NotEye 7.6

NotEye 7.6 is released!
This update is mostly for those who would like to use NotEye in their 7DRL 2014 entry. The seven day challenge starts in just a few days. Whether you want to use NotEye or not, good luck!

The 7DRL invitation caused lots of discussion about the licensing of NotEye. I am quite confident that GPL is (mostly) what I want; I have explained my motivations in the dev guide. I have also made the licensing clear in the package: improved the comments in the Lua scripts, license is displayed in the "about" screen, improved the "readme.txt" file and the sourcing of the audio/gfx files.

More changes:

• Added the DawnLike tileset (together with two new fonts) and some Lua scripts for it. Sample games now use this tileset.
• Added an "About NotEye" option to the NotEye menu. This simplified the NotEye main (pre-game) menu.
• Fixed the TPP mode (in 7.5 it worked correctly only in Hydra's hex mode).
• Fixed the "-N --ascii" command line option (which runs NotEye in the console).
• Added some new utilities for sounds, and for scheduling an action later.
• Added a noteye_halfdelayms(int i) command for more precise timing.
• Added more functions to JNI (thus Java can use more NotEye's functions).
• Fixed the Makefile (NotEye did not compile correctly on some Linux machines due to missing -lz -lcurses).

There have been some changes to Hydra Slayer, although it was not a focus of this release:

• Hydra Slayer has new sounds by Brett Cornwall. It is still a work in progress.
• You no longer get a double sword when growing your fingernails. (Also fixed the grammar slightly.)

See the NotEye website, or download directly!

Good luck hacking!

NotEye 7.5: TPP, samples, 7DRL invitation, and more!

After more than four months, a new version of NotEye is ready!

NotEye 7.5 has a new graphical mode (TPP). Since you can configure the camera angle, facing direction, and zoom, this is in fact several modes in one! Also, NotEye's fullscreen mode behaves in a more pleasant way (it keeps the current resolution, instead of changing it to the window resolution -- it can be configured to use the old behavior, too). Also, a new font was added (Wouter van Oortmerssen's Square font for roguelikes).

Moreover, NotEye is now friendly to developers using many different languages. Not only the support for C++ (namespaces) and C (NotEye header correctly compiles under a C comiler) has been improved, but also NotEye now includes samples in Free Pascal, Python, Java, and Lua. All of these examples (except Lua) show many basic features: PC, monsters, smooth animation, error handling (just reload the Lua files on Lua errors). All of the five sample games are very simple, but at least they are at least a bit different :)

Since the 7DRL challenge is coming, I invite the participants to use NotEye for their 7DRL this year. See here for more details.

Direct download link: NotEye 7.5+Hydra Slayer 15.5, Roguelike Bundle 1.3

Some more changes:

• Several options were added: Projectile speed, Backgrounds, Detail/violence levels (for disabling drawing of CPU-intensive details or blood). These options work for games which support them.
• Arrow keys can be used to change music/sound and detail/violence levels. Instant feedback when changing music/sound volume.
• All configs, recordings, screenshots etc. are now stored in the 'user' subdirectory; default config is included (in 'common') and copied there.
• 'copy error message to a file' in the crash menu.
• Auto-recording now can be selected from the menu (not only from the config file).
• Auto-logging. If you wanted to know how much time you spend playing roguelikes for some reason, now you can.
• Menus are now more colorful.
• Removed ADOM and PRIME from the menu - these games use NotEye, just download and run them.
• The NotEye Menu has been rearranged a bit. Fixed the message to 'press ENTER to resume playing' while in a game.
• Fixed the system terminal mode (it did not work in NotEye 7.3 due to changes).
• Gamescript files now provide their NotEye version (for backward compatibility in the future).
• In Hydra Slayer source, BFS is called bfs() instead of dfs().
• The palette display now works with all fonts (uses filled blocks instead of characters).
• Added some utility functions in the Lua scripts (sendvector, keyname).
• Renamed some functions in the NotEye header to make it clear that they belong to NotEye; also, for colors, the type 'noteyecolor' is used instead of 'int'. Added some new utility functions (noteye_lastkeyevent_* for examining the details of keypresses which do not resolve to characters, Lua-callable functions now can return nested arrays and Lua tables).
• Bounding boxes are calculated for tiles, which should make the pictures draw faster.
• A minor fix in backward compatibility.

NotEye 6.6 + Hydra Slayer 14.6

Hello! Time for some bugfixes...

Thanks to CCC, the following things have been fixed in Hydra Slayer 14.6:

• Fixed the Primeslayer (did not work without enchantment, although it should).
• Fixed the ambidextrous Vorpal Blade (did not grow correctly).
• Fixed the missing end-of-lines in the player log file.

