Hydra Slayer 18.0

Hydra Slayer 18.0 is released on Steam and itch.io!

Hydra Slayer is a roguelike with a unique combat system, based on old matematical puzzles. The highlights of release 18.0 are the following:

• A new player race, the Atlanteans. Most characters in Hydra Slayer would meet vulture hydras, who grow one head for every wound they deal to the player. The Atlanteans have been cursed by the gods, and this will happen for all hydras. Will you be able to turn your curse into an advantage? The curse significantly affects the equipment and strategies to use, especially in the first 12 levels. Thanks for Patashu and Nick for the idea!
• Evolving hydras. They start to appear after level 25. Their resistance to the given weapon material is increased by one after each attack. These are inspired by a (slightly trollish) post by IchigoMait.
• Previously, each level below Level 12 contained just one special hydra (not counting bloody or dragon variants of standard colors) -- since there are 9 types, some of them will appear just a few times. The new version changes this -- some levels will replace one of the standard ones with another special, and some will almost lack normal hydras and include most of the special types instead. Challenge levels now tend to have two special hydras per level too.
• One new exotic weapon -- I will leave that for the players to find :)
• New special graphics for scythes (Atlanteans start with a scythe), hecatoncheires and monkeys. Thanks to tehora for requesting these!
• Removed some exploits. It is no longer possible to enhance the titanic club easily with the Reforging+Ambidexterity combo (thanks to vo3435 for abusing this). A tighter limit is placed on using time-daggers on mushrooms.
• Some features have been added to help with "head draining" attacks (all hydras for Atlanteans, Vultures for all characters). When fighting head-draining hydras, the number of wounds caused by the hydra's next attack is given in the UI. For other hydras, when you select your shield, "+1" is displayed for the hydra whose damage is reduced by your shield. Also, you can now press 'w' in the hydra description, to view the amount of wounds the given hydra would deal for every size. Enchanted Mersenne Twister (when trying to roll a 'good' number of heads) will now take into account that extra heads could be drained.
• In the cheat mode, shift+H can now also summon equipment.
• Minor bugfixes: better display of the in-game achievement screen, capital letters accepted in the scores menu, better handling of the app going out of focus, the generation of Giants' weapons in challenge games, crash bug with Vulture + Ambidexterity + Knowledge/Growth, using Twister even though runes are active, inexact calculation of wounds in the PoK algorithm by head drainers, 'use count' for traps, dragons attacking in a wrong direction on non-orientable levels, number of stunned heads is no longer displayed in the PoK hint for large hydras (the algorithm does not care about them anyway), potion of knowledge correctly counting wounds for shadows, capital letters accepted in the scores menu

Have fun! Small updates will be posted on the Steam forum first.

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!

Hydra Slayer released on Steam!

Hydra Slayer has been just released on Steam!

If you don't know what Hydra Slayer is: is a roguelike with a unique combat system based on the properties of numbers (inspired by some old mathematical puzzles). At first this is simple addition and subtraction, but then divisibility and more complicated properties of numbers come into play. As a general design rule, it is rarely clear which weapon is better: the more potential the weapon has, the harder it is to use (for example, a blade that can cut 12 heads at once is useless against hydras which have less than 12 heads). You will need to combine your weapons into sets which can kill hydras as effectively as possible: hydra attacks cost you health, and it does not regenerate. You can play it as a short 12-level coffebreak roguelike, or continue to the full game, filled with many different special types of multi-headed beings, lots of special artifact weapons, levels with strange topologies, and so on. Hydra Slayer's system is very clear (no more wondering whether +3 Evasion or +1 Dexterity is better, because you don't know the formulae used by the game), but hard to master. Many of the items in Hydra Slayer are also unique -- they would not make sense outside of this combat system, like the Powder of Growth, which makes a hydra grow extra heads -- which is very useful, since a hydra with less heads is not necessarily easier to kill. See the detailed list of features.

The new version (17.0 -- of course, 16.3 is still available for free) has the following features:

• Typical Steam features, such as online achievements and leaderboards, Steam trading cards, cloud-based saves, automatic updates, and community.
• Updated interface. Some new animations (watch those heads fly!) and graphics.
• Slightly updated performance.
• A random challenge, which is 10 levels long, and much more random than a usual run of Hydra Slayer. Also, a daily challenge, where everyone plays the same random challenge, and can compare their scores.
• New music, by Brett Cornwall (work in progress).
• Some minor new gameplay features: traps to lead hydras on, Orbs which provide a powder/potion effect many times at the cost of a weapon slot, and new map generators.
• Source code (except the Steam features) is included.

