-

This blog has moved

2009-06-29T00:07:00.000+02:00

New address :

http://doryen.eptalys.net

Evil always win

2009-06-16T21:29:00.005+02:00

I've always been a google fan. Most of the sites related to Doryen are powered with google services, the blog, the main site, the subversion repositories... Google had two main characteristics that are uncommon in business world, and especially in software companies :

technical excellence serving simplicity
"Don't be evil" mantra

Yet, for a few years, google has been criticized. Some even claiming that google was the new evil empire. I never agreed with that. I find the whole "Big brother" cabal a bit paranoiac, because the data gathered is really used to enhanced the user experience.

Well at least, that was what I was thinking a few months ago. Then, they released a bugged browser stuffed with spywares, and they finally crossed the red line...

So if the big brother stuff behind adsense is supposed to provide relevant ads, what's the link between me or IT performance metrics and a religious organization ? And even better, why a so called non evil company is giving a definitely evil organization publicity ?

I'm probably overreacting, but I can put up with it anymore. Apparently, evil always win. We live in a sad world...

Anyway, I cease any activity on Doryen projects until I have a non google replacement for every service I need.

PS : the fonts in this post are completely broken because I posted it first with Chrome... never been able to fix them with firefox then...

Addictiveness through candy rewards

2009-06-14T13:08:00.006+02:00

There has been recent articles on gamasutra about how easy it is to apply MMORPG-like leveling and "candy reward" and have immediate addictiveness. This game is another example :

http://neyrod.mybrute.com

While the gameplay is almost inexistant (you choose an opponent, you see an automated fight sequence, you win or lose), it's very addictive due to the new weapons/technics/pets you can get when winning a fight and the fact that while the fights are completely automated, the is a lot of depth in them, with lots of different technics/items. For example, in melee fight, you can dodge, counter-attack, steal your opponent's weapon, disarm your opponent, throw you weapon and there are probably lots of other technics (I'm only level 4...). The fights are always different and interresting to watch, especially since you're limited to 3 fights per day.

Kukkatytto stealing my bludgeon before crushing me...

Wakfu - the game

2009-06-07T19:35:00.003+02:00

I mentioned a few days ago the wakfu tv series, but the associated MMORPG seems interesting as well. I'm not sure it will escape the usual MMORPG grind feast, but at least its graphics leave me completely speechless. I can't imagine how they do them. Maybe they have hundreds of artists working in shifts...

And here is a trailer presenting the setting and some in-game scenes.

New true-color C/C++ roguelike libraries

2009-06-04T23:50:00.002+02:00

I recently came across two new roguelike libraries. Both are in an early stage, but are still advanced enough to do the most important : draw colored characters in a window.

The first is tinycurses, a.k.a. "the curses of the future", by EligZero.

Someone finally decided to take curses out of the early 80s and make something usable out of it :P While it doesn't support the whole curses API (and I can certainly not blame his author for that), it brings some new interesting features, the most important being true color support. The nifty thing is that it plans to support both an opengl renderer and a curses renderer, allowing to ease the port of classic roguelikes to the world of true colors, while keeping the telnet compatibility. But it's not simply curses with colors. It has some very innovative features, like the ability to draw up to 7 characters on top of each other. It's a feature that was frequently asked by libtcod users, but I've never been audacious enough to implement it. I'm looking forward to seeing what can be done with it.

The second is even more mysterious and promising, all the more since, as far as I know, it's written by one of the most significant modern roguelike developpers. While libtcod is some kind of layman library (no real const correctness, a very thin OOP design, ...), libneko is intended to use state-of-the-art C++. While it's currently in alpha stage, even less advanced than tinycurses, I definitely keep an eye on it, hoping its authors will sustain the effort.

The good news is that those libraries will help to create even more visually appealing roguelikes. This concurrence is good because libtcod and the roguelike community above all will benefit from it.

Wakfu !

2009-05-24T14:12:00.005+02:00

Probably a bit off-topic, but I've just fallen in love with a french anime, created by the guys behind the quite amazing free flash MMORPG dofus. Well, not only do they plan a new Dofus 2 game with absolutely gorgeous graphics, but also another MMORPG named Wakfu, which happens 1000 years after Dofus. Even better, they did a Wakfu anime series with one of the best animation I've ever seen.

The first episodes can be watched on their site (sorry, french only). You can probably find them on youtube or dailymotion too :
http://serie.wakfu.com/fr/events/episode1
http://serie.wakfu.com/fr/events/episode2

PS : while quite mangaish, I think the graphics can even please non-manga fans. I find the character design simply awesome..

Hardening libtcod 1.5

2009-05-23T17:02:00.005+02:00

Progress is being made on the 1.5 branch. The most used modules have been "hardened", which means they shouldn't trigger crashes anymore :

console
image
sys
mersenne
noise
fov
path

As planned, those new modules stop your debugger with asserts while in debug mode when anything is wrong or try to do their best to keep the game from crashing in release mode. Note that with some Mingw32 versions, you may have to put a breakpoint in the _assert function so that the assert doesn't exit the debugger.

The new modules should also be more friendly with language wrappers, the assert displaying an error message on stdout instead of crashing when a bad parameter is send to libtcod.

Note that the python wrapper is not up-to-date on the 1.5 branch. No need to try and use it...

I also updated the noise sample so that it uses the subcell resolution.

There are still things to do until a release, but I thing a big part of the work is done and I can plan a first beta release at the end of May or the begin of June... Maybe even before the 1.4.2 release...!

New projects using libtcod

2009-05-23T15:00:00.006+02:00

Here are a few recent projects using libtcod or libtcod.net.

SaneRoguelike, an unofficial 7DRL by Narf The Mouse (C#, libtcod.net).

Z-Day, a turn-by-turn zombie-killer by Adam Rezich (C#, libtcod.net).

Tombs Of The Aztecs, a crazy experimental raytraced wolfenstein-like 7DRL shooter by Ian Craig (C++) !

New features in 1.5 branch

2009-05-20T20:34:00.003+02:00

The "colored tiles" and "subcell resolution" features are now in the 1.5 svn branch (but still very buggy).

The first one allows to use colors in font bitmaps. The color from the font bitmap is multiplied by the foreground color used in the console. You can use it for colored letters, but also for small bitmap tiles, icons, or when combined with the dynamic font character updates, even blit a fullscreen colored image (Umbrarum Regnum already does this with a greyscale image on it's title screen).

PS : note that I also increased the sample window size to get the framerate back to a sensible value ;)

The second has already been featured in pyromancer. It makes it possible to blit a TCODImage on a console using a few special chars that simulate 2x2 pixels in each console cell.

libtcod.net 1.4.1 released

2009-05-11T20:56:00.003+02:00

Thanks to John Klimek and Chris Hamons, libtcod.net, the C# wrapper for libtcod, has been upgraded to the 1.4.1 version (don't believe what the homepage says, the 1.4.2beta 2 doesn't exist yet :D).

You can get it and try it there :

http://code.google.com/p/libtcod-net/downloads/list

Happy coding :) !

Coding on Linux (warning, troll inside...)

2009-05-08T20:22:00.003+02:00

I finally found a good text editor on Linux \m/. Many thanks to Mingos for suggesting it, and to Wine developers for making it possible :)

More frames for 1.5 samples

2009-05-01T11:44:00.003+02:00

I made a significant change in the way the console stores colors. Instead of having an array of cells, each cell containing the ascii code, foreground and background colors, colors are now stored in 2 TCODImages.
The obvious advantage for the user is that every TCODImage feature is now enabled on console background or foreground color.
Another advantage is that the opengl renderer can now directly access colors from the console without conversion. This results in a slightly improved framerate...

Remember that the framerate with 1.4.1 is around 140 on the same computer...

There are still remaining bugs with the opengl renderer, though. Doing pixel-perfect 2D blitting is a pain with opengl. Another issue is that most linux distribs come with poor drivers which results either in poor performances or even in a completely broken display. Apparently, there's no way I can detect if the driver is good from the library so I'll have to make it possible for the player to disable the opengl renderer, maybe in a libtcod.cfg config file...

libtcod 1.5 sneak peek

2009-04-25T16:26:00.002+02:00

Mmmh... The library version apart, do you see any difference ?? ;)

The FOV Graal !!!!

