webhack-engine

The game engine behind WebHack (roguelike.run) and WebHack-Steam: NetHack 3.6.7 plus a headless window port, compiled to WebAssembly. This repository owns the C source, the WebAssembly build and the in-game text translations; the two clients own their user interfaces and consume the engine as a versioned dependency.

NetHack is © 1985–2020 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, and the NetHack DevTeam, distributed under the NetHack General Public License (NGPL); see dat/license. This repository is a modified version released under the same license. The upstream NetHack release notes are in README.

Every tag v* publishes a GitHub Release with exactly these files:

The clients copy the three engine files into webhack-client/public/ and run them in a Web Worker (nethack.worker.js, which lives in the clients). The engine's exported functions and the message protocol are defined in win/headless/.

scripts/build-wasm.sh            # output in dist/
OUT_DIR=/tmp/out scripts/build-wasm.sh
EMCC=/path/to/emcc scripts/build-wasm.sh

Requires Emscripten. Releases are built with the version pinned in .github/workflows/build.yml; building with the same version reproduces the released files byte for byte on Windows and Linux alike (nethack.js embeds the output directory name, so always build into dist/). scripts/build_wasm_simple.cmd is the original Windows script with identical flags, kept for reference.

• src/, include/, dat/ — NetHack 3.6.7 engine (with WebHack modifications, e.g. nhi18n.c for runtime translation) include/date.h, onames.h and pm.h are generated by util/makedefs but committed, so the build needs no native toolchain and stays byte-for-byte reproducible
• win/headless/ — the window port that talks JSON over stdout/stdin to the web client, the save-slot API, and the JS library the engine imports
• sys/wasm/ — WASM configuration and the preloaded files (nhdat*, sysconf, dungeon, .nethackrc)
• sys/, win/ (other ports), util/, doc/, DEVEL/ — upstream NetHack, unchanged
• locales/ — in-game text translations: webhack.pot (template), zh-CN/webhack.po, and the translated data files compiled into nhdat.zh-CN; see locales/README.md
• scripts/ — the build script, the i18n tooling that generates the C catalog and nhdat.zh-CN from the .po files, and data-extraction helpers used when the clients' game-data tables were first derived from the C sources

1. Merge the change to main (CI builds it and uploads the files as a workflow artifact).
2. Tag and push: git tag v3.6.7-webhack.N && git push origin v3.6.7-webhack.N.
3. CI creates the Release. Each client then bumps the version it pins and reviews the change in its own pull request.