You can buy Hydra Slayer on Steam or itch.io. Have fun playing!

NotEye+Hydra Slayer update, last year, and further plans

So let's start the 100th on this blog by summarizing year 2015.

2015 started with HyperRogue just accepted for sale on Steam. I put it on Steam Greenlight some years ago while it was still free to do so, because why not? At that time, HyperRogue, although it seemed to be the most popular of my games, was quite small and simple -- I considered Hydra Slayer to be more interesting from the gameplay perspective myself.
Well, the plan was to add typical Steam features such as achievements and leaderboards, and release it for a very low price. But it went much better than that. Quite a lot of people have bought HyperRogue, added positive reviews, and formed a community who discussed strategies and suggested many new ideas for further development. I have decided to add new features -- these features are added to the Steam version first to encourage people to buy, but the free version is also updated later. At the end of the year, HyperRogue on Steam has 38 lands (including some that are very interesting and I am very proud of), contrary to 11 when it was first released on Steam -- as well as many special modes, such as Euclidean, cooperative shmup, Yendor Challenge, or pure tactics mode. The free version of HyperRogue has 32 lands, so whether you have bought HyperRogue on Steam or not, you got a much more interesting game to play :)

In the meantime, I have been also working in Team ADOM. This was mostly working on NotEye, which ADOM is using as a graphical engine. I consider working on innovative game design (as in HyperRogue or Hydra Slayer) much more fun than mostly working on user interface, but still, it is great to work on one of the greatest roguelikes, that I have played a lot many years ago. In November, ADOM has been finally released on Steam too, and despite some nasty bugs in the initial release, it has been very successful there.

So what are the plans for 2016? I don't think it would be practical to add 30 new innovative lands to HyperRogue per year forever, but there are definitely at least some lands to be added -- HyperRogue community still has some great unused ideas. There is also still a lot of work to do in ADOM -- the user interface needs many more improvements.

More interestingly for me, Hydra Slayer has been just accepted for sale on Steam. In some sense, the situation between HyperRogue and Hydra Slayer has been reversed -- Hydra Slayer is the smaller one now :) Although HyperRogue and Hydra Slayer are both roguelikes based on mathematical concepts, there are also very different in some other regards. HyperRogue is designed as an open world roguelike, with a vast hyperbolic world that you can roam freely; to make it interesting at all times, the player character remains roughly equally strong during the whole game -- there are no experience levels nor equipment other than temporary powerups which cannot be carried far away -- otherwise, the players would just grind the hyperbolic plane to become stronger and stronger. 1HP approach makes all battles full of action, and brings new challenges based on monsters and environments -- so I have to be creative instead of copying other roguelikes -- but it has its limitations, too. For example, an unfortunate consequence is that all characters are very similar, the only difference being which lands you have already completed, and which lands not yet. Hydra Slayer, although its math-based combat is what I find innovative and interesting, is more like a typical roguelike here: a single dungeon, hitpoints, several races to choose from for the character, randomly found equipment that the character has to build their strategy around.

I am planning to use the same model for Hydra Slayer as for HyperRogue -- what you get by buying the Steam version (instead of playing the free one) is online achievements (contrary to HyperRogue, Hydra Slayer already has local achievements in the free version), leaderboards, and automatic updates with new features (which are also added to the free version after some time). I have no clear ideas for these new features at the moment, but I hope that the community will help here too, so if you have any ideas already, I am happy to listen :) At first, some work is required to update the graphics, add music (any suggestions here?), create the trading cards and other graphical assets.

For now, I have released a new version of Hydra Slayer+NotEye. The previous release was not tested very well (some of the bugs being the same ones as in the initial Steam release of ADOM). This release fixes them, improves the performance, and includes a new sample for Noteye, written in the D programming language (thanks to Michał 'Ancient' Bieliński, the developer of PRIME). Hopefully all the bugs that were easy to run into have been fixed, so if you want to play the free version of Hydra Slayer before buying it on Steam, it should be much better than the previous release. Furthermore, NotEye now has a repository on GitHub -- this should make it easier to allow both ADOM and Hydra Slayer grow together with NotEye, and potentially to let more developers to use NotEye or to contribute to its development -- previously, NotEye grew continually due to ADOM developments, but this growth was invisible outside.

So, have lots of fun in the New Year!

Changelog for NotEye 8.3:

• fixes in the copymap optimization, fullscreen mode, some crashes, some timing problems on Linux, true console output
• an option to disable autocentering if the player character is still close to the center (a configurable area of no-autocentering region, which can be different while targetting e.g. in ADOM)
• added a capability of improved versioning (previously, the version number of NotEye in ADOM did not change, even though there were differences)
• an ability to easily add user-made interface mods
• NotEye's dev menu allows to evaluate Lua functions
• added a sample in D (thanks to Michał Bieliński)
• an option to "ignore errors and go to NotEye menu" after the script crashes
• configuration is now actually saved for the Third Person Perspective mode

Changelog for Hydra Slayer 16.3:

• added some optimizations to improve NotEye's performance
• fixed some bugs in the interface, some typos and credits
• when you finish the Tutorial, you continue normal game as expected, not go back to the beginning of Tutorial
• Hydra Slayer's save/highscore/log files are now moved to NotEye's userdir

Necklace of the Eye 8.2

Hereby,version 8.2 of NotEye, and version 16.2 of Hydra Slayer, is released!

NotEye was silent during the last year, but in fact, while I have spent most of my time on HyperRogue, I have been also working on NotEye as a part of ADOM -- so ADOM always had the most recent version, but the official NotEye was not updated. Now it is high time for release, and hopefully, the long-awaited release of ADOM on Steam will come soon too!

The update to Hydra Slayer is mostly caused by the update to NotEye -- other than that, just one bug with mouse is fixed. Anyway, if you like Hydra Slayer, or want it to be updated, please vote for it on Steam Greenlight! After HyperRogue was accepted for Steam, both its free and paid versions were hugely improved, and hopefully a similar thing will happen for Hydra Slayer. So whether you are willing to buy the Steam version of Hydra Slayer or you are just a fun, Hydra Slayer's presence on Steam will be great for you! :)

Also, the websites for NotEye and Hydra Slayer have been improved.

Download the new version of NotEye from its download page -- you can download either NotEye+Hydra Slayer, or a Windows bundle with several games preconfigured to work with NotEye -- or just download ADOM, that's definitely recommended too. Have fun! :)

The changelog follows.

• It is now possible to use True Type fonts for the NotEye interface, which allows it to look more modern. NotEye defaults to use the True Type version of DejaVu Sans now, but old fonts are still available :)
• Improved handling of crashes -- if the NotEye script crashes, there is a bigger chance of getting an useful message, with options which sometimes allow you to fix the problem.
• Improved the configuration files.
• Even when using diagonal combos, it is possible to repeat keys by holding them.
• NotEye starts much more cleanly now -- the window is opened just once now (previously it has been opened and changed several times while the configuration was read).
• (Hydra Slayer) Fixed the mouse handling in the race selection screen.
• More efficient reading data of subprocesses in Linux (DoomRL did not work correctly in Linux)
• Window position is remembered
• Fixed a bug in some game configurations which prevented starting another game later
• Fixed the config for the 'hide the mouse pointer' feature.

For developers:

• Improved support for TrueType fonts: markup, which allows to change styles or insert images in text
• Streaming data to a string -- this also allows the screen to be restored after NotEye crashes in NotEye-integrated games
• fixed Shift+D in samples, arrows in Lua sample
• added the Hydra Slayer trailer (disabled without editing sources, though)
• deleted object IDs are reassigned
• displaying messageboxes, getting the HWND of the NotEye window in MS Windows

HyperRogue 7.1: mines and whirlpools

HyperRogue 7.1 is released on Steam!

In this version, after collecting 30 $$$ you can go to the beach and, if you can survive the attacks from Albatrosses and escape from the tides, collect some Ambers. The Ocean is the first land in HyperRogue which features equidistant curves prominently.

You can also take one of the boats, and go into the Ocean. From there, you can reach other coasts, access Caribbean, the land of Pirates (Caribbean was already there in 7.0, but now, it is only accessible via the Ocean), or the infinite Whirlpool, where your boat is only allowed to go with the current, and you have to defend from Sharks and Pirates, and capture treasures from other boats caught into the whirlpool.

Another place where you can go after collecting 30 $$$ is the Minefield, based on a well known game. Stepping on a mine is usually game over, but you know the number of mines next to you, so hopefully you will know where not to step!

The ideas for these lands were not mine -- Ocean and Whirlpool are wonderfullizardofoz's ideas, and the Minefield is Piotr Migdał's idea. Please send me ideas for new lands, and they might be added to HyperRogue at some point! (Although I already have some ideas...)