2009-04-05T19:18:00.003+02:00

Some of you might have read the fov study I did a few months ago.
http://roguecentral.org/libtcod/fov/fov.pdf

My goal was to find the best fov algorithm for libtcod, on both gameplay and speed sides. Unfortunately, every algorithm I checked had some drawbacks.
It seems that Mingos, developer of Umbrarum Regnum has just found something that really looks like the fov graal, getting almost a perfect result on every test. We still have to check that there is no hidden glitch, and the code has still to be polished and optimized, but it's already beating the other algorithms to a pulp...

It has a perfect behaviour in every gameplay test of the study (see some of the screenshots below).
It has an acceptable symmetry, as good as the best non-symmetrical algorithms.
Its speed blows away other algorithms.

Once again, this has still to be double-checked, but restrictive fov will definitely make its way to libtcod 1.4.2 and 1.5. I'll publish an updated version of the fov study including restrictive shadowcasting when I find some time... ;)

Detailed results :

Symmetry :
Outdoor : 5.25 %
Indoor : 0.91%

Speed :
Empty 600x600 : 2.36 times faster than shadowcasting
Empty 100x100 : 4.28 times faster than shadowcasting
Empty 20x20 : 3.2 times fasters than shadowcasting
Full 600x600 : 1.38 times faster than shadowcasting
Full 100x100 : 1.9 times faster than shadowcasting
Full 20x20 : 1.39 times faster than shadowcasting
Outdoor 600x600 : second fastest (1.24 times slower than basic raycasting)
Outdoor 100x100 : 1.18 times faster than basic raycasting
Outdoor 20x20 : 1.28 times faster than basic raycasting
Cave 80x80 : 1.36 times faster than shadowcasting
Cave 40x40 : first ex-aequo (as fast as shadow casting)
Cave 20x20 : 1.13 times faster than shadowcasting

pyromancer ! 0.1.2 released

2009-03-26T22:16:00.002+01:00

Another polishing release.

mouse fixed in fullscreen (uses the official 1.4.1 libtcod)
keyboard movement can be configured in data/cfg/config.txt
font size automatically selected according to desktop resolution (you can still change it with pageup/pagedown)
various small fixes

http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

Umbrarum Regnum lights on youtube

2009-03-25T22:58:00.002+01:00

There is an thread currently on r.g.r.d. about aesthetics of ASCII graphics. I think when it comes to aesthetics, pictures are better than words. Mingos has just released a video about lights in UR that contains stunning pieces of beauty. Judge for yourself...

libtcod 1.5 brainstorming

2009-03-25T21:26:00.006+01:00

I created a thread on libtcod's forums to talk about the 1.5 release.
Feel free to describe what would be your dream library.

http://roguecentral.free.fr/smf/index.php?topic=216.0

This thread is rather about wide architectural changes, general issues than specific bugs/feature requests, but anyway feel free to speak about what bothers you in the current version, check the planed changes for 1.5 and let me know if some are too radical.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

libtcod 1.4.1 released

2009-03-22T12:58:00.004+01:00

Finally ! After almost 6 months of betas and release candidates...
You can get it here :
http://thedoryenlibrary.appspot.com/

The documentation has also moved here :
http://roguecentral.free.fr/libtcod/1.4/doc/doc.php

I'll try to get an up-to-date version for linux 64bits as soon as possible.

I'll maintain the 1.4 branch with bugfix releases probably for quite a long time because the new 1.5 branch will break API compatibility. See the roadmap on libtcod's site for details.

I also wanted to thank all the developers who put their trust in libtcod for the recent 7DRL challenge. I'll soon put a brainstorming thread on libtcod's forum to get as much feedback as possible from this event and to put the 1.5 version on the right track to be even easier to use and more powerful.

True-color real time javascript roguelike soon possible ?

2009-03-21T18:13:00.006+01:00

The javascript speed war that's currently taking place amongst browsers may soon bring a javascript engine fast enough to have a pyromancer-like roguelike running in a browser.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/browse/

That would be really cool. No more compilation/deployment/platform issue. I've been keeping an eye on browsers javascript speed for a few years, hoping that it would become fast enough one day for this :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/rogue.htm
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/fire.htm

Well, that day seems really imminent...

pyromancer ! 0.1.1 released

2009-03-21T17:37:00.005+01:00

The gameplay didn't move a iota. It's a bugfix/polishing only release. But it features some pretty hot new technology, including :

dungeon generator using sub-cell precision
anti-aliased fov
FPS-like keyboard + mouse control or Diablo2-like mouse only control (hit 'm' to switch from one to another)
a new, more visual, powerup selection screen

Get it for linux or windows here :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

Ether Saga Online

2009-03-20T20:52:00.010+01:00

We've been used to seeing loads of free insipid asian MMORPG released every two months. Sometimes, one game steps above the others. The previous one that attracted my attention was Holic Online. Now it's a Chinese WOW-like named Ether Saga Online. It seems really pollished and complete. Though, be aware that if you're allergic to kawaii mangas, you'd better not look at following screenshots :)

Character creation screen

The character creation is quite simple, WOW-like, with 3 races and 6 classes. Though, note some interesting features :

first you start directly with a pet (ok it's a pink cat, but it's still a pet!)
you enter a birth date and an astronomical sign that will give you special feats

Main game screen

As you can see, it's definitely not a quick and dirty MMORPG. 3 actions bars with bindings to either 1..7, Alt-1..Alt-7 or F1..F7 keys, a pretty complex minimap with autowalk feature to easily follow the path to a far destination. Even the characters widgets are far from basic, and look at the pet widget. The pet is definitely not some kind of foil that can only follow you. It has his own stats, actions and RPGish evolution as seen on the detailed pet screen :

Pet screen

The crafting system, while not as rich as star wars galaxies or Ryzom, seems to be interesting too. You can add new sockets to your gear and embed gems in them to improve their characteristics.
You can gain skills either through Ethyr (artifact you get from quests or monsters) or Nascent skills (when you level up) depending on your birth date.

Skills screen

Another interesting feature with skills is that you can automatically chain skills by saving the sequence in a macro. You can also gain transformation cards that allow you to transform into a wide list of pokemon-like critters...

So if you're interested go and try it. It's free !

pyromancer video

2009-03-14T03:10:00.001+01:00

In you don't want to bother downloading the game or if it crashes on your platform, you can now watch it on youtube !

pyromancer 0.1 for Mac OS X

2009-03-12T21:48:00.004+01:00

Thanks to Michael De Rosa, pyromancer is now available on Mac OS X ! It's the same version as the 7DRL release for Windows and Linux. A big thank to him :)

http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

pyromancer ! 0.1 released

2009-03-07T01:17:00.006+01:00

Epic boss fight...

I won't be able to work on it tomorrow so this is the final release for the 2009 7DRL contest. What was changed since step 05 :

an introductory screen
a final fight with a boss in the last level
stats in death/victory screen
skill balances
number of levels reduced to 8
improved dungeon generation
balanced spells (amber/incandescence more powerful)
better contrast for creatures characters

Downloads for windows and linux :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

Source code :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/source/browse/#svn/tags/7DRL

I find the concept interesting enough to make me want to work a bit more on it. Things I'd like to improve :

less boring boss fight
mini-bosses in each level
in burst-mode, fireballs should project creatures and destroy walls

Pyromancer ! step 05 : power-ups

2009-03-05T01:07:00.004+01:00

Embers... Embers everywhere!

Still only one spell (fireball), but you can make it really versatile thanks to power-ups.
Left-click : standard fireball
Hold left mouse button : incandescent fireball which sets fire to any creature getting to close. At high level, can easily be used to block passages.
Hold right mouse button : the fireball projects deadly live embers. Pretty impressive at high level, where embers can go through creatures and bounce against walls...

I also added multi-font support (8x8 / 10x10 or 12x12). You can change the font with numpad +/-.

Known bug : sometimes, levels parts are not connected, which is really annoying when the stairs are on the other side...

