SDL Consoles
lochok
I've started working on what I hope will eventuate to be a western
roguelike. Knowing me, there is very little hope that the project will
ever see the light of day.
I've so far reimplemented a basic console and message display using SDL.
Its a solution I'm surprised more people don't do - the console library
I've written whilst not being fantastic is less then 300 lines of code
(pascal) - and you get so much flexibility with it. Suddenly you can use
any other graphics etc to add some extra flavour to the look.
Really - I've done no actual games programming on this project as yet.
I've reimplemented console functions and the message display. But I've
uploaded a screenshot to show how backgrounds could potentially be used
to make a roguelike look a bit better. The console doesn't even have a
fake roguelike on it - its a test pattern I made for the console itself.
But its possibly worth a look if you're thinking of trying something a
bit different with your RL.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44400533@N06/4078535105/
Lochok
Jotaf
A western RL, as in, not a japanese RL? :P
It looks pretty cool. To answer your question, people just don't
bother! There's the lure of curses' multi-platformism and possibility
of playing through telnet; also, many RL tutorials are still based on
curses and many people have their own wrappers for curses as well. The
only serious attempt at using SDL for console rendering is libtcod,
and it was well received.
Are you planning to tie the background image to the current location?
Canyons, desert, town, saloon... I wonder what would be the effects on
player immersion. I think it would be analogous to DoomRL's use of
sound effects, and if done well it could be awesome!
Jotaf
Paul Donnelly
Nice looking background images you've got there. I'm ready to post the
whole McQuown gang out of town right now. A western could be fun.
As for SDL, perhaps some people don't use it because then they would
feel it incumbent on them to include a lot of graphics they don't feel
up to doing.
Krice
> uploaded a screenshot to show how backgrounds could potentially
> be used to make a roguelike look a bit better.
There is background graphics for letters in Teemu:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/paulkp/teemu/teemu.htm
I think it's even better than one backgroung image, because
you can see easier what the tile is. In full ascii roguelike
it's not always obvious.
I also find SDL easy to work with and you can create a
custom GUI for a roguelike without limits.
knu...@talecraftpictures.com
console look. As does my own game at www.asciisector.net (which is
also programmed in Pascal! Yay!). I absolutely love it. The
combination of SDL + FreePascal means that I can compile the same code
for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux with only commenting/uncommenting 2
lines for the Mac OS X version. That's right; 2 lines is all I have to
change to compile for three different operating systems. I'm not doing
any background images and stuff like that -- it's pure console look --
since I feel that if you first go down that path, you might as well go
fully graphical. But that's just my personal preference. I absolutely
love working with SDL + FreePascal!
Christian Knudsen
stu
> I've so far reimplemented a basic console and message display using SDL.
> Its a solution I'm surprised more people don't do - the console library
> I've written whilst not being fantastic is less then 300 lines of code
> (pascal) - and you get so much flexibility with it. Suddenly you can use
> any other graphics etc to add some extra flavour to the look.
SDL is piss easy to use and more people use it than you think.
looks pretty cool. do we get to play the AT with no name??
-stu
lochok
> On 6 Nov, 00:17, "lochok <\"lochok\"@optusnet." <"NOSPAM!> wrote:
>> Howdy
>>
>> I've started working on what I hope will eventuate to be a western
>> roguelike. Knowing me, there is very little hope that the project will
>> ever see the light of day.
>>
>> http://www.flickr.com/photos/44400533@N06/4078535105/
>>
>> Lochok
>
> A western RL, as in, not a japanese RL? :P
>
>
> Are you planning to tie the background image to the current location?
> Canyons, desert, town, saloon... I wonder what would be the effects on
> player immersion. I think it would be analogous to DoomRL's use of
> sound effects, and if done well it could be awesome!
>
> Jotaf
Hmmm - I hadn't considered that. I like the idea - it could work well -
but I'm going to aim first to have a playable game. I'm liking the idea
of sounds (if I can find under good licenses or produce myself) and
music (I play guitar and compose - doable) too.
In general - I think because I've been [losing] playing a bit of DoomRL
as recent, some of it will creep in (if I can actually get it to a
playable state). There are some things which it does which could work
well in a spaghetti-western style RL but I think some things will need
to be done a fair bit differently to make it more then a shoot-em-up
(think Clint Eastwood as opposed to John Wayne...). But that's all in my
head still... I have to get past getting a working engine first!