Game Hunter has created a Frozen Depths+NotEye video, which caused the following bugfixes:

• Cursor shown in Frozen Depths (and possibly other roguelikes in the future).
• Frozen Depths will no longer interpret the "@" on the Help Screen as PC (unfortunately, I see no way to tell Sages from the PC...)

Also the following things have been improved in NotEye 6.6:

• The Dungeon Crawl config has been fixed (should no longer detect the PC on the X-map, or interpret other humans are PCs - NotEye now knows that PC is always at the same coordinates).
• In Linux, NotEye (caller.sh, actually) will now automatically turn off the UTF-8 encoding (and use ISO-8859-1). (This bug caused lava and other weird terrain to be displayed as several characters in Crawl.)
• Letters now look better when drawn on a non-black background (especially when the letters are black).
• As suggested for PRIME, mousewheeling upwards now moves your character in the opposite direction.
• Keyboard input menu is improved. Now, it allows you to turn on/off rotation/translation for numpad and arrowkeys, has more explnatory text, and more options for letter-based layouts.
• Fixed a bug which caused alpha-blended images to be scaled incorrectly.
• Fixed a problem with noteye_halt and enabling key-repeat on reload.
• The 'distill' function is now available to script writers ('getdistill'). Mostly for debugging.
• Tile debugging ('tiledebug') now provides a slightly more informative output (for images and transforms).

Download NotEye 6.6 + Hydra Slayer 14.6

The Seven Day Roguelike Challenge 2013 will be running from March 9th to March 17th. I have no good ideas for my entry yet, but you are invited to use NotEye as your display engine :) See sample.cpp and sample.noe for a simple example. Have fun slaying Hydras, developing and playing roguelikes!

7DRL reviews and HyperRogue version 3.3

We have finally finished reviewing all the entries in the 7DRL challenge 2012. You can see the results on RogueTemple, and also another version with screenshots, made by Todd Page.

We have one winner (rated 2.72 on average), I rule, you rule, we all rule old-school Hyrule, five tied for second place (2.67), and 7 more with average at least 2.5. I think that these differences are very small: it was often hard to me to decide whether to give a score of 2 or 3 in my review, and also much depends on who reviewed the particular entry. The ones I have tried (as a reviewer or personally) are of a very high quality, and I think every game in the top of the list deserves to be tried. Congratulations to all of them!

HyperRogue II was among the games tied for the second place. It got a perfect score for Aesthetics, Innovation and Roguelikeness, but lower scores for Fun (unfortunately) and Scope (I understand that it is a bit hard to judge scope since a part has been written before the challenge).

Anyway, HyperRogue III raises Aesthetics, Roguelikeness and Fun even higher (and Scope in some sense, although this should be judged for 7DRLs only). And this post announces Version 3.3!

This update is rather minor. Some descriptions are improved; they are now more accurate and detailed. Made it clear that there are actually many Orbs of Yendor. Cultists in the Icy Lands produce more heat now. HyperRogue should now work correctly in a resolutions with height greater than width (not only on Android).

The Android version gets a "share" function, which allows you to share a short description of your character (together with a screenshot). Your characters are be no longer destined to be lost without any trace.

Have fun!

Necklace of the Eye version 5.1

The 7DRL challenge has created a wave of good roguelikes, some of them using the newest libtcod version. Drakefire Chasm is very good, but I could not get it into fullscreen on my Linux machine. So I have tested it with NotEye, and found some bugs (not very surprising, since Brogue was the only libtcod roguelike I have tested it on in the past). NotEye version 5.1 fixes these bugs, and adds some minor new features. I can play Drakefire Chasm on Linux in fullscreen now. :)

• includes a config for Drakefire Chasm and Top Dog
• libtcod fix: TCOD_sys_wait_for_keypress now stops waiting on a NotEye keypress too (this one broke both games above)
• streaming fix (including libtcod): zipped stream is now flushed correctly (this bug made Top Dog halt in some circumstances)
• NotEye no longer needs to be able to find the font file when running a libtcod game (it uses its own font instead)
• Vapors of Insanity tiles are included (and some of them are used by Drakefire Chasm)
• Some new fonts added to the selection: Fantasy 16x16, double-sized 8x8 terminal font (for square-shaped games such as Top Dog)
• grass icon in Brogue is raised
• a dev mode added to the libtcod.noe config, which can be used to get the RGB colors and positions on mouseover
• an option to make screenshots with F4 (useful for animations)
• the website has been redesigned to provide a more detailed information about each supported game

Breathing fire	FPP
Dialog	ISO
a Priest casting a spell, in 3D	ISO

Drakefire Chasm and Top Dog via NotEye

Unfortunately Sword in the Hand is not supported, since it uses libtcod 1.5.0. Porta Lucis uses a Visual Studio version of libtcod (I am not sure which version) and I cannot try it. Download NotEye 5.1 here!