Binary downloads (windows/linux) :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

Source code :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/source/browse/#svn/tags/step05

Next release :

add a final boss and a victory screen

Possible bonuses :

balance the spells
improve embers projections direction when the fireball hits a wall

Impossible bonuses (don't count on them for the 7DRL release...) :

destructable ground/walls
fire burst should project creatures around and stun them against walls
improve pathfinding and AI
more creatures, more spells, more items...

pyromancer ! power-ups (wip 2)

2009-03-04T00:26:00.004+01:00

Now I can choose the power-ups from a list. This does not make much sense because it's supposed to be a scroll... But I think it's important for the gameplay to be able to choose what you want to improve instead of getting random power-ups.

Good news, I finally found the fireball duplication bug which was due to a height/width variable mix in lightmap rendering...

I still have some bugs to fix and a few improvement I want to do on the fireball spell. Hopefully, it will be done tomorrow. Then I'll do some boss & victory screen to make sure the game can be considered as finish for the 7DRL. Anything I'll be able to add after that will be bonus... (mainly new spells or new creatures, maybe more interaction with the dungeon).

Still no download/source code tonight.

pyromancer ! power-ups (wip)

2009-03-02T23:54:00.004+01:00

I've done a third of the power-up system, which seems to show that indeed, it may take most of the week to finish it since I can only work on it in the evening... The 7DRL release might be a bit skinny, but I find the concept really interesting and I'll probably keep working on it a bit after the contest.

There are currently two sort of items that are dropped when you kill a monster : health potions and magic scrolls. When read(when you walk on them), they allow you to choose a spell power-up. There are three types of power-ups :

spell power-up : increase the power of a spell you already know
spell variation : add a new effect to a spell you already know
new spell

No new downloads/source code until the power-up system is finished.

pyromancer ! step 04 : creatures

2009-03-01T22:38:00.008+01:00

Erm... I expected to reach this point after the first day. It took me two days... Things are much slower than expected...

Anyway, there are now creatures (a single type) with braindead AI (see the player, attack the player). The pathfinding was a pain to implement. Strangely, creatures in tcod have the same behaviour but I'm using a basic scent tracking system. In pyromancer, I can't because I have no actual map data (only a TCODMap) so I have to rely on A*.

Another feature that caused lots of delays is a Left4Dead-like AI director. Creatures are not spawn during the dungeon generation. Instead, they are created during the play, trying to achieve the same alternation of calm and intense action moments that you can find in L4D.

I'm fighting with the strangest bugs ever too. I still didn't find why fireballs reaching the left/right borders of the console appear at two places at the same time....!!

So you can go there, find stairs, burn things, die. No victory screen yet.

Source code and linux/windows downloads are on google code :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/

The next step : power-ups, a second spell, a boss creature... If things keep going at this rate, this may take the whole week...

Pyromancer ! step 03 : fire ball

2009-03-01T01:36:00.005+01:00

I added the first spell : fireball (left mouse button).
I improved the mouse movement control. It's much easier now.

There is a known bug, fire balls going out of the console reappear in the middle...

Next step : add some critters to broil... I'll do that tomorrow...

[update] :
btw I switched to Linux. Debugging is really tedious with my old version of mingw...
You can find downloads for both linux and windows on google :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

[update2] :
another bug : I screwed the fog effect. It will be back in the next step...

Pyromancer ! step 02 : the walking @

2009-02-28T19:38:00.005+01:00

It took considerably more time and code to get there... I expected to make this in a couple of hours. Damn. The success is already compromised...

Ok, so what have we here ?

A 10 levels dungeon starting with boring geometric rooms and ending with twisted caves.
A mouse controlled @ walking.
Subcell resolution rendering and lighting.

The beast is already pretty CPU intensive...

The second step is there, on google code...
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/source/browse/tags

[update]
You can get a compiled version for windows there :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/downloads/list

Pyromancer ! step 01 : empty game window

2009-02-28T12:35:00.003+01:00

This is the first post for pyromancer !, my 7DRL attempt for the 2009 contest.
I'll post screenshots for each main step here. The corresponding code base can be seen on google code :
http://code.google.com/p/pyromancer/source/browse/tags

It's generally difficult (at least for unexperimented developers) to dive into a full game source code.
I hope this step by step approach will make it easier to understand how to build a game with libtcod.

This first step is rather basic. Just having a working game window with a basic config file.

Next step will contain dungeon generation.

libtcod on Mac OS X and updated fov study

2009-02-20T20:12:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Michael De Rosa, libtcod made its way to Mac OS X. You can grab it here :
http://thedoryenlibrary.appspot.com/

You can also see how Jonathon Duerig's enhanced permissive field of view included in libtcod 1.4.1rc3 competes against other algorithms on the updated fov study here.

libtcod-1.4.1rc3

2009-02-19T22:17:00.005+01:00

erm.. A new release. 1.4.1 has really been too long. Too much releases and no real pilot in the plane... This version might not be more stable than the 1.4.1 betas because I completely changed the permissive fov and the default colors. I think I'll use the ubuntu scheme for the next release. Set a release date, keep the changes coming and freeze them one month before the release.

Anyway, this version brings you a lot more default colors, a handy permissive fov with variable permissiveness and it should be possible to use SDL based functions (get desktop resolution, load images, ...) before calling initRoot.

Get it here while it's still smoking ;)
http://thedoryenlibrary.appspot.com

[update] Sorry. It has been a rather chaotic release. Links on the website should be ok now...

libtcod projects news

2009-02-17T20:33:00.003+01:00

Some news from libtcod users :

A new blog was created for The way of fallen. Check it there :
http://thewayoffallen.blogspot.com/

Umbrarum regnum has now its own forums. Feel free to register here :
http://umbrarumregnum.110mb.com/forum/index.php

After Chrysalis, Tomb of rawdin is the second 7DRL using libtcod. Get it here :
http://redmine.bloodycactus.com/projects/rawdin/wiki

Escape From City 17

2009-02-13T23:10:00.005+01:00

Completely off-topic.

I urge any Half-Life fan who hasn't started steam for two days to watch this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo

Kingdom of Shadows

2009-02-03T23:58:00.007+01:00

To my great pleasure, it seems that Umbrarum Regnum is back on the release track. After a few months of doubts, it recently went through its first complete rewrite, using now full C++.

According to Mingos, we should expect an early tech demo soon with some map generators, one of the all-time strengths of this title. I also witnessed the signs of a huge background work on the setting, which I won't disclose here but head to Umbrarum Regnum's official site and you'll get some hints.

Title, cave, forest, swamp...

Fov study

2009-01-31T02:49:00.004+01:00

You can read the fov study here :

http://roguecentral.org/libtcod/fov/fov.pdf

I'm waiting for your feedback, especially on conclusions since opinions may diverge on certain points.

[edit March, 22 2009 : fixed dead link]

In search of the fov graal

2009-01-27T21:34:00.006+01:00

I've been working for a few weeks on various field of view algorithms. The conclusion is near and I should post results on r.g.r.d and roguebasin soon. Nothing revolutionary, but some data and facts that will probably be of some help.

Sadly I haven't found the perfect algorithm yet (if it exists...).

Also, you can check two new songs on the rogue bard, both being covers of titles submitted for the 2008 roguelike soundtrack contest. Enjoy :)

New website for libtcod

2009-01-15T20:37:00.005+01:00

I created a website on the brand new google appengine. I still don't know if I will keep it, but it's fun coding web pages in python ;)

http://thedoryenlibrary.appspot.com

If you want your project to be featured there of if your project is already featured and you want to change anything on its page, don't hesitate to contact me. I have crazy plans for to allow users to update their project page directly in far future...

New roguelike website : the Rogue Bard

2009-01-14T01:54:00.001+01:00

This is a project that was triggered by a simple challenge between Mingos and me. It first turned into the 2008 roguelike soundtrack contest and now is expanded into a (erf.. almost) full featured web site.

http://roguebard.eptalys.net

New features will be progressively added to the site, when libtcod, arena, doryen and my real life leave me a few spare time ;)

Optimized diamond raycasting

2009-01-12T20:53:00.004+01:00

Surprisingly, diamond raycasting is slower than standard raycasting. I removed any memory allocation and expensive container operation from the loop, and it's still slower. Here are the last results on the same computer as the previous post :

CIRCULAR FOV time : 0.801974s => 125.939 call/s 7ms/call
DIAMOND FOV time : 1.79608s => 56.2336 call/s 17ms/call

The optimized code can be found here. Maybe someone will find a good optimization...
http://code.google.com/p/libtcod/source/browse/trunk/src/fov_diamond_raycasting.c

I have a few explanations about the result. Diamond raycasting main feature is that it visits each cell only once. So it's supposed to be much faster than standard raycasting when the cell visiting process is long enough. When using a TCODMap, visiting the cell is only testing a boolean value, so the gain is not significant here.
Besides, diamond raycasting involves a lot of function calls. When you removed memory allocation and container access issues, function calls may still kill your performances. While standard raycasting has one function call for each cell on the perimeter (one function call for each ray casted), diamond raycasting has more than 3 function calls for each cell in the fov ! When working on big field of views (like the one used in the benchmark), this certainly has a big impact on the performances. I think the only way to get significant performance improvement (at least 50%) now is to alter the algorithm itself...

Anyway 56 calls/second on a 600x600 map is probably enough for most usages :)

The Doryen arena 0.8 released

2009-01-11T15:38:00.001+01:00

I didn't put everything I wanted in this release, but at least it contains the challenges.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

libtcod 1.4.1 beta 4 released

2009-01-10T15:36:00.007+01:00

This release contains a few fixes in the python wrapper and a new fov module supporting several fov algorithms. Currently, it supports the previous basic raycasting algorithm (named circular raycasting) and a new algorithm recently discussed on r.g.r.d (I called it "diamond raycasting". See this article). While it seems to work, it's still highly unoptimized. It should be much faster in the next release.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

[update] Here are a few performance results on my Athlon 64 2800+ :

CIRCULAR FOV time : 0.73648s => 137.139 call/s 7ms/call
DIAMOND FOV time : 12.9762s => 7.78351 call/s 128ms/call

Tests are done with a 600x600 map filled with 5000 random obstacles.
DIAMOND will probably be faster than CIRCULAR in the next release. Until then, use it only for testing purpose...

About pixels

2009-01-08T21:32:00.005+01:00

I've recently come across a very good pixel art tutorial, created by Derek Yu, the guy behind the awesome graphics of Aquaria.

Character created in Derek Yu's tutorial.

Aquaria, one of the few games from independent developers available on Steam.

One may think text-mode game developers might have little interest in such technology. But the upcoming libtcod features make it possible to use real graphics on the console as seen on TCOD's portraits. I wonder how the portraits would look, once converted to pixel art sprites (while keeping their current realistic look).

I would even be interested in using this in other parts of the game (mostly in user interface, where it would allow to stuff more information on this little 80x50 console). I'll probably experiment a bit with it in the next days/weeks. I started TCOD with the idea of following strict ASCII layout but I cannot resist the mermaid song of some bitmaps here and there...

If you're interested in such art, also check these two amazing pieces of work...

New year omen...

2009-01-07T23:48:00.004+01:00

2009 started for me with my laptop dying in horrible agony. It died exactly one year after the first libtcod release... Spooky omen...

Fortunately, I didn't lost any data concerning the Doryen projects, but this was the only computer where I could compile libtcod with mingw32. For some odd reason, the windows mingw32 doesn't work on my desktop computer. Until I find why, I'll probably have to compile the mingw32 version on my Linux virtual machine...

Some news about libtcod. I should release a new 1.4.1 beta soon with a few fixes and doc updates (mainly stuff added for the portraits in TCOD). I tried to make it work with python 3 but there are still a few pitfalls. You'll have to stick with python 2.5 or 2.6 for a few more weeks.

Christmas hollydays stopped my momentum on the portrait stuff and I'm still undecided wether I should keep working on it or switch to Arena for a few weeks. The last release is almost 6 months old. Too long for such a small game...

Test dialog

2008-12-15T21:55:00.006+01:00

Feedback on portraits is pretty good. The poll is unquestionable... 38 / 0 in favor of realistic portraits...

I'll setup a little test to see if/how portraits can really improve the storytelling process. Here is a dialog that I find pretty good. I didn't write it myself. See if one of you can find where it comes from... ;) I've hidden the character names so that it's not too easy...

I'll post the version with portraits within a few days...

Girl [close to tears] : I'm sorry. It was my fault. Why do I have to be treated like this ? Just because I'm a little different ? It's not fair... [sob] [hears a music box]
Boy [the music box in his hand. looks surprised]
Girl [sees the boy. frowns]
Boy : You like it ? Why else would you be staring ?
Girl : I thought... I just thought it was a pretty song. That's all.
Boy : Really ? [see the horns] Oh ! Are those going out of your head ? They look like horns !
Girl : I'm sure you think my horns are disgusting don't you ?
Boy : What ?
Girl : I'm sick of this. I'm sick of it all.
Boy : That's cool ! They're so cool ! No way, that's totally awesome ! I'm nearly jealous !
Girl : You're jealous ? You have no idea how much trouble these horns have caused to me.
Boy : Uh... I'm not sure what you mean, but I don't think I've ever seen anything that cool ! I'm not kidding. I think they're great.
Girl : Leave me alone. You're not funny.
Boy : Hey ! What do you think, do you want to be friends ?
Girl : You must be joking
Boy : What ? Why is that ?
Girl : It's because I hate all of you.
Boy : You hate all of us ?... Hold on ! Listen ! My name is XXX. Same time tomorrow. I'll be waiting for you right here. Don't forget to come. I'll be here. I promise.

First emotions

2008-12-11T00:28:00.005+01:00

Eyebrow / eyes only.

WFT ???!!! A tourist in hawaian shirt ? In a cave ?

Ah man.. I don't remember... Did he say the blue pill or the red pill ?

Oh my god... This guy will never release his game...

Why would she call me a pervert in the first place ?? She's so un-cute...

I wish I never accepted this portrait job...

Some clothes

2008-12-06T18:30:00.008+01:00

At least, since I junked GTA4 10 minutes after I finished installing it, I had more time to work on tcod portraits... Here is the complete good happy family with clothes. Those versions are bigger than the in-game portraits. The guy still has those weird plastic hair. I'll improve it later.

Since it's rather difficult to find pictures of people in medieval clothes, I'm using several sources of inspiration. There are first a few on-line medieval clothes shops :
here and here

I'm also using a few very good comics with medieval settings :
Lanfeust of Troy
and François Bourgeon's awesome Companions of the dusk

It's very cool to take a little refreshing break, drawing a few new layers from time to time. The next steps are the emotion engine and more eyes/nose/mouth variations. I have first to figure out what set of eyebrows/eyes/mouth I need to represent the main emotions. I improved the engine so that it works directly with the full size layers (220x220). Once the final portrait has been created, the game uses a high quality supersampling technics to scale it down to the appropriate size (either 64x64 or 80x80). This feature has been recently added in libtcod svn version. It allows not only to work with the original pics without having to scale them by hand, but it makes it also possible to do a few new tricks, like randomly translating vertically the eyes / nose / mouth position just by a few pixels before the scaling operation to increase the portrait diversity. I'm also thinking about splitting the eyes into 3 layers : eyeball, iris+pupil, eyelid. This would allow to move the pupil inside the eye which would be great for the emotion engine.

[OT] Gamer theft 4

2008-12-06T15:53:00.006+01:00

This pixel soup runs at 5 fps, while Far Cry 2 and Crysis run perfectly fine on my pc

There was a time some game company did great games, with unprecedented freedom, great gameplay and awesome story/dialogs. This company produced 3 games that were huge hits. For some reason, this company decided to stop earning money from pc gamers... My advice to everyone reading this blog : DON'T BUY THIS SHIT UNTIL THEY FINISH IT (maybe in two years according to the current status of the game...).

The worst in this story is that the game was probably done by enthusiast game programmers until some millionaire producer woke up one day decided that he needed another ferrari so he stuffed the game with shitware and released it before it's finished... I hope he dies in horrible agony, being raped by a cave troll...

Kids...

2008-12-05T22:32:00.002+01:00

Hehe I'm getting good at this :)
This is definitely the right way to do it as I would never have been able to get such good graphics without a real picture as back-up. It took me less than one hour to do those ones. Now I'll have to provide all those people with some cool medieval clothes.

