ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

this stuff's gone

You might want to consider using T-Engine 4. Still uses Lua and all those good things that come with it. It is a better engine than T-3.

I tried out ToME 4 a while ago and couldn't stand to play it more than a few minutes at a time. And I tried several times; I just couldn't get into it at all.

I hated the graphical menu nonsense you have to go through before even playing a game (made even worse by the fact that it was all glitched-up, with some of the buttons in the wrong place and blocks of multi-colored pixel noise here and there.) Something about it reminds me of a MassivelyMoronicOonlineRepetitivePukeGame, which is not a good thing at all. Also, I just don't like mouse-based interfaces in games; the keyboard will always be better.

I hated the tiles. Which is not surprising, since I've yet to see a set of roguelike tiles that aren't horrible. At least they were big enough that I could usually tell what things were, unlike pretty much every other roguelike tileset I've ever seen.

I really hated the fact that the default graphical setting was "@ and letters for the monsters, tiles for everything else" and that I needed to fumble around with the options for a while just to get rid of the graphical stuff. This is actually even worse than just having tiles for everything (which is something I never thought I'd see: a roguelike graphical mode worse than "tiles for everything.")

Even more than I hated that, I hated the fact that it seemed impossible to make it look like anything even vaguely resembling the classic ASCII font. Even when you set it to text-only, it looks more like "someone opened up Word with a huge font and started typing" and nothing like the old ASCII. I like the look of plain old somewhat-blocky ASCII font, especially in roguelikes. Seeing what looks like any old Windows font, with its huge round @ symbols and its variable-width letters and its slanted # symbols that don't even come close to passing as walls, just doesn't work for me. It didn't help that the text came in all different sizes (from "nearly unreadable" in some of the menus to "ludicrously huge" for the @, map features, items, and monsters) rather than the old ASCII-like every-letter-the-same-size thing.

I hated seeing little damage numbers pop up on the player/monsters whenever an attack took place. I was also mildly annoyed by the sound effects, but I think the bouncing numbers were the real problem there. One thing I've always liked about roguelikes is that you can never be sure exactly how much damage you've done until the critter's dead, and the damage is actually described instead of just put into pure numbers--I like seeing messages like "the greater demon claws you!" and "you slash the poison fungus!" scrolling past at the top of the screen, not just a red "23" that flies over your head for a few seconds. Bouncing damage numbers aren't always bad (they're good in Final Fantasy-type RPGs), but I don't want to see them in a roguelike.

I hated the fact that there were tons of highlights and pop-up windows.

I hated the fact that there were apparently no messages scrolling up at the top of the screen. I don't know if this was something I accidentally turned off somehow or if it's the way things work by default, but I didn't like the fact that I needed to use the Look command just to figure out what a monster was even after it attacked me or I attacked it. Seeing a little damage number pop up over my head when a brown J gets close just plain sucks compared to seeing "the python bites you!" show up in the black space at the top of the screen.

I hated the fact that, much like the previous problem, walking over an item didn't give me any description of the item. The only way to find out what kind of potion I had just stepped over was to actually pick it up. I miss seeing "a bubbling white potion" pop up as soon as I stepped over said potion.

I hated the fact that it seemed nearly impossible to actually see my stats anywhere on the screen; even though I prefer the way ADoM did it (stats and stuff horizontally at the bottom of the screen) to the way Angband variants do it (vertically on the left side), not having my stats visible at all is just horrible. All that glitchy graphical space and there's not even anything there to cover some of it up? Again, not sure if this was a glitch, some feature I accidentally turned on/off without realizing it, or just the way it's supposed to look... but either way, it's really bad.

But at least I can't say I hate everything about TE4.

The new skills system, while a little strange due to the unfamiliarity of it all, seems like it might be at least worth looking into. Of course, I'd have to look into it more before deciding whether I actually like it or not, but I like different skill systems in general; I haven't yet run into one that I really hated, and I've played a lot of roguelikes with a lot of different systems for that kind of thing. I think the main thing keeping me from actually looking at the skill menu long enough to figure out whether I like it or not is the "graphical crap and Windowsy fonts" look that all the menus have in TE4.

