Quality/Stability of "finished" 7 day roguelikes

[purestrain]

Hello there,

is it just my opinion or did the quality/stability of finished roguelikes dramatically drop? I'm currently fighting more problems with compiling/running/debugging then just playing them.

Don't get me wrong; usually its a bit harder to get windows-roguelikes running on linux, but this year with all the unity/xna/c#/ruby/webgl/whatever roguelikes i feel that most people don't care if it is running on at least some other pc with/without bleeding edge versions of software.

Even if my roguelike was not finished i made sure and asked severeal people if its running for them and tweaked the framework until it was.

[kipar]

It's sad to be unable to run interesting roguelike in windows because it's unix-only (or e.g. written in ruby but require ncursesw which is unix-only), but in most other cases it's enough to install that bleeding-edge software the author mentions in readme file.

[Ancient]

Are you thinking about Storming the Ship entry? It is not unix only really. "ncursesw" can be supplied by pdcurses on windows. By the way I have Linux and I am unable to run it. Seems like the roguelike in question is really only portable with author's computer.

I found java entry "Man in the Mirror" which runs only on windows because it uses some OpenGL wrapper. The wrapper apparently ties the game to single platform. Just imagine the problems the evaluation committee has to overcome to review all that. People on Linux are especially screwed. :(

[kipar]

There is pdcurses in windows, but 'ncursesw' Ruby package(gem) don't compile under windows. But if this game don't run on Linux too, I should agree with the first post.

[Perdurabo]

Even if my roguelike was not finished i made sure and asked severeal people if its running for them and tweaked the framework until it was.

I actually made sure my roguelike was finished as opposed to multiplatform

I'd love to have mine running on Linux, and will do so via Mono at some point in the future: but I wrote it using C# so I could learn the language.

Mind you, the reason it is in .NET 4 instead of say, 3 is that I didn't have time to write it in 3 as the syntax of some bits of system.file especially differ! 168 hours isn't a long time in practise!

[Darren Grey]

I think the overall quality and stability of the 7DRLs is actually up this year.  Last year had a lot of @ wandering round the screen games - really basic efforts that should never have been posted as successes.  Having played the majority of releases I know of only 1 like that this year.

However there are quite a number that are difficult or almost impossible to get played.  For some the developers are working to try and fix it, but for others they seem to have just been left to wither.  I don't understand how any dev could do that personally - surely when you make something you have pride in it and want others to enjoy it?

Anyway, here's hoping that we'll see update releases which sort out some of the niggles.  And I'm glad at least that we still have a big number of very playable games.  They might not be ground-breaking or amazingly replayable, but the creators still deserve some credit for getting a working game out the door.

[Perdurabo]

Yikes. ping me if you have a problem getting Stygia to run, Darren!

[Krice]

Funny thing is that people are using C#, Python and other modern languages that were supposed to prevent bugs. I think with Python especially it went actually worse than ever.

[Darren Grey]

Yes, I think Python has become a liability to use these days.  The biggest problems I've had are getting python games to work.  Mind you, some of the Python games work absolutely fine, so I imagine it's the devs that are partly to blame.

I got Stygia running, Perdurabo, and I know others have too.  My own mini-review of it: "Whilst this doesn’t break new boundaries it is a solid enough roguelike, with a decent interface, no terrible bugs, and it seems reasonably balanced.  Equipment items have a nice variety to them, though enemies are mostly uninteresting.  The heat mechanic could do with expanding upon, but overall it’s a good game."

[Perdurabo]

Yes, I think Python has become a liability to use these days.  The biggest problems I've had are getting python games to work.  Mind you, some of the Python games work absolutely fine, so I imagine it's the devs that are partly to blame.

I got Stygia running, Perdurabo, and I know others have too.  My own mini-review of it: "Whilst this doesn’t break new boundaries it is a solid enough roguelike, with a decent interface, no terrible bugs, and it seems reasonably balanced.  Equipment items have a nice variety to them, though enemies are mostly uninteresting.  The heat mechanic could do with expanding upon, but overall it’s a good game."

Cheers Darren. Yes, those were two things that if I had time, I would have tried to expand, I've got a lot of ideas...but ran out of time.

D.

[Ancient]

Arghh. Finally made Man in the Mirror to obey me. It turned to be a surprisingly good entry.

I agree with Perdurabo. It is better to make your 7DRL run fine on a single platform than to deploy for three OSes but crash on startup on each of them. If it runs only on Linux we will assign reviewers using that system. If it needs dot-not 4 Windows users will review this. However, if developer drops our way something not runnable this may wind up not getting covered at all.

[Numeron]

I found java entry "Man in the Mirror" which runs only on windows because it uses some OpenGL wrapper. The wrapper apparently ties the game to single platform. Just imagine the problems the evaluation committee has to overcome to review all that. People on Linux are especially screwed.

I am the author of The Man in the Mirror, did you have trouble running the game on a different platform due to the OpenGL engine? Which platform, and what was the error?

I have supplied natives for the three major platforms, and have confirmation that it works on unix, but not yet OSX.

If you are referring to my note in the readme, I mentioned only that it was untested on platforms other than windows, and that its proper operation is not guaranteed on them as I have no access to those platforms myself.

(phew been a while since I posted here)

-Numeron


EDIT: Sorry, got a bit ahead of myself, I just read your last after posting this. Gald you got it working, but still, if you give me more info on your original problem I can probably streamline it for others to use - however as I said, I have no access to the platforms myself.

[Ancient]

The issue was when running "java -jar mirror.jar" I got this:

Code: [Select]

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.jarinjarloader.JarRsrcLoader.main(JarRsrcLoader.java:56)
Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no lwjgl in java.library.path
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1734)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:823)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1028)
at org.lwjgl.Sys$1.run(Sys.java:73)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at org.lwjgl.Sys.doLoadLibrary(Sys.java:66)
at org.lwjgl.Sys.loadLibrary(Sys.java:82)
at org.lwjgl.Sys.<clinit>(Sys.java:99)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.<clinit>(Display.java:130)
at engine.ui.SlickUI.<init>(SlickUI.java:40)
at mirror.Game.run(Game.java:105)
at mirror.Game.main(Game.java:50)
... 5 moreI read your note in readme and misunderstood it exactly as you suspected. By overexagerating. The thing was just set java.library.path to current location. I already answered this here.

[Numeron]

I uploaded a new version with the VM argument -Djava.library.path=./ bundled into the jar.

Could you please try it again for me? If that doesnt work, then well I have no idea, I guess I'll just add a note into the readme for linux users to add it in themselves.

It seems odd that something like this would work on one platform but not another, I thought that despite the obvious differences in backend native stuff of each JVM, they were otherwise all exactly the same. My main (unfounded I guess) concern was that the .so/.jnilib files themselves would be old or not work.