Messages

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Prospector 0.1.15 released

« on: December 25, 2010, 12:21:55 PM »

Hooray!

2

Other Announcements / Re: Villain-based Roguelikes?

« on: December 23, 2010, 10:44:22 PM »

ADOM - I think it does not satisfy your requirements, but anyway, you can pick other quests when playing a bad guy, and have a different ending, so it is not exactly the same

I was actually debating whether to mention ADOM in my first post, given that going for an "ultra" ending (while not necessarily evil) does require you to go to a bunch of new locations to collect chaos artifacts and get severely corrupted (which you normally avoid like the plague).

Anyway, these are some great responses. There are even more games like this than I had expected!

3

Programming / Re: Trouble installing ncurses in Ruby...

« on: December 23, 2010, 10:23:08 PM »

I'm not really sure how to do that on Windows, but this article might help.

That's actually where I started. Maybe I did something wrong, but the instructions on the ncurses section there totally didn't work.

I suspect your Ruby has not been built correctly to use ncurses.  It's surprisingly difficult to get right, especially if it uses wide-character functions.  Someone probably set build options or includes or defines that broke it when compiling Ruby.

(sighs) I was afraid of something like this. I'll keep fiddling with it for a bit after reading that page, but it's really starting to look like I'd be better off just using another library. Not the end of the world, if it comes to that.

Thank you again for your advice (both of you!).

4

Other Announcements / Villain-based Roguelikes?

« on: December 21, 2010, 05:05:04 AM »

In most roguelikes, your character is the good guy, or at least NOT the force of evil that's threatening the land. How many RLs are there where you can play the bad guy?

Rogue Survivor is a good example, where you can play a zombie and score points by killing humans instead of surviving the longest. Or arguably Prospector, if you start as a pirate (attacking/looting merchant ships instead of exploring planets). If it hadn't been a hoax, the Serial Killer RL would've counted, too.

What would be some other examples?

Note that I wouldn't necessarily count RLs that simply have "evil" classes/races (ie chaos knights in Dungeon Crawl, much as I love that game). Many games have those, but in most of them, you still have the same goal, face the same dungeon, and score points for the same things normal characters do, you just have a different set of tools and handicaps to work with (if even that). I'm curious about examples that change the game experience more drastically.

5

Programming / Trouble installing ncurses in Ruby...

« on: December 20, 2010, 07:35:41 PM »

Since a lot of roguelikes use curses/ncurses, I figured it's more than good enough for me, too. Since I plan to keep things at the ASCII level, it sounds perfect.

The problem is, I'm using Ruby 1.9.2 with the DevKit (on Windows 7), and try as I might, I can't get the ncurses gem to install. I'm greeted with this error message:

Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing ncurses:
   ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

C:/Ruby192/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking for ncurses.h... no
checking for ncurses/curses.h... no
checking for curses.h... no
extconf.rb:35:in `<main>': ncurses header file not found (RuntimeError)


Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby192/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ncurses-0.9.1 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/Ruby192/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ncurses-0.9.1/gem_make.out

I confess that I'm still a noob programmer, but I'd actually be relieved if the problem is something totally blindingly obvious. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated!