Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

[Omnivore]

I plead lack of sleep and caffeine.

[AgingMinotaur]

Surprised there's been no chatter on The Ground Gives Way yet...

Seems interesting ... No joy with Wine, though, I'm afraid

Imagine an ADOM in the trappings of HyperRogue 4.x!  A world to truly explore~   

Yeah, ADOM in a setting where the area enclosed by a circle increases exponentially with its radius. Sounds awesome! Imagine HyperADOM where a town contains more tiles than you see in an entire game of ADOM.

Truly a world to explore~!

Yes, god forbid anyone should try to make something innovative.

I don't see it being a tautology.

That's because, if you did, you might have to revise your preconceived notions a tiny bit
We're probably not getting much further with this discussion right now, so I'll leave the dead horse for you to keep floggin, if you wish.

As always,
Mintauros

[Krice]

You should watch Youtube videos of Gordon Overkill playing ADOM (recent Litithia ones, but can't remember which). He makes interesting observations about good and bad things about tiles. One of them is that you can see immediately how much HP the monster has. It's a simple but very effective thing. Also, the movement of similar kinds of monsters is easier to understand when they slide from tile to another. There are also some problems like less visibility because tiles are large and poor visibility of rocks from the dungeon floor (this could be easily fixed). He is sometimes switching to ascii mode to see the entire level and detect missing rocks.

[mushroom patch]

Imagine an ADOM in the trappings of HyperRogue 4.x!  A world to truly explore~   

Yeah, ADOM in a setting where the area enclosed by a circle increases exponentially with its radius. Sounds awesome! Imagine HyperADOM where a town contains more tiles than you see in an entire game of ADOM.

Truly a world to explore~!

Yes, god forbid anyone should try to make something innovative.

[...]

I don't see it being a tautology.

That's because, if you did, you might have to revise your preconceived notions a tiny bit
We're probably not getting much further with this discussion right now, so I'll leave the dead horse for you to keep floggin, if you wish.

Yeah, I have preconceived notions, like how hyperbolic geometry works and how many people have been attracted by the wonderous innovations of oughties roguelike development. Good thing we have people to remind us that if you haven't heard of it, it's innovative, and innovation is awesome.

[edit:] to clarify, it is not my intention to denigrate HyperRogue -- I am merely reacting to the idea of a project on the scale of ADOM set in hyperbolic space, thrown out above as another gee-whiz idea. HyperRogue is a cool idea for a small project and it's a nice technical achievement. And hyperbolic geometry could make for some cool computer board games, particularly if you worked with a compact quotient with a tiling, e.g. hyperbolic Go on a double torus etc. But I don't see it working as a dungeon exploration setting.

[getter77]

The seemingly lost, root point with all heavily tongue-in-cheek was mainly that The Terminal is just another approach, one that got some historical traction, but should not be seen as neither a summit nor an albatross as surely there are yet more varied approaches out there given computing is still in an absolutely infantile state versus other endeavors of human culture.

Rogue and Roguelikes are generally RPG's that, wittingly and unwittingly, pluck a bit from The Future, historically owing back to Tabletop D&D wranglings and Choose Your Own Adventure books in terms of bringing a world to life and making things happen that were "impossible" outside of a Dungeon Master/non-computer context.

They are the historical Amiga, but unlike that, progress did continue even if not as roughly apace as we'd all like.   Thinking of Roguelikes in an O/S + Hardware sense may also prove handy for reckoning things...


Also, the rules of math are a means to an end/a bitter enemy---theoretical Parabolic ADOM would be surely forged into better form with the time honored Roguelike tradition of impassible terrain/high mountains to craft the world so much moreso against the tyranny of infinity~

[Bear]

I gotta say I'm doing the term approach for a bunch of reasons, including but not limited to:

* standard interface fully addressed by standard library maximizes portability achievable without turning code into a pile of ifdefs and introducing dependencies on nonstandard or platform-dependent libs. The ncursesw library is pretty stable, so there is no vendor whose next (or last) version of a library I depend on will break the game or introduce build-dependent bugs in some versions.

* network play via universally available ssh/telnet, with no need for anybody to download & install anything on their local machine.