Version 7.1 also has some other features. Press 'v' or click the 'menu' button to see the new main menu, which conveniently lists all the features of HyperRogue. Also, a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) written by Fulgur14 is now available on the website. These two features should make it easier to fully enjoy HyperRogue. Also, the shmup mode correctly says that the number of knifes is counted (not the number of turns), fires are burning off and heat dissipates even offscreen (previously, many of the speed runs abused the fact that heat did not dissipate offscreen), Fire Cultists can attack more terrain types, another message is used for Sandworm explosions when you see no spice created, and a bug which caused the Icy Land to become too hot in the shmup mode has been fixed.

Also, the German translation should be available soon. Have fun!

By the way, I have recently recorded a new trailer for Hydra Slayer. Please vote for Hydra Slayer on Greenlight, if you have not done this yet! Versions 7.1a/b fixed: - "(v) menu" instead of "(v) config" - blow into water/fire/mines - the PC could just stand in place during high tide and not drown - fixed the "escaped Whirlpool" achievement - fixed the Restart key - in the very unlikely scenario when the Key is generated in the Whirlpool, it is protected by a Pirate party with Orbs of Water, so it hopefully does not run away and you can escape the Whirlpool Version 7.1c fixes: - you can no longer use Orb of Air against sharks, seeps, and other restricted monsters. - but you can use Orb of Air to blow monsters into chasms. - made the Ocean less bright in the plain mode (still brighter than LoEM), and the Minefield slightly brighter (to make it more different from the Land of Mirrors). Also, made the fire graphically calmer in the Land of Power. - Orb of Aether now protects you from mine explosions, but also makes you unable to detect mines. - for thematic reasons, R'Lyeh is now more likely to be adjacent to Ocean (and less likely elsewhere). - Fixed the Hyperstone Quest message to include new lands. - Two new achievements added ("Black Mark" and "Nasty Pet") - Fixed a bug with Space/Safety (the game was trying to calculate the cost after Safety acted -- this is fixed, hopefully this fixes the crash too) - Fixed a bug with Crossroads II/Ocean border - mine marks now appear above the PC/monsters. Version 7.1d fixes: - bug with Crossroads II generation which also caused the game to stop generating lands fixes. - saving the new treasures/kills. - Euclidean mode supports the new land, as well as the gameboard modes (pick the gameboard mode you want, and then pick Euclidean mode, to activate an Euclidean gameboard). Version 7.1e fixes: - collecting OoY works. Version 7.1f fixes: - Tame Bomberbirds now fly over chasms. - Forgetting old kills during saving, this is fixed.

HyperRogue 6.6: Steam, Android, and Desura

Some news about HyperRogue:



HyperRogue on Steam has been updated to Version 6.6 -- this fixes some minor bugs, and also includes the source code, so inner workings of the seven new lands are no longer secret. More details at the bottom of this post.

HyperRogue on Google Play has been updated to Version 6.6 too. There were some bugs which caused HyperRogue to crash on exit (I thought that this was caused by the OS deciding to kill HyperRogue in order to clear memory, but it was actually a bug). Additionally, HyperRogue registers itself as a service -- this reminds the user of the game in progress, and should hopefully prevent Android from killing it (we will see if this indeed works).

HyperRogue is also going to be released on Desura in June! If you would like to have access to the newest HyperRogue, but you do not like Steam for some reason, this is for you. The Steam version has global highscores (meaningful in a game of skill such as HyperRogue), achievements which add a bit to the game (I am proud of getting the Master of Cult achievement myself), and a great community -- but you do not lose it, since the Steam key is included in the Desura package too! Source code and HyperRogue Gold for Android are also included. If you like HyperRogue, please give it a good rating on Desura!

Some cool new features are already planned for version 7.0, so at some time the current version (HyperRogue 6.6) will be released for free, and the paid versions will be updated with new lands and features. Have fun!

Detailed changelog for HyperRogue 6.6:

• Some bugs related to Mimics (Mirages and Mirror Images) have been fixed: they are now destroyed when they stray too far away, when you teleport, or when they attack an Ivy. (If they were not destroyed in these situations, it could potentially lead to weird behavior.) Also, they no longer change their direction without a reason in the Alchemist Lab.
• Walls left by killed Vine Beasts are now more visible in the Hive.
• Shift-clicking on a cell now does nothing if it is impossible to cast a spell from a ranged Orb at the given location.
• HyperRogue's log file has been improved a bit. The implementation is much more clean, and it lists achievements gained, and data proving that the scores have been achieved in an official paid version of HyperRogue. This could be potentially used to prevent some forms of cheating by tampering with saved games (although it is possible to cheat anyway, just a bit harder).

