard and its Perl backend, as well as the ones for the devnull tribute tournament.
- qt: Designer and Programmer - Python web backend, achievements system, in-game features.
- Tangles: Server admin and creator of the Croesus IRC bot. Ensures that the various interactions between the game and the server network are working properly.
- elenmirie, raisse, jilles, hothraxxa, and oh6: Tournament designers and alpha testers.
- And special thanks to spicyCebolla, Andrio, and bhaak for providing bug fixes, and to all of the TNNT beta testers for helping expose those bugs before the tournament goes live every year.