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Well Goodsir, i concur with the Imperial Guard. They are indeed worthy of their own game. Have you seen Warp Rogue at all?
You might also want to check libjcsi for console output in java, it might be just what you need: http://slashie.net/libjcsi/
//This class calculates every square given within an Area of Effect
public int distanceFromCenter(int ix, int iy)
public enum AOEType {CIRCLE, BEAM, CONE} //The enumeration of AOE
Windows is probalby only good for writing gui's and facebook apps.
Consider something like ADOM's animated forest, which contains something like 1500 monsters. Each of them move each turn. If you calculate FOV for each of them, and it covers the whole level, that is 2000 cells. Let's say you do 20 simple operations on average for each cell. Then you get 60 millions operations per turn. Current computers do about 400 million simple operations per second, so if you would get a slight lag. If you use an ineffective script language, or notify each monster whenever a monster in its sight moves, or your monsters have equipment and bodyparts which affect the strategy of other monsters, or something like that, then it will be too slow.
So it seems that you cannot have a roguelike which features heavy expressive-but-inefficient scripting, huge armies of monsters, large FOVs, and complicated AIs.
But huge armies and large FOVs are things that (in most cases) you can remove easily once it turns out that the game is too slow.
I think the programmer plays a more vital role than the language. Lots of people are writing RLs in Python, but DarkGod is the only one making a big success. Partly I think it's his experience of writing older languages that has taught him to make the most of Lua.
Scripting vs non-scripting is down to personal preference. Both are valid tools in anyone's hands. Certainly scripting makes many things convenient (especially submissions from community members), but if the dev is more comfortable with something else then he should stick to what he likes.
Maybe if you'd used a higher level language it'd be done by now.
Yeah, that's what people say. But I haven't seen their major roguelikes... I really think that in game development the programming language plays very little role.
ToME 4 is a recently released major roguelike (whether you like it or not), *and* it features scripting with Lua. Plus, it should be obvious to anyone, and in the professional and academic world is undisputed common knowledge, that the choice of language, as well as what tools you use, undeniably plays a large role in *any* programming project. Choice of language and tools, coupled with the developer's proficiency in them, is critical to any project that wants to ship this century. To suggest otherwise reveals an extreme lack of understanding of the software development life cycle.
Higher level languages, which features more machine instructions per line of code, by their very nature result in a more rapid release, whereas lower level languages take more time, as well as requiring a greater debug time. This is why many software companies make extensive use of higher level languages for applications that are not speed critical, since speed is where most higher level languages lose their edge.
This is also why Dark God has been able to release a very ambitious ToME 4, coupled with constant updates, which are all impressively large in scope. I'd say he pretty much makes the value of scripting languages undeniable. By coding a robust engine in C++, which uses OpenGL for rather impressive graphical effects, as well as being highly modular, he's able to add an absurd amount of content with every release, solely because of the increased productivity of working in a higher level language like Lua.
All in all, whether or not you choose to make use of a scripting language is up to you, and depends on your design goals. But to suggest that because *you* don't use it, that it doesn't provide a huge productivity boost for others who may use it, is silly and absolutely wrong.
There is no scripting in Kaduria either and it's supposed to become a major roguelike.. so yeah, I know I don't need scripting.
It's hard to estimate before you try
I've made some prototyping in falcon and I love results very much.
Actually I already have rich perl experience, and I know how convenient and fast script development could be.
But perl is too heavy and hard to embed.
I tried many different scipting languages, I liked some features of ones and other features of others.
Falcon is the best so far featurewise, but it's too far from release version,
but I took part in development in case I fail with my project