First male portrait

2008-12-04T22:15:00.003+01:00

This seems to work for males too (sorry no clothes yet. I could have put him a dress from the female portrait but I'm not sure he would have enjoyed...). He still lacks personality, but I try to create the template from the most archetypal model as possible.

Also see the improved female portrait. Doing the male made me realize that the female has a neck slightly too long... I'll fix that soon.

portrait v2

2008-12-03T23:41:00.010+01:00

It seems I found a way to compensate for my poor artistic skills. Instead of trying to draw portraits from scratch, I tried to draw on top of real pictures. Results are encouraging. The problem is that they might be less legible than the big headed comic-like portraits... What you say ? (please try not to judge the girl attractiveness but what would be the best in the game!).

Roguelikes

2008-11-28T23:48:00.005+01:00

This seems to be a good time for roguelike coding.

First, Donblas's Magecrawl, which has been put not long ago on the shelf, made a unexpected come back with a working early demo. You can get it here (windows only for now) :

http://magecrawl.googlecode.com/

Magecrawl, by Donblas

And then, there's Merc's project. Merc has been working in the shadow for six months but recently announced an upcoming demo on roguecentral forums, along with a few tempting screenshots. I have to admit it has the most somptuous ASCII graphics I've seen since Aviel's stand...

The way of fallen, by Merc

While both projects are in very early stage, I'm very glad to see some very promising true color text-mode roguelike surfacing. After all, this is what libtcod is all about... ;)

Procedural skin/hair color and jewelry

2008-11-23T19:46:00.002+01:00

The grayscale layers used in the portraits have some very convenient properties. For example, to randomize skin or hair color, I just have to multiply the corresponding layer by a float factor (between 0.5 and 1.5 for hair). I also added new layers to support jewelry.

Following Mingos advice, I changed the eyes so that they look less manga. The eye/mouth/eyebrows still have only one version.

Women, women, are there no men in Doryen ? Well, before I start another set of layers, I want to be sure that I have explored all the procedural possibilities.

first real procedural portrait

2008-11-22T16:44:00.003+01:00

Here is the first portrait actually created from independent elements (body / clothes / face / mouth / nose / eyes / eyebrows / hairs), and totally drawn from scratch. It took me two hours to reach this point. Making additional sets of eyes/hair/... should be much faster. I hope so, because there are loads of elements to draw, especially since I decided that portraits should also reflect the character's mood... That means that each set of mouth/eyes/eyebrows must be drawn for each mood supported by the engine.

Pixel level grayscale graphics

2008-11-19T20:14:00.003+01:00

Ok, Jotaf's idea has just left the world of vapourware.
Here is the first shot of a greyscale bitmap dynamically mapped to unused ASCII codes and printed on the console.

Right now, the portrait is a placeholder shamelessly ripped from faceyourmanga.com. As you can see, it works pretty well and we could almost think it's actually colored, but it's displayed using the same color as the text next to it (a very dark brown) and the different colors are the result of different alpha values. Of course, this only works if you use a 32 bit font, as a 24 bit font has no alpha layer and could only produce monochrome bitmaps.

Of course, now I'll have a hard time trying to convince people that this is a text-mode game...

Yeah, I know... Doryen's dwellers have a strange way to say hello...

Now, the question is... Will I be able to do decent graphics for the procedural portraits system...

Colored city

2008-11-06T20:55:00.004+01:00

I finally allowed TCOD to use custom foreground colors. Now walls, roofs, doors go through the same shading pipeline as the ground color (background color of the console). I'm not yet really convinced by its new look, but for sure it's more... well, graphical...

Subcells, trees, python...

2008-10-30T23:58:00.004+01:00

I think I finally reached the limit of 2x2 subcell graphics... Even with a small 8x8 font, the 4x4 subcells are too big for such usage...

subcell graphics gone wrong...

Now I'm left with two solutions : either allow true graphics which would be a terrible blasphemy or give up with such embellishment... The other feature I'll have to cancel was to display the character's face in their dialog box, to give more personality to all those @ :). With the subcell resolution, this would require the face bitmap to cover half of the screen... Impossible to stuff in a small dialog box using only a few console lines... I have still a small hope to succeed, using very small faces sprites... Keep posted...

I also worked a bit on trees and forest. I tried my best to have something as hot as in Aviel's stand... and I failed ! Forests don't look that bad, but on another hand, they don't look that good neither :). I have still to work on them.

aviel's stand trees rip-off gone wrong...

At least I've found a new usage for the packer (to be included in libtcod 1.5). I use it to easily put forests on top of cities without bothering about tree/building overlapping.

city in the middle of a forest

Now concerning libtcod, I've just released a new 1.4.1 beta for all platforms/languages including an improved python wrapper. The heightmap tool can now generate code in every supported language (C, C++, python).
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

libtcod 1.4 for python released !

2008-10-25T15:50:00.005+02:00

Now you can use every feature from the Doryen library in python.
Note that the wrapper is in early beta stage and may be updated often.
It has been tested on Windows with python 2.6 and on Linux with python 2.5.
It includes every libtcod sample ported to python.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

TDL, the full blown python library from Kyle Stewart is not canceled. It will be built on top of this thin wrapper to provide you with a smoother python integration and lots of added value (like parameters values checks and proper python error handling).

libtcod 1.4.0 released!

2008-10-16T21:11:00.002+02:00

This version fixes a few bugs in the latest 1.4.0 beta and slightly improve simplex noise speed.
Enjoy !

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

Subcell resolution, antialiased font in action

2008-10-10T20:24:00.005+02:00

Early concept of game introduction for TCOD... Does it still look like a text-based game ? Yet it is...

libtcod 1.4.0 beta 2 released

2008-09-30T23:13:00.003+02:00

This version adds antialiased fonts from greyscale bitmap support and custom/dynamic character mapping. Dynamic character mapping makes it possible to change the character in the font associated with an ASCII code, allowing mainly to use several fonts in the game. See the documentation for details.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

Sub-cell resolution - a blessing or a curse

2008-09-28T10:37:00.009+02:00

While not planned for the libtcod 1.4 release, there is already a working prototype of the sub-cell resolution module in TCOD. This might be a rather controversial module. With true colors and customizable bitmaps fonts, we might already wonder if libtcod still produce text-mode games. With this module, the question is even more justified. Of course from the technical point of view, we still only print fixed size characters from a set of 256. But from the gamer point of view, distinguishing between games using libtcod and full graphics games is more and more difficult. Of course using the sub-cell toolkit to do an actual graphical game would be stupid. It's only there to improve the game look to make it more appealing. Look at those early screenshots from TCOD (title screen and death screen).

Now look at the new version, using the sub-cell resolution. It looks like real graphics uh ? And yet it only uses 7 special characters (see this post). Zoom on the picture and you'll see that every console cell always contain only 2 colors (foreground/background). While being highly unoptimized, the sub-cell toolkit is already fast enough for fullscreen animation with the 80x50 TCOD console as you can see on the youtube video below. The question is... Is sub-cell resolution evil ? Maybe I'm pushing too far the visual limits and in the process, TCOD may definitely lose its mind as a text-mode game... Should I really add this in libtcod 1.5 ? I'm waiting for your comments / votes on this subject.

libtcod 1.4 heightmap tool in action

2008-09-23T01:22:00.001+02:00

More font power to come to libtcod 1.4

2008-09-20T02:35:00.006+02:00

Trying to push further what can be done with 256 characters, I added two nifty features to an upcoming 1.4.0b2 :

support for antialiased fonts from greyscale PNG. Fonts are easier to create and modify on a greyscale picture than on a 32 bit PNG with an alpha channel. You can use either white fonts on black background or black fonts on white background.
the mapping of the ascii values to the font can now be changed dynamically. This allows not only to use some more intuitive font layouts than the standard ASCII layout (a simple predefined "TCOD" layout can be used, or you can define your own), but it can also be used to store several fonts in the same bitmap and switch from one to another in the game. You can for example use styled characters for texts and a classic terminal font for dungeons.