NotEye 8.1 + Hydra Slayer 16.1

After a long break, NotEye 8.1 is released!

The biggest change here is porting NotEye to SDL2. The major advantage of this is that NotEye should run much more smoothly now, which should be visible now. In the future, it should be easier to port to modern hardware such as iOS or Android, or to create games with many windows. This required lots of work to achieve — for example, SDL2 input handling is very different from the SDL one. I suppose the new handling is usually convenient for game developers, but it makes things much more complicated for frontends such as NotEye, which have to simulate the system console of Windows or Linux, or to communicate with libtcod (which still uses SDL 1.2).

More changes include:

• An OSX package is provided. You can now enjoy Hydra Slayer on a Mac!
• Tile transformations are cached (tilemapping). Another solution which greatly improves the efficiency of NotEye.
• Added more sizes of the minifont (used for the minimap in ASCII mode). Thanks to Asmerillion on the Polish roguelike forums for the files. Also the font selection menu has been split into two submenus.
• Supports changing of mouse cursors and window icons. DOS mouse cursor is simulated in the fullscreen ASCII mode.
• NotEye now supports TrueType fonts, modal windows, and special input codes (sent to the integrated game, but not corresponding to real keys). These are currently used only by ADOM.
• I have decided to remove the RogueBard music from the official NotEye package. It is still included in the Bundle version, though.
• The new sounds for Hydra Slayer are finished (well, for now at least). Thanks to Brett Cornwall for the new sounds!

In case you wonder where is NotEye 8.0: NotEye is intensively developed as a part of ADOM. The latest closed releases of ADOM (r48-50) use NotEye 8.0. There have been some changes since then, so this is NotEye 8.1.

Downloads:

• NotEye 8.1+Hydra Slayer 16.1, Windows executable+source
• NotEye Roguelike Bundle, version 1.4

Have fun!

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!

interview and ADOM pre20

Rather old news, but there has been an interview with me on the Roguelike Radio!

Also, ADOM prerelease 20 is available (for everyone). It includes a newer version of NotEye than the one available on the official NotEye's website. But I am going to wait a bit before releasing the new version officially.

Stay tuned!

NotEye 7.3

NotEye 7.3+Hydra Slayer 15.3 is released!

NotEye 7.3 has the following changes visible to players. You can see them in Hydra Slayer 15.3, as well as in ADOM Prerelease 17, which is coming soon to donors!

• Some crash bugs in NotEye 7.2 have been fixed.
• The display does not jump to center of the new player position immediately—instead, it moves smoothly.
• Smooth character movement animations in games which support it, such as Hydra Slayer or ADOM. There are some issues with it, but still, I think it is a nice feature.
• Auto-scrolling, manual scrolling, and movement animation speeds are configurable.
• OpenGL is now automatically turned on in the FPP mode (this previously worked in ADOM, and has been moved to NotEye).
• Fixed a problem with out-of-window mouse on Mac (thanks to jt).
• Ctrl+wheel zooming has a limit now.
• The Minimap now tends to use the reserve lines if they were allocated.

For those who want to use NotEye for their own games, there are also some more technical changes:

• Noteye uses Vector and Rectangle structures now (see vectors.noe), instead of {x=, y=} or {x0=, y0=, x1=, y1=} structures. This makes some code more elegant (we no longer need to do the same thing for X and Y coordinates separately).
• Adjustments for the Roguelike Bundle: NotEye detects if it is a part of the Bundle, and adjusts its menus accordingly.
• Added "pickinteger"/"pickbool" functions to make it easier to write user config files (config-GAME.noe).
• Redesigned the display system. Most of the functions have changed.
• FPP mode now accepts floating point coordinates of the origin.
• Fixed spFree ordering in the non-OpenGL FPP mode (it is now drawn after spFloor/spCeil).
• I have started some refactoring (to reduce the number of global variables), but this is still a work in progress.
• Some of the changes above are not backward compatible (old game.noe files would not work with the new version). The file "backward.noe" is supposed to list what has changed, and apply fixes for old game.noe files.

You can download NotEye+Hydra Slayer (Windows binary+source) here (~8 MB), or the Roguelike Bundle Draft v1.2 (Windows, 20 MB) with more games included which work out of the box.

Have fun!

Hydra challenge, new NotEye, HyperRogue music and exploits

It seems that a lot of things have happened during the last month...

