HyperRogue 9.1

HyperRogue 9.1 is released on Steam and itch.io!

There are some gameplay fixes, and numerous user interface improvements. There is a new "land", but it is not a part of the normal game, but rather a separate Halloween mini-game, where you play on the surface of the jack-o'-lantern, and fight typical Halloween monsters, such as witches, undead, and demons. This is very different from the usual game of HyperRogue because you play on a sphere -- which is (in some sense) the opposite of hyperbolic plane! While HyperRogue is that everything is infinite, the sphere has severely limited space of just 32 cells. Collecting Treats will summon new monsters, and bring you magical Orb powers. You have to manage your limited resources to be successful here.

The Halloween mini-game can be activated from the main menu. In it, you can press 'o' to try the spherical variants of the usual lands of HyperRogue. You can also try elliptic geometry, which is obtained from the sphere by considering the antipodes to be the same point -- and there is no real difference between Mirror Images and Mimics in this geometry :) In general, HyperRogue now lets you compare the hyperbolic phenomenons to their spherical counterparts. After Halloween, the spherical/elliptic geometry and the Halloween mini-game will be available in the "Euclidean/elliptic mode" in the special modes menu.

Other changes include:

• Major overhaul of the user interface. Most of this has been actually done in patch 9.0i. The new menus should look better, and adjust to the screen size better (especially mobile). The color dialog has been improved, and it is now used when you edit the colors of your character. Most numerical options are replaced with subdialogs when you can enter the numbers directly, or adjust them with arrows or sliders; and some help is provided for some of the less clear numbers. In 9.1, additionally pressing F5 or F10 while in good game won't stop immediately (ESC screen will be shown first).
• Improvements to the Prince(ss) quest. Some bugs were fixed (jealousy did not work, monsters tended to just stay in place after hitting the Princess -- now they ignore her while she is stunned, and also the stun time is extended). If you have saved the Princess successfully, but she dies later, you can revive her with Orb of Love after you collect 20 $$$ more.
• Orb power is now drained after the monsters move, not immediately after the movement (so Shielding at 1 charge will still defend you for the next turn, and Aether at 1 charge will let you move once more) -- this should be much more intuitive, especially with Orb of Time. Also fixed some bugs with Orb of Time (Thorns or Aether were considered to be used even though they were not). Also fixed Ghosts and Rock Snakes, who did not work correctly with Orb of the Shell/hardcore mode.
• Knights of Camelot now quote Euclid, Lobachevsky, Gauss, and Escher.
• As a reference to Deadly Rooms of Death, Goblins are now afraid of energy swords, and won't step on cells adjacent to them.
• You can now change the projection quickly by pressing number keys. This is useful on the sphere, and also if you want to see the different models of hyperbolic plane quickly. 1 (orthographic or Gans model), 2, 3 (stereographic or Poincaré), 4 (gnomonic or Klein).

As usual, there will be probably patches -- changelogs are reported on the Steam forums first. Have fun!

NotEye 8.4 + Hydra Slayer 17.1

Necklace of the Eye, the roguelike frontend and display library, and Hydra Slayer, a roguelike based on mathematical puzzles, have been updated!

This update brings the following:

Hydra Slayer update

Hydra Slayer has been updated to version 17.1. This means that features which were previously available only in the paid version on Steam are now free. These features include: random challenges, traps, a new type of equipment (orbs), animations of flying heads, music, and lots of bugfixes and interface improvements. See here for details about version 17.0, and for the further updates. Of course, you still need the Steam version for typical Steam features such as online achievements, leaderboards and trading cards, and new features planned for the future will get in the paid version first!

LuaJIT

NotEye now uses LuaJIT instead of the standard Lua. This greatly improves the performance.

Better support for Unicode

NotEye is now better at handling Unicode, that is, characters outside of the standard ASCII. Thus, when using a font containing all Unicode characters, for example, Hydra Slayer can now display the appropriate symbol √ for Eradicator, and Brogue can use the Aries symbol ♈ to display grass (previously this was possible only with fonts supplied with Brogue). Probably there are still some cases where this does not work as well as it could -- see NotEye's GitHub repository for further developments.

Better support for Linux terminals

One of strengths of NotEye (compared to Libtcod) was always that a NotEye game could work in a system terminal -- this makes it easier to communicate with software such as ssh for remote playing or screenreaders for blind people, and is the preferred way of playing text roguelikes for some people. NotEye 8.4 improves this somewhat. Modern Linux terminals do support 256 color palettes, or even TrueColor -- the newest version of NotEye can use this, thus, if you are playing Brogue on such a modern terminal, it should look just like the graphical version, with Unicode symbols and truecolor lighting. Secondly, using this feature was somewhat complex -- in version 8.4 it is sufficient to set the environmental variable NOTEYEEXTRACONFIG to consoleout_curses() (for the traditional Curses output), consoleout_16(), consoleout_256(), or consoleout_truecolor() (these three options work only in Linux for now). Previously ADOM and Hydra Slayer had special scripts on Windows for enabling the console output -- using an environmental variable makes these scripts simpler.

Downloads

Download NotEye+Hydra Slayer, or NotEye+Brogue. Have fun!