* term interface is standard and users who have visual difficulties will already have their font sizes and colors adjusted to compensate (and/or a screen reader configured for it).


I don't claim that these things I care about are the same things everybody ought to care about; just that using the term interface seemed obviously the best way to achieve these things. 

[Slash]

Classic Roguelike: Turn based - Grid based - Randomly generated levels - Permafailure

[mushroom patch]

Classic Roguelike: Turn based - Grid based - Randomly generated levels - Permafailure

My favorite classic roguelike is Conway's Game of Life.

(And no, I don't want to get into another long thread about why you're wrong.)

[Slash]

Yes, please don't waste your time trying to prove me wrong.

[mushroom patch]

As they say, that which is asserted without proof can be safely dismissed without proof.

[AgingMinotaur]

(And no, I don't want to get into another long thread about why you're wrong.)

Lol. Please enlighten us wrt the loss condition of Conway's Game of Life, though.

Yes. No. My own all-time favourite RL must be vim, I think. I runs most beautifully in a terminal, and even includes support for vi keys by default!

As always,
Minotauros

[Krice]

This thread gives me an idea to write a complete, strict definition of a roguelike. Remind me to do it!

[mushroom patch]

(And no, I don't want to get into another long thread about why you're wrong.)

Lol. Please enlighten us wrt the loss condition of Conway's Game of Life, though.

The game either halts or it doesn't. Once it halts, it doesn't restart.

HTH.

This thread gives me an idea to write a complete, strict definition of a roguelike. Remind me to do it!

The basic mistake in thinking here is the idea that you can give a "clean" or "complete" definition without reference to existing work in the genre, particularly without reference to the classic examples.

Moreover, the term is too fraught to be recoverable at this point. When some of the major outlets of discussion on the subject run affiliate programs with people selling "roguelikes" and at the same time claim to have the definitive word on what constitutes a roguelike (one which is very convenient for those looking for retro cred in their efforts to market the least you can do and still have a commercial product), you know you've gotten to the party way too late.

The word as it is now often understood is little more than cover for producing and marketing schlock.

[AgingMinotaur]

Lol. Please enlighten us wrt the loss condition of Conway's Game of Life, though.

The game either halts or it doesn't. Once it halts, it doesn't restart.

So what's your point: That you don't see the difference between this and losing a Roguelike, or just that you willfully misinterpreted Slash's post¹? Would Game of Life be a RL by your standards, if we labeled the cells "kobolds" and ran it over ssh? (Not even entering into the hermeneutic feat needed to equate Game of Life with "random level generation".)

As always,
Minotauros

¹ Should perhaps come as no surprise, considering your earlier implication that DF's use of a simplistic interface is somehow due to the nature of non-Euclidean geometry

[mushroom patch]

Lol. Please enlighten us wrt the loss condition of Conway's Game of Life, though.

The game either halts or it doesn't. Once it halts, it doesn't restart.

So what's your point: That you don't see the difference between this and losing a Roguelike, or just that you willfully misinterpreted Slash's post? Would Game of Life be a RL by your standards, if we labeled the cells "kobolds" and ran it over ssh? (Not even entering into the hermeneutic feat needed to equate Game of Life with "random level generation".)

I've seen a game that shipped with oem windows machines in the 90s that randomly seeds game of life boards. I think this kind of application is pretty common.

I took Slash's comment to be his proposed definition of "roguelike." His definition is vague and would include things that clearly are not roguelike games (for example, the Game of Life). Now maybe what he meant is that those factors taken together with his other notion, the so-called "Berlin interpretation," of "roguelike" would constitute a special class of roguelikes, "classic roguelikes." This seems even more problematic -- just more dodging, trying to carve out space for a maximally inclusive and correspondingly meaningless definition.

You must know, given your hostility, that I have a definition of roguelike much narrower than yours and that's much better grounded in the history of roguelike games than the one you support. And you know very well that I don't think the Game of Life or anything like it is a roguelike game.

A definition like Slash's or like the Berlin interpretation cannot capture what a roguelike (or "classic roguelike") game is because it makes no reference to the history or tradition -- something that had existed long before r.g.r.d and its remaining active alumni came along. It can only capture what a certain group of people want the word to mean.