The changes to stats seem to generally be decent; having the Intelligence equivalent do more than just magic makes a lot of sense, and making Magic be its own stat instead of having it run off of intelligence seems like a good idea too (intelligence = magic only makes sense for the "learns spells by studying books for hours" type of magic anyway.) I guess removing Charisma isn't too bad considering that it wasn't really used for much in previous versions, and is generally considered the "throw-away" stat in most games that even have a Charisma stat to begin with.

The music wasn't bad; some of it was actually kind of nice, despite the weirdness of having music in a PC roguelike. I seem to remember seeing music-related options in TE3 too, though, so this might not be all that new.

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Of course, I haven't really messed with T-Engine 4 much (I'd have to re-download it if I wanted to take more of a look at it, since I deleted the whole thing after the first few failed attempts to not hate it), so it's entirely possible that it's not quite as awful as it seemed going by my first impressions of it.

But, from what I've seen, TE4 is not for me.

original post wrote:Yeah, T-Engine 4 has the high degree of "editable-ness" as well, but... every time I've tried ToME 4, I get this overwhelming urge to delete the entire program and never look at it again. So version 3 it is!

Maybe I should've put the "please don't point me toward TE4" warning in bigger text to begin with.

I'm sorryou do not like ToME, however still TE4 can be made into what you want, you can have old looking font, you can have no flying text you can have no music or tiles or whatever. ToME is build upon TE4, not the other way around.

Anyway good luck

I'm sorryou do not like ToME, however still TE4 can be made into what you want, you can have old looking font, you can have no flying text you can have no music or tiles or whatever. ToME is build upon TE4, not the other way around.

That's good to hear. I figured that a lot of things would be customizable, I was just so turned off by my first impression of the whole thing that I didn't give it much of a chance. Maybe someday I'll try looking into the files for long enough to figure out how to make the changes I want.

Question: Would the list of things that you can get rid of include that graphics/mouse-based menu at the very start, with the save/load/etc. options? I figure the look of the skills menu, placement of stats/messages on screen, etc. can be changed because those are module-specific things, but isn't the startup menu part of the engine itself? The menu in TE3 doesn't bother me quite as much (since at least it's text-based), but it'd be really strange to have all that graphical stuff in the starting menu for a game that's all-text.

Most of ToME 4's main gameplay systems--skills, stats, etc.--don't seem too bad (from the brief look I had at them), but I just can't stand all the unnecessary graphical nonsense and font weirdness. It also bothered me a bit that the ZIP file I downloaded was over 70 megabytes when all previous versions have been around 3 or 4; this makes it pretty much impossible to download on dial-up, and a bit slow even on better connections. Is this just because of all the graphics and such inflating the filesize, or is the program itself ridiculously huge for some reason?

Maybe having some sort of "old-style ASCII" example module (to show people that it is indeed possible for TE4 to make a roguelike that actually looks like a roguelike) would be a good idea.

/me ponders how you manage a browser or even just your OS gui (unless you do it all in command line ;> )

The startup is obviously part of the engine yes since no module are loaded at that time.
I personnaly do plan to do some quick 7DRLs that are ascii only and it does not bother me in the least.

I wanted to recreate Rogue inside TE4, that cold be of use to you I suppose

As for the size, just get the music-less version.

/me ponders how you manage a browser or even just your OS gui (unless you do it all in command line ;> )

Heh, nah, I don't go quite that far. It's mostly just in roguelikes that I prefer the ASCII to anything graphical, though sometimes I run into a GUI in some other program that I don't like much (like some of the more recent Windows versions... getting rid of the old-style Start menu in Windows 7 was one of the most idiotic changes Microsoft has ever made. Glad I've still got XP.)

I actually wouldn't be completely against a graphical roguelike, if only the graphical mode was set up more like a regular 2D video game (with player/monster/item sprites and maptiles being separate, animations for walking in different directions and when things happen, graphics that are 2D and non-awful, a more video-gamey looking font, etc.) rather than a mess of clunky tiles and Windowsy-looking fonts and menus.

If graphics in non-ASCII-mode roguelikes all looked as good as something like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (or any other 2D SNES/GBA/DS game, really; doesn't necessarily have to be quite as cartoony as a Pokémon game), I might actually play one with "graphics mode" turned on every once and a while.

As for the size, just get the music-less version

Ah, so it's the music that's inflating the file size so much. Yeah, music files (especially MP3 and similar formats) tend to be ridiculously huge... I'm not sure why I didn't consider that as a possibility.