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!

Brogue 1.7.4, ported to NotEye

This is a new port of Brogue to NotEye. It includes tiles by Oryx and audio by LazyCat. Also thanks to Lanhash for asking me to finally do this, and for testing!

This is much better than the old port from 2012. Now, Brogue communicates with NotEye directly, without using Libtcod. This approach is much more convenient (no longer two windows) and much more robust (NotEye can get information about the placement of windows directly -- previously it could not, which caused some glitches).

Get it here, and have fun playing!

PS: I would love to also create a NotEye port of DCSS, using the DCSS tiles. Currently my preferred way of playing DCSS is to play the ASCII version of DCSS via NotEye. But somehow I found it hard to understand how tiles are drawn in DCSS -- if you have any ideas about how this could be done, please contact me :)

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!

Brogue video

And here is another NotEye video, presenting Brogue.

There are some glitches (Brogue draws some black letters on black background which are supposed to be invisible but are visible in NotEye; windows do not display very nicely and sometimes don't receive mouse clicks correcly) but I hope it shows something.

Have fun watching!