What platforms would you play roguelikes on?

[Krice]

For traditional roguelikes, the platform is UNIX terminals on multiuser systems

I'm sorry, I didn't think about historical computers.

[Bear]

And, seriously?  For best results?  Use text mode in the dang term window.  Let me pick the font, let me pick the size of the font, and be ready to go with whatever number of rows and columns I happen to have it open to when I invoke it (from the command line, of course), and I'll be happier with your game than I've been with most of what I've seen lately.

I want all new games to support 1x9000 text resolution!

But seriously, term window doesn't need to be used to get this effect. With a bit of effort, libtcod can handle some of it. With nearly no effort SquidLib can exactly handle the font changes to arbitrary fonts.

Yeah, 1x9000 is silly.  I'm not upset about a "your term is too small to play this game" message if it gets down to less than, say, 14x50.  But just as a matter of normal use?  My term window defaults to open at 100x100 characters.  If I'm doing something I want to see in large scale, I use the term window open 250 characters wide; I have a couple of apps that generate debug logs with settable margins, and I set 'em to 250 when I'm tracing a problem. 

I'm just saying, a term window, at least for me, is normally 100x100, not 80x20.  Special-purpose term windows to monitor processes or network comms or whatever, I normally open at anything from 14x50 to 350x160. 

Write a game that detects the size of the term window and uses "extra" space for a good purpose or decides what to skip displaying when the space is smaller than you expected, and I'll count it as a good thing.

[Eben]

I used to have a DOS laptop that only had a 80x25 character screen... And not when it was state of the art sadly.

I'm all in favor of adaptive display (put them into my own games), but realistically it can take a lot of time away from other development. The bigger reason to have terminal support and adaptability might be to support screen reading software. Blind video gamers is a seriously underserved group of people. And I'm serous about that, unlike my 1xFOO comment

[Krice]

Write a game that detects the size of the term window and uses "extra" space for a good purpose or decides what to skip displaying when the space is smaller than you expected, and I'll count it as a good thing.

That's more like poor design trying to fit the gameplay to window size. I think it's essential to use fixed size gameview whatever it is, because the range of visibility and also the physical size of level has important role in the gameplay.

[reaver]

Write a game that detects the size of the term window and uses "extra" space for a good purpose or decides what to skip displaying when the space is smaller than you expected, and I'll count it as a good thing.

That's more like poor design trying to fit the gameplay to window size. I think it's essential to use fixed size gameview whatever it is, because the range of visibility and also the physical size of level has important role in the gameplay.

Amen. It's like preferring to read a book in an ASCII editor using wordwrap so that you can adjust to whatever resolution you want, versus a nicely typesetted PDF.
On a mobile, I'd take the ascii out of necessity. On everything else I Read It As It Was Meant To Be Read. But again, that's just me.

[AgingMinotaur]

I think it's good design practice to take into account that different users will have different screen/terminal sizes and so, though. My primary computer used to be a netbook, and there was nothing more annoying than games which didn't fit on my small display. I also totally get that people with humongous monitors would like to be able to put some of that screen size to good use. pdf rulez, but it might make more sense to compare UI design to a format like css?

As always,
Minotauros

[Krice]

My primary computer used to be a netbook, and there was nothing more annoying than games which didn't fit on my small display.

It may be annoying, but if you want to play don't use toys, get a real computer (whatever it is..).

[AgingMinotaur]

Brilliant. Why spend a few hours making sure your application plays nice with small displays, when you can just be a jerk instead?

As always,
Minotauros

[Aukustus]

I put a selectable font size on my roguelike so that people can play with small screens. Easy and fast to make the game playable on different sized screens.

[Bear]

if you want to play don't use toys....

But Krice, that's what toys are for! 

In fact, that's why we CALL them toys!

Now it's true that some games are for little toys (2-inch screen on a phone) and some games are for big toys (dual-monitor gamer box with a pair of 24-inch 1920x1080 monitors) but ... come on, this is a games forum!  Obviously, every machine we play with is going to be in use as a toy!

[Rickton]

My primary computer used to be a netbook, and there was nothing more annoying than games which didn't fit on my small display.

It may be annoying, but if you want to play don't use toys, get a real computer (whatever it is..).

It's one thing to say that about the newest ultra-realistic 3D game with realistic fluid physics or whatever, but a roguelike? Especially one that's played in a terminal?