Friday, December 14, 2007

The Doryen library : libtcod !

I'm currently isolating a part of the TCOD code to create a library for roguelike developpers using C++. It should be ready in a few days with following features :
  • 24 bits colors windowed or full screen console
  • a Mersenne twister random number generator
  • a Bresenham line drawing toolkit
  • some basic system functionnalities (keyboard handling, picture loading, ...)
It should be available on following targets/formats :
  • windows/mingw32 static library
  • windows/Visual Studio 2005 DLL
  • linux/gcc static library
This is a great opportunity for me to clean the base classes of TCOD. It may also be cool for other developpers interrested in "alternative" true color roguelikes. The library can handle both real time and turn by turn games. Although it's not really optimized yet, it has decent performances on my old Celeron 466 laptop. The rendering engine is based on SDL 1.2. Currently, it can only use the 8x8 font used in The Chronicles Of Doryen, but if someone happens to use it for an actual project, I can easily make it customizable (it's stored in an external .bmp file).