When you were talking about taking ideas from a rogue-like Argh, that got me to thinking. You know those nethack frontends? stuff like falcon's eye, and the gtk graphical interface for nethack? What if you could somehow use spring to make a 3d representation of nethack?
You could let the original nethack executable run and just have it pass important data for display to spring.
That could be doable via a DLL, I'd imagine.
I don't really see that as the way to go, though- just me a personally, I'm certainly not saying that a Nethack frontend might not be fun.
I just think that it wouldn't translate to 3D very well. I loved many of the ASCII games, but including the time for character animations to happen, etc., means that it'd have to be weighted differently to work well.
So... I'd rather see something more complex than Gauntlet, but not ridiculously complicated, and use Lua to reshape the level whenever you go "up" or "down" or "return to town".
I'm pretty darn sure that it can be done, and be a really cool, randomized Diablo-esque experience. I just don't want to mess with it until the engine can do better character animation for organic stuff, and ideally we'd (finally) have a modern splatting format that we could edit in realtime.
I think that a simple Roguelike, where each turn (say, 1/10th second) causes a pause (allow players to adjust the # of turns before a pause, and voila, semi-realtime or just plain realtime, depending on preferences) would be quite easy to get done, on the programming end.
Ok, complex spells and stuff might get hairy, but whatever- getting the basics working would be pretty easy, and would mainly involve stealing other people's GPL'd algorithms.