Greyscale (antialiased) test font with the more convenient 32x8 "TCOD" layout.
There is still room for lots of special characters.
Note the two different sets of letters than can be used simultaneously in the game.
This font uses 256 characters but the engine can handle up to 1024 different characters, only 256 being mapped at one time.

libtcod 1.4.0 beta released

2008-09-18T00:24:00.003+02:00

This beta might last longer than the previous ones because there are a lot of new stuff in this version, so probably lots of bugs ... :) Some modules have been barely tested (zip module) and some are more toys than actual useful stuff (heightmap module, hmtool). Anyway if you feel like giving it a try, it's here :)

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

More antialiased fonts

2008-09-15T22:42:00.003+02:00

Here is a comparison between the libtcod 1.3.2 terminal font and the libtcod 1.4 new antialiased font. At scale 1, the difference is barely noticeable, but when the game is run in full screen, the AA font looks much better.

The AA font look also much better even in windowed modes when we use a 10x10 or 12x12 font instead of the standard 8x8.

Even with characters as small as 10x10, the alpha channel allows to have a very good readability even with more stylized fonts, like this example using an awesome font courtesy of Mingos.

Antialiased fonts support in libtcod 1.4

2008-09-12T12:08:00.007+02:00

hanks to Mingos who prompted me to add support to PNG fonts with an alpha channel, libtcod 1.4 will be able to render antialiased fonts. I've always been sceptical about this being possible and useful. I was wrong. Thanks to a huge optimization in the flush function (the "True colors" sample jumped from 170 frames per second to 300 on my laptop...), not only it works, but it works fast ! Concerning the usefulness, just look at the screenshot and see how smoothed fonts look fine :)

Insight into Umbrarum Regnum's character creation

2008-09-06T22:47:00.013+02:00

I've been lucky enough to have a working version of Umbrarum Regnum to hand. No need to say I was pretty excited as it's the most ambitious project using libtcod for the time being. I won't focus on the game itself as it's well covered on Mingos's website, but rather on the character creation, which I think is representative of the game potential and gives hints about the whole universe that supports the game.

What strikes you first when you run the game is the awesome background animation on the game menus. Mingos has definitely mastered libtcod's noise module, however minimalist it is, and seems to be able to endlessly find new ways to use the perlin noise and it's derived. Unfortunately, there's no way to give an idea of how it look with a static screenshot...

While being losely inspired by the classic DnD-like character creation that you can find in games like Morrowind, UR's system is packed with fresh and surprising ideas, like being able to choose your father's and mother's race independantly, the use of a simple and powerful personnality system or professions having an impact on your character's age. In fact, some advanced professions need so much time to learn that only a few long living races can afford them.

Once the character creation is finished, the main remaining impression is that every property of your character has an impact on its statistics, and most properties are dependant. For example, some professions might not be available if your personnality is not in accord with them.

Of course, there's still a long road before UR can be released as a game, and I know better than anybody how difficult it can be to reach this stage, but I'm pretty confident in Mingos capacity to do some great stuff. Remember that one year ago, he had almost never coded anything...

libtcod 1.4 heightmap tool

2008-09-05T20:28:00.003+02:00

The heightmap tool is improving slowly. While the available tools in the heightmap module are still very limited, it's already pretty cool to be able to stack several operations on the heightmap and then dynamically modify any parameter of any operation and see it's impact of the heightmap in real time.

Moreover, I ventured to start to develop a small widget toolkit for the heightmap tool that might join libtcod if it's useful enough.

On this first screenshot, you can see the UI :

status bar on the top
a small stats panel
the tools panel where you can stack a new operation, change the display mode or export the heightmap
the parameters panel where you see parameters for the selected operation
the history panel, showing the stacked operations

On this shot, I first added fbm to get the landscape base. Then a few hills in the center of the map (thus the visible peak with snow), then a few rain erosion and a last smoothing step. I selected the first operation in the history stack (add fbm) and I can tweak its parameters (noise scale, position, ...).

On this second shot, I moved the fbm to the left (see the sea position). The hills didn't move. They're still on the middle. This shot also shows that when the mouse is away from the UI, it becomes transparent to allow you to see the whole map.

libtcod 1.4.0 sneak peek

2008-08-30T22:47:00.005+02:00

To see on libtcod homepage : a few screenshots of the new samples/tools included with the upcoming libtcod 1.4.0. Get them here and enjoy ;)

news from libtcod 1.4.0

2008-08-27T23:58:00.005+02:00

I've been trying to port libtcod to SFML for a few weeks, but I think it won't be done for the 1.4.0 release. Some SDL features are not yet covered by SFML and even worse, I've got terrible performances with the SFML DrawSprite/DrawShape functions. I didn't do a benchmark, but they're apparently much slower than SDL BlitSurface/FillRect. The first implementation uses the same algorithm as the one used by SDL and while I have 115 fps for the first sample with SDL on libtcod 1.3.2, SFML is stuck at 2 fps... The 1.3.2 does 4000 blits per frame... Pretty intensive.

The good news is that I improved the SDL renderer and I get 170 fps on libtcod 1.4.0 (only a few hundred blits per frame for the first sample).

I'm currently working on the heightmap toolkit. This one won't have a sample but a standalone program to test it : the hmtool ! With it, you'll be able to design your terrain by hand and then get the code to rebuild it from scratch in your roguelike. It's far from being a professional terrain building tool, but it has some nifty features, like the rain erosion function :

The tool is still very basic. Maybe I'll improve it in further versions...
Anyway, things are going pretty smoothly and libtcod 1.4.0 will probably be released during September, maybe with arena 0.8 !

Arachnophobia

2008-07-22T20:05:00.004+02:00

I added some more cool stuff to Arena 0.8 :

creatures are pushed away when they die. The smaller creatures go further.
corpse bleed for a few seconds. The arena rapidly becomes a blood bath. Warning, this game is M rated :)
now the burning condition is visible on the main screen through the creature character color

Some creatures have fancy new skills :

the gnoll becomes a gnoll sorcerer who can metamorphose himself into a much stronger "three headed gnoll abherration"...
the giant spider can enter gestation and summon a bunch of annoying baby spiders

Arachnophobia : so rats and goblins couldn't tame you ? Maybe spiders will...

This inspired me a new challenge : arachnophobia. In this one, new giant spiders regularly enter the arena. You goal is to survive until the end of the round while keeping the total number of spiders under a certain limit. This is tricky since spiders can immobilize you with their web and quietly go and give birth to lots of baby spiders... You'd better bring a lot of firepower with you...

Diablo III

2008-07-18T00:41:00.004+02:00

Ok, this news is completely obsolete since it's already more than two weeks old :)
Anyway, I was expecting the next big thing in the RPG world to be either Fallout 3 or Fable 2. That was without allowing for the announce of Diablo 3. Even if lots of fans seem to be disappointed by the new visuals, I watched the gameplay video and find it awesome...

True 3D, Havok physics, cooperative gameplay... yummy

Go and have a glimpse of this delightful 3D roguelikiness :
http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3

Sneak peek at arena 0.8

2008-07-17T20:53:00.007+02:00

I've set up the challenge system in Arena pretty quickly. It was the occasion to clean the code that was leading to astronaut spaghetti after the quick and dirty development of the custom fight mode... The challenge mode is not yet finished, and things may still change until the 0.8 release.

Challenge selection screen

This is the challenge screen where you can see all available challenges, and which one you achieved. Some challenges can have scores. For the time being, I've setup only 3 challenges with 3 different gameplays :

Goblin hunt : you have to win your fight before the time limit. If you succeed, you can try and improve your time.
Fire dance : your health points shall not decrease beyond a certain limit.
Infestation : you have to kill at least n creatures in a limited time. If you succeed, you can try to improve the number of creatures killed.

Infestation - Rats have never been so dangerous...

All those different game rules have been added pretty easily thanks to a pluggable module system : the game engine handles the core game rules (display the arena and panels, creatures AI, ...) and every specific rules are implemented in small independent modules. Each module handles a specific rule. There is a "time limit" module, an "enemy count" module, ... Even the demo AI on the title screen in now implemented in a "demo" module. When I start a game, I choose which modules I enable. This is really flexible and, I hope, will allow me to experiment and create lots of interesting mods for the upcoming versions.

I also added a few eye candy. Now the arena cast shadows depending on the time of the day. You can see here the same picture in the morning (left) and later in the afternoon (right). Yet, the creatures don't cast shadows. I'm not sure this would improve the look of the game.