In the previous two weeks, Hydra Slayer was featured in the Reddit Roguelike Weekly Challenge. Players were asked to play Hydra Slayer and reach as deep as possible. You can see the results here.

I had some fun, and I hope that the challengers had fun too. Congratulations to ionfrigate for winning! :)

Still, I think that the Hydra Slayer challenge did not show the game's full potential... I mean, it was not as fun for the players and myself as it could be. For players competing for scores, I think it would be better to count the wounds gained during the 50 levels, instead of going as deep as possible (I think that the game gets quite boring after level 50...). Also, all of the high-ranked players have been playing as daughters of Echidna, which is unfortunate IMO, as they are the least interesting race for me: it is easier to construct an efficient weapon set for Echidna than for other races; using this efficient weapon sets is a rather boring calculation; and they seem to be more powerful than the other races. They pose an unique challenge due to being completely different than other races, but if I was organizing a competition, I would probably ban them.

Still, weapon sets that have been used by different players have been a bit different (one of them used a pick axe, which was surprising for me).

The challenge led to some improvements in Hydra Slayer!
Hydra Slayer 15.2 features:

• The potion of knowledge is now usable only against a single enemy. This is actually more logical: when facing a bloody hydra and a vulture hydra, for example, you can choose whether to unblood the bloody hydra, or to analyze the vulture hydra.
• Also, the potion of knowledge is now less useful on shadow hydras: it now shows three single handed attacks. Before this change shadow hydras were extremely boring for Echidnas, since for any respectable Echidna three attacks are enough to kill a shadow hydra, and thus shadow hydras boiled down to drinking the potion and noting the numbers. Especially boring when there were lots of other Hydras in sight, and the game had to analyze each of them, which takes a lot of time for ambidextrous slayers...
• To nerf the Echidnas a bit, they are now slower to use items. Using items costs a turn, and throwing powder at hydras costs another turn (and the hydra attacks in the meantime while the powder is thrown!). I think that Echidnas need more nerfing, though, so please comment if you have any ideas for this.
• Some bugfixes: shadow hydras are no longer detected with a right-click. Keys such as 'm' and 'f' now actually work when a hydra is stunned (previously, the screen tended to disappear right away in this case... this bug appeared in UberHunter's videos and I could not find the reason for it, but it was apparently caused by the stun animation). The semi-transparent part of the screen sometimes appeared in the wrong place, this is fixed.

Also, NotEye got some improvements. Some players know these improvements from the closed prerelease of ADOM, or from the Roguelike Bundle draft. Both of these were called NotEye 7.1 (I think), so the official release gets number NotEye 7.2.
The changes are following:

• Minimap has modes: it can show the old typical minimap from colored boxes, but it can also show the original ASCII screen, or a graphical screen (in the Tile, Isometric, or FPP mode). So the player could play in ASCII mode and have a tiny FPP view in the corner, for example. Also the minimap is movable now, and the default placement is (supposedly) more intelligent.
• The Noteye window is resizable.
• A new 3x5 font added (especially useful for the ASCII minimap).
• Some keys caused NotEye menu to crash in some situations, this has been fixed.
• Added ChessRogue, Gruesome, Toby the Trapper, and Unstoppable to the NotEye menu.
• Music now stops when NotEye loses focus. Also better handling of mouse out of the window.
• Noteye looks for batch files in the 'batch' subdirectory, and can run games via these batch files.
• Scrollable map. Holding the mouse close to the edge of the map area will cause the map to scroll. Look at the menu (NotEye menu, or some game menu) to center back on the PC. This also means that when the PC is on the edge of the map, the tiles mode will detect this and move the PC off the center, so that more of the map is visible.
• Zoomable map. You can now zoom the map in the menu (by changing the tile size in the graphical mode submenu), or using Ctrl+Mousewheel.
• You can now specify the max frame rate, to conserve the CPU.
• Table streaming, to be used in integrated games, so that special events sent by ADOM will be streamed when creating a NotEye recording or playing via a NotEye server. The next prerelease of ADOM will display a nice, detailed animation when using the machines in the level with lots of guards and a huge shop! ;) (I was surprised when I saw that place first, so no details, go play ADOM yourself if you do not know what I mean)
• For some games it is good to restrict the map to the original map area, this is better supported now.
• An option to reserve space below the map appears in the menu now.
• Fixed some minor bugs with the cache used for zoomed images.
• Fixed some problems with FPP.
• noteye_getevent() now actually returns the event.
• "isosizes" now returns all the original parameters, too
• NotEye scripts have access to "getkeystate" (e.g. check if Ctrl is checked) and "getticks" (for timing)

You can download Hydra Slayer 15.2 and NotEye 7.2 here.

