Making a good description for ToME4 and T-Engine

[Canderel]

[*]Diablo I - Yes
[*]Diablo II - Yes... kinda
[*]Diablo III, well, we'll see.
[*]Eye of the beholder - No... Not sure as to why yet... lemme ponder... Elaborate parties?
[*]Dungeon Siege I (never played any of the others) - No, way too linear...Especially in terms of the map. But almost.

Maybe we should create a new topic : What defines roguelikes, but at the moment we're seriously drifting off topic...

[Jaorin]

In my mind, being non-ascii by default disqualifies it as a roguelike.

Nethack and Angband are tile-based graphics by default on installation. Those are both clearly roguelikes.

Wikipedia gives the following definition.

"The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Many early roguelikes featured ASCII graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue."

ToME fits very neatly within that description.

Edit: I do prefer ascii mode on most roguelikes.

[greycat]

Nethack and Angband are tile-based graphics by default on installation.

Are not. Well, at least I'm 100% sure that Nethack is not. I haven't actually looked at Angband in some time, but I'd be massively surprised if they did the whole SDL thing like T-Engine does. Last time I looked at Angband, the default configuration was something like USE_X11 + USE_GCU (or whatever the flag for libcurses was called). And USE_X11 was just multiple windows of text, not tiles.

[Gwai]

NetHack is installed with tiles and asci, but asci is the default.

[greycat]

http://www.nethack.org/v343/download-src.html

nethack-343-src.tgz (3.6M bytes) (MD5 sum: 21479c95990eefe7650df582426457f9)
NetHack 3.4.3 source release.

Unpack, read the README, step 5 says: "It is worth mentioning that the default configuration is SysV/Sun/Solaris2.x (simply because the code was housed on such a system)."

sys/unix/Install.unx says... well, a lot. But it does not contain the word "tile". It talks about how you need to edit about 3 dozen different files scattered throughout the tree. Just like I remember. It has not changed in all these years.

If you're talking about some binary build for Windows, then you're simply in a different world than I'm in.

[Gwai]

Installed with might be a broad word. I would have said that the files are there you just need to make changes if you want such things. As someone who would never ever play NH with tiles, I haven't tried to make them and if you say they would be too inconvenient to fairly be considered included in the package, I believe you.

[greycat]

Hmm... well, there are apparently some "tiles" under win/share/. win/share/tile.doc (which despite the filename is not an MS Word document, but rather, a text file) says "Window ports can optionally make use of the tiles (pictures for NetHack symbols) found in this directory. They are distributed in a text format with routines to help in converting them to a system's preferred format and using them there."

I can't say I've ever seen them in action, though. I've only ever played Nethack in ASCII. It sounds like there would be a fair bit of work to get them working (and then you couldn't play in a terminal either). I'm willing to concede that the official binary builds may have done whatever work is involved in this. I've never used a binary build either.

(Also note that it says "Window ports" not "Windows ports". It's not talking about Microsoft Windows, but rather, windowing systems in a generalized way. This threw me at first.)

[Jaorin]

Maybe I should have said "The default windows binary for nethack is a tiled version of the game."

Here's what it looks like. It works like this right out of the box on Windows (works in wine too).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/somecampbe ... 0/#preview

I know this because I had to specifically download a dos version just so I wouldn't have to deal with the annoying interface on a Windows only computer.

[Gwai]

I'd forgotten that. How horrible. Maybe I usually downloaded the DOS versions.

[Jaorin]

Yeah. If I remember right, Angband is even worse. I think it's a fullscreen tile mode thing.

ToME 4 is the first roguelike that I've played where I actually prefer the graphics. I guess it's sort of a mix though. It's got graphics for the terrain but not the player or monster. It's kind of a nice hybrid (obligatory DG rocks!).

[Canderel]

Right, so anybody ready for:
Making a good description for ToME4 and T-Engine?

Tome : A rich and complex game set in Middle Earth's 4th age (after the ring's destruction), that features atmospheric music, unlockable game content and features, difficulty settings to help the newer players along and a vibrant community.* A must for all roguelike fans.

T-Engine 4.0 (beta4) : An SDL based engine for creating realtime and turnbased games using LUA scripting.

*: Who can deliberate 10-20 posts long on what a roguelike is...

[Yottle]

Right, so anybody ready for:
Making a good description for ToME4 and T-Engine?

Tome : A rich and complex game set in Middle Earth's 4th age (after the ring's destruction), that features atmospheric music, unlockable game content and features, difficulty settings to help the newer players along and a vibrant community.* A must for all roguelike fans.

T-Engine 4.0 (beta4) : An SDL based engine for creating realtime and turnbased games using LUA scripting.

*: Who can deliberate 10-20 posts long on what a roguelike is...

I would add somewhere: "In the Rogue/Nethack/Angband tradition of turn-based, single-player, dungeon-crawl, role-playing games, but completely new code since Tome2."

[Karzack]

Tome : A rich and complex game set in Middle Earth's 4th age (after the ring's destruction), that features atmospheric music, unlockable game content and features, difficulty settings to help the newer players along and a vibrant community.* A must for all roguelike fans.

Building on this and other posts. I can't say I really added anything to it. I just kinda mashes some posts together and thought I would try to give it a shot.

Tome is a single-player, turn based, fantasy RPG. It is a rich and complex game set in Middle Earth's 4th age (after the ring's destruction).

It features a range of races and classes, random dungeons, atmospheric music, and unlockable game content and features. There are also difficulty settings to suit your play style and a vibrant community.* A must for all roguelike fans.

How much detail are we looking for?