Finally, I also added a new "rush" skill for the player. This one makes it possible to run towards opponents, hitting and possibly stunning every one in the way. It's also a good trick to escape your surrounding opponents when your situation becomes alarming...

So the 0.8 may follow 0.7 pretty quickly, but I still have to work on the core gameplay. I'm not satisfied with the fighting system. It's still too tedious. Moreover, the new game modes are really challenging and I have to make the player stronger. I'm thinking about buffing up "lesser skills" and maybe adding superpowerful weapons that you unlock by winning challenges.

There is another cool feature I'd like to have but I still haven't thought about it : fight replays. You should be able to save your fights and play them back later, and possibly post them on the Arena forum. But this may not be in the 0.8 as there are lots of pitfalls to overcome.

libtcod-1.3.2 + arena-0.7

2008-07-12T14:22:00.004+02:00

I updated the libtcod 1.3.2 packages with a small fix for the C# port.

Arena 0.7 is also available in beta with the brand new custom fight mode. Here is my personal tournament highscore : 8012. Try and beat me ;) (without modifying the config files of course...)

libtcod 1.3.2 released

2008-07-11T22:50:00.002+02:00

I put it in "beta" status just in case there is an issue with the packaging. It will become the stable release in a few days.

This is a bugfix release. I also added documentation for the generic container module, that was there since the 1.3.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

News of the Arena

2008-07-10T23:17:00.003+02:00

The next release of the Arena is near. I'm still tweaking the gameplay, trying to make it less confusing and repetitive. I have a few plans to allow the player to enter more smoothly into the game. The main issue for newcomers is currently to see all those different monsters attacking you without knowing them. I'll implement new game modes in the upcoming releases to fix that.

The 0.7 release features a "custom fight" mode in which you can select the creatures you fight.

Custom fight setup screen

This makes it possible for you to experiment with each different creatures. You can see the strength value of your selected opponents so that you can try to beat your score by winning against stronger and stronger opponents. If the tournament mode is too easy for you, here you can add opponents with no strength limit...

Wanna try and fight 10 balrogs ?...

Other modes to be added later are :

a tutorial mode, where a master teaches you the different techniques (parry, combo, shield, ...) one after another.
a challenge mode. Instead of simply having increasingly stronger opponents, you can choose different challenges and try to beat your score. For example, kill the maximum number of goblins in one minute, try and beat some creatures without taking any damages and so on...

libtcod C# bindings / bugfix release / SDL

2008-07-07T20:25:00.003+02:00

Chris "donblas" Hamons is doing a great job creating a C# port of libtcod.

You can download it there :

http://code.google.com/p/libtcod-net/

Many thanks to him, especially since he discovered several bugs in the process. I'll release a 1.3.2 version soon fixing most known bugs and adding documentation for the generic container, an undocumented module already present in libtcod 1.3.1.

Concerning the 1.4 release, I've just discovered the SFML library that seems to be exactly like SDL, but better ! ;).

http://www.sfml-dev.org/features-fr.php

If SFML is as good as it sounds, the 1.4 will probably use it instead of SDL. The immediate advantage for libtcod would be support for more image formats (mainly JPG, PNG, TGA).
Another great advantage for the next releases would be easy sound support. Now that we have some great roguelike tunes, it would be a shame not to be able to use them in games :)

svn repository for libtcod

2008-07-03T15:34:00.002+02:00

You can now browse online the sources of libtcod here :

http://code.google.com/p/libtcod/source/browse

Under tags, you'll find the sources of different releases, starting with the 1.3.1.
If you like to live on the bleeding edge, you have the latest development branch under 'trunk'.

Arena 0.6 is out

2008-06-20T19:57:00.002+02:00

Nothing really new in this release. It tries to reduce the defects of the 0.5 :

first levels less boring by making them more difficult
allow the player to focus on interresting things (special skills, target selection, ...) instead of repeatedly hitting its target

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

Holic Online

2008-06-18T20:01:00.003+02:00

While doing research for the Chronicles of Doryen, I came across this nice MMORPG. It's rather unknown (well I guess so since I had never heard about it until a few days ago) but seems pretty promising.

It has clean manga-style graphics that may not please everyone but it's really a cut above the bulk of free corean MMORPG. Some details could be the signs of a really good game, like the use of Oblivion's speedtree library for the tree rendering. The usual quick and dirty MMORPG doesn't care about having nice and moving trees.

The user interface is very intuitive and pleasant. If fact, I would even dare to compare it to World of Warcraft's GUI in terms of intuitive-but-powerfulness, with some very nice innovations like tags on the ground in cities to show the direction of the main shops.

I didn't play enough to catch a glimpse of the whole game, but early impressions are really good. Of course there are the usual "kill x critters" quests, but WOW has them too. You can upgrade and/or enchant items, there is even a background story which seems much more interresting than the usual MMORPG stuff (in fact the background story of WOW or Guild Wars is so dull that I wouldn't be able to tell anything from them).

And I kept the best bit until the end, it is completely free ! So if you're interrested in MMORPGs and got a not-too-old graphic card, I can only urge you to give it a try :
http://holic.netgame.com/

Work-in-progress crafters GUI

2008-06-11T20:08:00.004+02:00

This is not the definitive version, but it gives a more concrete idea of how it will work.

On the first screen, you see on the left the list of items that the crafter can create. Items for which you don't have the necessary components are disabled. The right side show the part of your inventory relevant to the current item. As you can see, each item has a list of mandatory components and some optional ones.

After selecting an item with ENTER, you can choose which components you want to use. Each time you add a new component, the properties of the resulting item are updated.

Two new articles + TCOD crafting

2008-06-06T21:30:00.002+02:00

Ok, they are not really new. I just recycled two blog posts and converted them to permanent articles on the doryen main site. I think they're interresting enough to deserve a place here !

Dungeon morphing :

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/dungeonmorphing

Dynamic map :

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/dynamicmap

Also, some new stuff from TCOD. I've just implemented the first crafter. Crafters are NPC you can find in towns and they build stuff for you. You bring the raw material and for a few gold pieces they create useful objects. There will be different ways to get raw material. For now, you can get hides on some creatures corpses. The first implemented crafter is the tanner. This guy create leather and hide armors.

The tanner has a list of items he can create. Now what is interresting is that the properties of an item (leather boots for example) are not static. They depend on the type of material you provide. Leather boots require 5 pieces of leather. Leather pieces have different properties depending on the creature they come from. Some give good armor bonus, some have a better durability, etc ... This is interresting because you can get items perfectly adapted to your needs, provided you find the necessary materials.

Finally, raw material is not a special hardcoded type of item. It uses the item feature system (see this) and only adds a few features. Thus, 'raw material' is not really appropriate since any item in the game could be used in the crafting process. This could be used for example to reproduce the potion system used in The Witcher, where you create different potions, and some potions can be used as ingredients for more powerful potions.

libtcod 1.3.1 + arena 0.5

2008-06-05T21:36:00.003+02:00

Two releases at once ! Not bad for a thursday.

libtcod 1.3.1 fixes a few bugs and improves the modules added in the 1.3 with a default parser listener for basic config files and easier mouse button clicks detection. It also support fonts with more than 255 characters.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

arena 0.5 uses libtcod 1.3.1 (the 0.4 version could not be compiled with libtcod 1.3) and adds pathfinding for the creatures along with a few fixes.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

100th post !

2008-06-03T01:26:00.002+02:00

"Come on, 100 posts and no TCOD binary ? And it's not vapourware ?"

( just an allusion to one of my favorite roguelike developers :D )

Nothing really hot here, but I couldn't resist writing the post #100. To refer to another roguelike legend, I'm not going to step in the room, guns blazing. No need to duck.

Indeed, I started dusting the old TCOD code. After a few months on the brand new clean Arena, it takes courage to get back to that old bag with his geological layers of code stacked the ones on the others... I even forgot that TCOD time code was completely based on frames. I have a lot of work to bring it to the level of the Arena where I can tweak the game speed with a single float parameter... Anyway, cleaning things here and there is a good way to slowly get back to the real work. I even already backported a few things from Arena, like the red flashing effect when you're hit and the player's conditions panel. If the Arena and libtcod don't take me too much time, you may here from TCOD soon (not for a release, but at least for new features).