Last but not least, I am collaborating with NeonCorridor: he is creating great music for HyperRogue. The songs which are ready are available here; comments are welcome :) For a long time, I felt that HyperRogue was complete except that music was missing, and this is going to be fixed in a few weeks. Also, Adam Borowski has discovered some exploitful strategies in HyperRogue, which allowed one to achieve unlimited scores while remaining safe (or practically safe). These are also going to be fixed in HyperRogue 4.0. Stay tuned!

NotEye 7.0 + Hydra Slayer 15.0

After a relatively long time, a new version of NotEye and Hydra Slayer is released!
This version includes many features and fixes many bugs reported in the meantime.

NotEye 7.0:

• A selection of palettes. Several palettes are included, and you can even define your own palette. Also palettes with non-black color 0 work somewhat.
• The choice of font/resolution has been improved. Any font can be scaled now (both up and down). You can also request a specific resolution (e.g. 800x500) and the currently selected font will be scaled to match the requested resolution as well as possible. Fonts which were simply scaled versions of other fonts have been therefore removed, and replaced with two new fonts. (In the future NotEye probably should also support TrueType fonts, or some other format...)
• You can now save the configuration from NotEye, and have it automatically loaded the next time you run NotEye (when saved before selecting the game), or the next time you play the specific game (when saved during the game).
• Alpha-aliased fonts did not look well on non-black backgrounds, this has been fixed (again?)
• letters in mini-tile mode look better now
• fixed some bugs about the map location
• the mysterious "view using a selected config" moved to the Network menu where it belongs
• a new recoloring algorithm (which will be supposedly used for karmic dragons in ADOM)
• When the game hides/resizes the cursor, NotEye handles it correctly (also added to noteye-curses.h)
• Renamed keymaps and keytabs (might introduce backward incompatibility)
• tested on a Raspberry Pi (works, although slowly)

Hydra Slayer 15.0:

• Giants are sometimes 50-headed and named Hecatoncheires, to reinforce the Greek mythology theme (as suggested in that thread)
• A rare error with connectivity has been fixed. If you had to abandon your game from the previous version due to being unable to find the stairs, load the savegame in this version, it will fix it for you. (Also this does not ruin the Tutorial, as the previously released small bugfix did)
• A new rare weapon family, probably not very useful, but always something new (based on the Roguetemple thread)
• Meteorite Eradicator now uses the correct image in NotEye. Also Eradicator now uses the appropriate ASCII character if the font includes it (works in NotEye's VGA and Fantasy fonts, I have not tried to make it work in Unicode terminals)
• Weapon materials have been fixed in the Tutorial (in the weapons room).
• fixed a bug with the NotEye script which caused crashes in some circumstances (I don't remember the details)

A new version of Hydra Slayer for Android has also been released at Google Play (the last version of Hydra Slayer for Android released was 14.0...).

Download NotEye 7.0 + Hydra Slayer 15.0

Have fun!

NotEye 6.7 + Hydra Slayer 14.7: First Person Hex

Yet another small update to both NotEye and Hydra Slayer.

The following things have been improved in NotEye 6.7:

• When you choose the viewing mode before starting a game, it will be used each time. This is useful for roguelikes where you have to restart after each character. Also the config file is more versatile now regarding this.
• Fixed a bug with the built-in terminal emulator (this bug caused messages to overlap while playing Crawl on Linux)
• Freeformparams now have additional parameter, "side" (should we also display it when looking at it from the back? usually we do not want this, as these are the back sides of the walls etc., but sometimes we do) and "shiftdown" (should we shift the images to put the bottommost pixel of the image on the ground?)
• FPP parameters now allow more control. Use (dx, dy, dz) to move the eye position slightly (I have moved it to the front, which sometimes allow us to see more). Use (objpush, monpush) to tell how much the objects and the monsters should be shifted. Use (xz, yz) for non-square grids.

As for Hydra Slayer 14.7:

• Ambidextrous attacks now check for collapse (thanks to CCC for reporting this)
• Hex no longer uses the far left/right columns (that was ugly)
• The Brownian level generator did not work in the Hex mode
• Some wrapping levels did not display correctly in the Hex mode
• First-person perspective in the Hex mode (yes, non-square grids are useful!)

Download NotEye 6.7 + Hydra Slayer 14.7

Have fun slaying more Hydras!

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!

NotEye 6.5 + Hydra Slayer 14.5

Game Hunter has made several more videos about Hydra Slayer and NotEye. Go watch them!

