Happy New Year!

Roguelike of the Year 2012 Poll has ended!

Hydra Slayer got 13 votes. It got 11 votes in 2011, and 14 votes in 2010... the numbers are quite consistent :) Although the gameplay has not changed much, Hydra Slayer has received some interface improvements due to its involvement in the Roguelike Incubator. I hope that these numbers say that the game has improved a lot through 2011 and 2012 :)

By the way, Game Hunter is now running a Let's Play on Hydra Slayer. Go watch it! (It seems there are some problems with screens disappearing right away... strange, it never happened for me)

HyperRogue III got 23 votes, plus 5 votes for the 7DRL version (HyperRogue II). I see that the draft from the last year (Hyperbolic Rogue) received 11 votes. Anyway, I am very happy about the success of this weird mathematical experiment.

Vapors of Insanity have received 6 votes (the same number as last year). Not a good score, but I have not worked much on it...

ADOM has received a second place with 1445 votes. It had a great crowdfunding campaign, and I am very proud to be a part of it. I hope that NotEye integration will help it to win ROTY 2013 :)

Thanks for everyone who voted!

What about the next year? Probably NotEye will continue getting improvements. Maybe Vapors of Insanity too, although I feel that it is more effective to spend time on other projects (HyperRogue seems the most popular of my games, and I spent the least amount of time on it). I have no plans about any major further changes to HS or HR, but if I invent something new, or get some cool suggestion, I will happily work on it. I have no good idea for a new game... If I had, I would probably execute it right away, instead of waiting for the 7DRL challenge (just like I did with Hydra Slayer and the Hyperbolic Rogue draft). But the year is long... hopefully I will have something new :)

I wish you happy adventuring in the New Year!

NotEye 6.3 and Hydra Slayer 14.3

As an early Christmas gift, I have improved some things in NotEye and Hydra Slayer. Maybe nothing groundbreaking yet, but enough for a release :)

Changes to NotEye 6.3:

• provided error handling to NotEye-integrated roguelikes (such as "Sample Roguelike" and ADOM); a script crash in these will now show a menu (continue playing, play in a safe mode, reload the script)
• adjusted the Brogue config to Oryx's animated tiles
• OpenGL disabled by default (it causes problems in some circumstances, I think it is better to turn it off by default just in case; you will probably want to turn it on when using FPP)
• Text over tiles displays faster now
• fixed some minor bugs related to server/client
• quickshots disabled by default (i.e., taking screenshots with F2; edit config.noe if you want this option)
• provided a script to automatically discard music when not used
• added some preliminary work to clean up the memory (although it is not really used yet, except when an error causes NotEye to reload completely)
• screenshot and getpixel now work in the OpenGL mode
• OpenGL mode scaled textures incorrectly on some machines, this should be fixed
• Added a "fadeoutmusic" function which does just that

Changes to Hydra Slayer 14.3:

• Previously, when used against huge hydras, Rune of Growth matched your largest divisor. Now, it also works with your Eradicator and similar weapons, if you do not have any divisors, although not very well (that would be too easy).
• Fixed a crash when ambidextrous attacks against mushrooms (thanks for Peter Brogan for reporting this!)
• Two achievements added: "Don't Divide and Conquer" (win without attacking with any divisor blades) and "Power is for the Weak" (don't drink your first potion of power juice).

I have confirmed that both new achievements are winnable (with Human and Centaur, respectively, and before beefing up the Rune of Growth). Such challenge games are great if you find the small game too easy. You are invited to invent new ones :)

You can download NotEye+Hydra Slayer here. If you want to try Brogue, configuring it from the scratch is quite difficult, so you might prefer to download the all-in-one package instead, which works out of the box.

As usual at this time of the year, you can vote for Roguelike of the Year 2012. Please vote for ADOM, Brogue, Hydra Slayer, and HyperRogue :)

Have fun playing roguelikes during the holidays!

Necklace of the Eye 6.2

The new version of NotEye is released! This version has the following highlights:

• NotEye now supports OpenGL. This does not give any new features yet, but hardware optimization makes the FPP mode work a lot faster (on my machine, ASCII runs slower in OpenGL though (but still extremely fast), and other modes run at roughly the same speed; YMMV). You can enable/disable OpenGL in config.noe or in the menu (press M,M,O).
• I have improved the support for Brogue, including the tileset made by Oryx: (don't forget you need to download the updated libtcod connector)
• Thanks to the help of Thomas Biskup and Jochen Terstiege, NotEye now compiles successfully on OSX.

A more detailed changelog follows:

• OpenGL support (rendering, menu option, "setvideomodei" now allows giving flags, just like the SDL function "setvideomode"; the OPENGL flag makes NotEye use OpenGL)
• improved Brogue support (read Oryx tiles, draw Oryx tiles, detect menus in the tile version)
• OSX support (supplied the directories for included files which are different on Mac, adjusted for the different color order, made the pseudoterminal work, Makefile)
• made NotEye work with fonts including more than 256 characters (NotEye, NotEye-curses, and the libtcod connector)
• transformations (both the usual tiletransform and the more general tilefreeform) now work in almost all contexts (for example, you can use "tilefreeform" for arbitrary rotations, and the dz parameter in "tilexf" to push doors into the center of the tile in the Iso mode)
• tiletransform is no longer restricted to multiples of 1/1440
• transformations are now cached (unless the image is too big)
• transformations are now antialiased (in some circumstances)
• also tilefill works in all contexts now
• added the "transNone" constant which means that you do not want a transparent color
• improved the "console help" development option
• development menu now lists the memory used by NotEye (including the image cache size - unfortunately all that caching means that more memory is used... NotEye still has a problem with determining that memory is no longer used, I need to find a good solution for this)
• fixed ugly characters which appeared in some circumstances
• fixed some combinations of operations which did not work for some reason (layers, transforms, recolor, etc)
• fixed the mouse coordinates in the double minitile mode (did not work in Brogue)
• fixed the "measure FPS" development option

Download NotEye 6.2 directly. Have fun!