Concerning libtcod, it seems that the BSP toolkit is going to win. I may also add a default parser listener in the parser module. For basic config files, it would save yourself from writing it and you could simply read properties with a basic getProperty( name ) function. For more advanced configuration files, writing your own listener is still the most flexible solution. There are also a lot of feedback on the various artefacts in the Fov toolkit. I won't get out of it, I'll have to add a more robust algorithm. Maybe in the 1.4 too.

Finally, I started fixing a few bugs on the Arena. There are still some missing features like the armor and tiresome bugs like the sleeping AI, but I'll treat this more in a coffee break fashion, getting back to Arena from time to time when I'm bored with TCOD or libtcod.

Arena 0.4

2008-05-30T20:51:00.003+02:00

You can get the new version of Arena with a lot of new stuff, including some demo fights on the title screen.
I didn't work too much on the skills balance, but rather on the gameplay. There is now more feedback, especially when you get hit. I reduced the default speed of the game as the last version was a bit too frenzied.

I also introduced the balrog in the arena. Beware, this one is pretty nasty...

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

The Doryen Arena is released

2008-05-28T23:32:00.004+02:00

It's still unfinished and a bit crude, but it has already some interresting gameplay and a lot of config files to play with. The AI is particularly bugged, so there will probably be some new releases soon. It also lacks finishing touches, especially in the static screens (title, death, victory). Well, after all,it's supposed to be a prototype to balance the melee fighting system, not a full blown game !

The main page :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

The forums :
http://roguecentral.free.fr/arena/forum

libtcod 1.4 candidate features

2008-05-25T14:23:00.005+02:00

You can vote for the features of the next release. Here is what I have in mind :

BSP toolkit :

This toolkit allows you to easily create BSP trees and traverse them in various way. BSP trees are currently used in TCOD to create dungeons (see this).

Heightmap toolkit :

This toolkit, combined with the Perlin noise toolkit, is used to build realistic overmaps (see this). But anything that needs a 2D array of floats can use it. TCOD uses it for the cloud layer of its weather system.

Subcell graphics toolkit :

This toolkit will allow to draw bitmaps using a resolution twice bigger than the console's resolution. For example, you can draw a 16x16 bitmap on a region of 8x8 console cells. It sounds too good, but there are a few limitations : you won't be able to draw text of this region because the subcell toolkit already uses the foreground color. Also, your bitmap's colors will be altered since the toolkit uses posterization. This toolkit uses the following 6 special characters to simulate pixels smaller than the console cells :

Pathfinding toolkit :

This toolkit will be linked with the FOV toolkit and will allow you to easily :
find the path from a creature to the player at no cost by tagging the cells in the player field of view.
find a path from two arbitrary points using Djikstra algorithm.
find a path from two arbitrary points using A* algorithm.

libtcod 1.3 is out !

2008-05-25T12:41:00.002+02:00

Just a few fixes since the beta. The documentation still has missing pages (in the "Compiling with libtcod" chapter).

libtcod in python

2008-05-24T14:08:00.002+02:00

Kyle Stewart has just announced on the Doryen forums the availability of a python port of libtcod. You can download it there :

http://4b796c65.googlepages.com/tdl

It's based on the 1.2.2 version, works for Windows and Linux, seems pretty complete and even has an improved version of the Field of View toolkit, using permissive field of view. Thanks a lot to him, and happy coding to all the python roguelike developpers !

Bad weather on The Arena

2008-05-20T21:25:00.006+02:00

The Arena is taking shape and I spend some time on the eyecandy necessary to a Doryen game. I ported some of the weather features of TCOD to the arena and played a bit with some new ones. I'm pretty satisfied with the fog and I will definitely add it to TCOD too as soon as possible.
Each fight in the arena occurs at a random time of the day and with a random weather. It has absolutely no impact on the game but The Arena is also supposed to display the visual possibilities of libtcod.

So here are a few screenshots showing different atmospheres : rain, sunny, dawn, light fog, heavy fog, night. Each is not a unique atmosphere, they can combine : fog at night, rain during fog, ..

Fable : The Lost Chapter

2008-05-19T23:19:00.004+02:00

I recently came across Fable : The Lost Chapters. I've been hearing from it for years, but never took a look at it. Now it's a 3 years old game, it's very cheap, so I bought it, thinking "even if it sucks, I won't spend too much money"...

I've been playing it for a week, and ... what a good surprise ! The best gaming experience since GTA San Andreas... It's even better than The Witcher in term of gameplay, and it definitely entered my list of top game references for TCOD (along with Oblivion and Guild Wars).

Oblivion was my first source of inspiration and the first features I wanted to have in TCOD was Oblivion-like towns with houses full of objects you can steal. But I found out quickly that it would be a hell to implement. Oblivion tags stolen objects so that you cannot sell them to merchants. I don't like this, but Oblivion do it because every single object in every house of the world is an actual world entity that can be taken, dropped, stolen. Allowing you to sell stolen item would allow you to empty the whole world.

Doing it in ascii was also pretty difficult. How can you represent a house full of objects, dishes, furnitures in an ASCII world ??

Fable handle this in a very elegant way. Every object in the house is not a world entity. Instead, furnitures full of objects are only figurative. A bookcase can be represented full of books, but when you interact with it, you will be able to take only one book. Thus, each house contains only a limited number of objects that you can steal (0 or 1 per furniture), and when you have taken everything you can, the house don't look empty. Of course, this is not as realist as the Oblivion approach, but I find it superior in term of gameplay.

After I release the Arena, I'll probably add this feature to TCOD. Why objects in houses are so important to the game when it lacks so many other basic gameplay mechanisms ? In fact, in my mind, the stealth gameplay will be very important in TCOD. With objects in the houses, the thief gameplay will be within reach. I can't help myself thinking about tactical missions where you have to break into a manor/castle and evade the guards to get a precious object. This will be very refreshing after an hour of troll bashing... :)

Projects updated on the libtcod homepage

2008-05-12T02:48:00.002+02:00

I updated the "projects using the Doryen library" section.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

If you're using libtcod and have something to show, feel free to send me information about your project, I'll add it.

I've been away from the Doryen projects for a few weeks, but I hope I'll be able to go back to them soon...

TCOD dynamic map video !

2008-05-06T23:05:00.002+02:00

Ok, this is not new, but I couldn't resist showing the real time thing. Here is the real time scaling feature of the world map in the Chronicles of Doryen.
You can get the high definition version here :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/tcod_dynmap.avi
or simply watch it on youtube, and remember... it's only ASCII :D

libtcod 1.3 beta released for Linux

2008-05-02T18:33:00.001+02:00

Get it on the library homepage :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

libtcod 1.3 beta released for Windows

2008-05-01T11:06:00.002+02:00

The Linux version should be out quickly.
I didn't have time to polish this one so I release it in beta.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

Arena death screen update

2008-03-21T20:50:00.003+01:00

Things are getting better. It still lacks the tombstones and some more polishing... It's supposed to feature volumetric fog, but it's not noticeable. Hopefully, tombstones will make it more apparent...

arena death screen... voxels

2008-03-21T00:46:00.002+01:00

Ok, one first good news, I've been able to setup a basic voxel engine for the cemetary ground. I expected it to be more difficult to settle. Currently, it looks awful, but with some lighting and fog effect, that'll do... The next difficult stuff is the fog. I don't know if I'll be able to make it look as good as I would like...

Arena death screen / mouse support

2008-03-20T21:48:00.003+01:00

This is an early quick and dirty concept for the arena death screen. It doesn't look anything special here, but what I have in mind may be even better than TCOD's flaming skull... I cant' say more for now, I might know more about its feasibility tonight. This picture was just a test to see if could look good enough on a 80x50 resolution. The image has been scaled up 3 times here.

Concerning libtcod 1.3, the mouse support has already been added. Early adopters can find it here (sorry, only mingw32 version before the final release) :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/libtcod-1.3wip-mingw32.zip
It's a work-in-progress version, so anything could still change until the final release. Especially the wheel_up / wheel_down flags that don't seem to work.