Of course, some bugs and feature requests were discovered on the way...

Necklace of the Eye 6.5:

• Some fixes from 6.4 did not actually make it to the release (which actually made NotEye 6.4 unusable with DoomRL and some other games)
• NotEye now explains what is OpenGL good and bad for

And, on the more technical side:

• File generic.noe is no longer such a chaotic file, with functions related to many different features of NotEye (view modes, sounds, reading the map, running the game, keyboard input, and fonts). It has been split into several files . Also some stuff has been rearranged.
• Added some comments in the common/*.noe files.
• Some sound-related functions added (playsoundloop, playmusicloop, mixsetdistance, mixsetpanning, mixunregisteralleffects) (not yet used, but requested for ADOM)
• Added 'getobjectinfo' to get info about an object, as a Lua table (for example, using getobjectinfo on a simple image tile will currently return all the values used to create the tile (image, origin, size, transparency key) and the number of empty rows at the bottom)

Hydra Slayer 14.5 (thanks again to Game Hunter for his videos, and Ben Franzluebbers for reporting several bugs):

• Fixed a bug which sometimes caused hangups on entering the new level in the 4-directional mode
• invisible walls now look like dark walls, and unknown cells are simply black now
• shadow hydras are now remembered after you save the game
• pick axes have been upgraded slightly: they are now doublers (like bows and spears), not stunners, are more powerful (e.g. they work instantly at size 5), have new names and growth messages
• Mushroom staff now remembers mushroom displacement stats (and is displayed in the weapon history if used only for that)
• Titans now can press Shift+G to quickly move weapons from the ground to their extended inventory
• Potion of Knowledge now displays the weapon '0' correctly
• Fixed a bug which sometimes caused crashes when using knowledge/growth on vampires
• Updated the onsite feature list to the new theme

Download here, and have fun!

Hydra Slayer 14.4 + NotEye 6.4

I have noticed some bugs in Hydra Slayer while watching UberHunter's Hydra Slayer videos (and also noticed some more on my own when playtesting). I have fixed some of them, although there are still some left (I have no idea what causes some menus to disappear immediately, and what caused the crash after the 9th episode). Anyway, I think there are enough changes for a new version (for example, daughters of Echidna were much easier to play than intended).

Hydra Slayer 14.4 has the following changes:

• Damage modifiers (+1 damage for Echidna, -1 damage for having a correct shield) now actually work instead of being displayed wrongly
• Made bows stronger (longer stun times for larger bows; also stun times are displayed correctly now)
• Fixed a bug which caused loss of turns when wielding a bow
• Full-info now always displays the element sequence (and the names)
• Fixed a bug which caused levels to be empty after using 'o' to use another savegame
• dragon hydras are now animated correctly
• time weapons now work correctly against partially stunned hydras
• Fixed the message when "finding a powder"
• Removed debug numbers when generating a level
• The game now makes sure that there is a free spot next to the level entrance (otherwise you could run into problems if you are surrounded by mushrooms and have no dagger)
• minor fixes to the NotEye file

Also NotEye 6.4 has some improvements:

• "setscreensize" can override the default screen size (default = font size * ASCII rows/columns); also the ASCII screen is now centered if the resolution is larger than its size
• Fixed a bug which caused "key repeat" to not work
• Added an "enablekeyrepeat" function
• Added a "noteye_getevent" function to libnoteye, which returns the last keypress as an SDL event (so that you can read special combinations); also "noteye_getchev" which reacts to all keypresses and keyreleases
• Removed endwin() which sometimes caused a crash when closing the program on Windows
• screen is now cleared after closing a NotEye menu
• Curses mode now reads "ALT" correctly
• A small fix to the antialiasing routine (a bug caused weird vertical lines)
• Fixed a rounding error in tile scaling
• Auto-shiftdown is now always disabled when using tilefreeform or tiletransform (I will probably add some extra functions to adjust this manually later)

Have fun!

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!

try Hydra Slayer online

Hey,

AppSurfer is a nice website which allows to play Android apps on the Web. I have added Hydra Slayer:

Hydra Slayer on AppSurfer

Works a bit slow, but if for some reason you want to try Hydra Slayer without downloading, or see how the Android version works, now you can :) You can play by clicking the screen (as you probably would on Android), or with the keyboard (see this page for the list of keys).

But don't forget that the real desktop version looks better, is more user friendly, and you can save game safely :)

HyperRogue is available too, but unfortunately it seems too slow yet.