BBS door game created by Mehul Patel in the same vein as Barren Realms Elite but in a medieval setting with many, many more options and much more complex gameplay.

Falcon's Eye, or FE as it is better known, was a game of kingdoms with the same textual interface that made BRE so famous. Although it borrowed BRE's main concepts of land use and resource management, it also added more complexity in the form of races to choose from the start, each having different military units, buildings, and spells available to them.

The game is turn based with a modifiable default of 12 turns a day, with each day representing a year and each turn representing a month. During each turn there are a series of things that always happen: the masses have to be fed, their 'happiness' is calculated, military is recruited, land is bought, resources are traded, buildings are constructed, militaries are sent out to conquer, and diplomacy is done - among other things.

Things got interesting in an InterBBS game, where the kingdoms of a particular BBS work together on a 'planet' (a single InterBBS League) with other 'continents' (individual BBSes) full of their own kingdoms. Due to the nature of the game's resource management, going to war was a necessity to thrive, if not survive, and InterBBS wars become very heated.

Eventually, updates to FE ceased and Mehul left the BBS scene in favor of the 'net. As FE was his final project, it was never really perfected and thus still suffers from balance problems and the occasional bug. John Dailey Software owns the rights to the game, and it can be downloaded from and registered through them.

Also, the game Utopia on Swirve.com is based on the original Falcon's Eye concepts. If you played FE, Utopia will be a trip down memory lane...

Falcon's Eye is a graphics "patch" for Nethack.

FE is probably the coolest graphics patch ever created for Nethack (beating Charhack and Nethack 3.3's graphic stuff wasn't that hard, I guess, but FE does it about zillion times better than any of the earlier attempts). The viewpoint has been changed to isometric 3D view and the characters, rooms and monsters are pre-rendered 3D. The game now also includes cool background music and graphical introduction.

Regrettably, it isn't complete (only a handful of monsters were done), and the 3D view makes exploring some dungeon levels rather difficult. I noticed that in some cases I was looking at the map constantly =( Also, there's one graphic frame per character. At least I would wish the character to turn around and such...

I noticed this is probably the only Nethack version I've played that made my PIII-600's processor load jump through the roof - well, the game worked just fine, nevertheless, and probably works on slower machines too. (Very few roguelikes have "386 or faster; Pentium recommended" in their system requirements =)

Falcon's Eye looks very promising, though. I hope it will one day become much better. It ain't Diablo II what comes to ear- and eye-candy, but has much more gameplay-related depth =)

FE was made by Jaakko Peltonen. The modifications are available under GPL. The game uses SDL, so it runs on both Windows and *NIXes. There's also a Debian package.

Home page, as of writing: http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/nethack.html

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