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Kharne RL blog
Kaduria RL blog
Planet Roguelike
RogueBasin
Great Games Experiment
interesting, important and not obsolete (Slash / roguetemple)
Its a rather splendid game (Dave Moore / Kharne)
This is becoming a game I love to hate (Krice / Rogue Hut)
The game looks interesting, and I think it presents itself well for a roguelike [...] the visual effects I've seen seem nice (Curseman, in a comment)
Great work! (Tim., in a comment)
In my last article, I wrote that I will now concentrate a little bit on enhancing dungeon features. My current development version already contains the following features:
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During the last releases, I lost sight of the interestingness of dungeons in LambdaRogue. As of LR 1.2, there are the following specials (besides standards like various floor tiles, walls, normal and locked doors, water):
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Once again Krice has reviewed the recent LambdaRogue release. Read his comments at RogueHut.
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Update (02 Oct 2008, 09:40) I just recognized that I forgot to include all necessary .dll files in the Windows download, so the game won't start in SDL mode. I have already uploaded a new Setup file which fixes this. Sorry.
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If you follow the discussions in the roguelike world, you surely have noticed The Berlin Interpretation (B.I.), trying to name important factors of roguelikes, based on the roguetemple definition. Now Krice announces that he will answer to the B.I. with his own definition – and admits that his definition would currently exclude the original rogue from the collection of roguelikes, because rogue had no possibility to choose a character class.
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LambdaRogue 1.2 will bring a small gameplay enhancement which is standard in many roguelikes: The need for identifying items before using them the first time. So far, I either was too lazy to implement this or I had to implement more important changes first.
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Wow. Privateer: Ascii Sector. Of course I already recognized that this game exists, and I also recognized the positive reactions on it, but I never tried it. Until yesterday, when I downloaded the latest release (0.4.3 from Sep 20th 2008). And now I'm excited and addicted to it.
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Yesterday I had my short presentation at IRDC 2008. Basically I talked about my current thoughts on ASCII symbols in roguelike games. Based on Peirce's well-known categories icon, symbol and index I tried to categorize the use of ASCII in LambdaRogue's dungeon view.
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Saturday and Sunday the first International Roguelike Developers Conference will take place at Berlin, Germany, and I am looking forward to meet some other roguelike developers there, besides speaking about "Context and Meaning in character based roleplaying".
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Since the release of LambdaRogue 1.1 not really much happened concerning further development of either the 1.x branch of the game or my 2.x rewrite project. The reason is easy.
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Since some weeks I have an old, used IBM ThinkPad (T23), which will be my only computer soon. My older computer was an Amilo notebook, faster than the T23, but its keyboard is slightly broken, its damn loud (the fan nearly never stops) and sometimes it behaves strangely. Well, most of the time I was able to work with it very good, but for working purposes I need something more robust. And although this ThinkPad is even older than the Amilo, I can work better with it than before.
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Today I started to re-implement LambdaRogue from scratch. This is the first step towards a 2.0 release in a far future. I have learned a lot while developing LambdaRogue 1.x, and my main goal for a 2.0 release is to create better code: better structured and, even more important, completly object oriented. I already have set up the basic structure of the application (a window where I can press ESC to quit). I was able to use most of the 1.x source for this, and I believe that most other parts of the 1.x LambdaRogue only need a slight rewrite. The main challenge is to recognize code parts which should be recreated as objects and to determine how this could be done. Here especially player, monster and item objects will be interesting. For example, LambdaRogue 1.x has a big "MoveMonsters" function which alters the position of all monsters. LambdaRogue 2.0 instead will have a method "Move" inside the monster objects. However, LambdaRogue 1.x will also receive future updates, as develeopment of 2.0 will be slowly, slowly, slowly. It is even more an experiment than a true project. Perhaps it will not work as I think now, so I will always have a grown 1.x branch to improve on.
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Once again we have an update, and this is a rather important one, because I discovered some serious bugs, one of them hunted here. Another bug seems only to occur on Window platform, due to an uninitialized variable.
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This is a message which sometimes occurs when entering a deeper dungeon level. Unfortunately, what follows is a crash. The bug is not very predictable – it may occur or it may not, and until now, it only occured in levels deeper than 10. Until I have a patch for this, it is a good idea to save the game (as it is a roguelike, this will also quit the game) and make a backup of the savegame file before going downstairs. An inconveniant workaround, I know. I do my best to fix the bug.
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Update ... well, it seems I was not really awake when I wrote this text. The comment I mention was made by Tim. on the features entry.
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From now on, the Windows version of LambdaRogue will also be provided as executable setup file, as alternative to the zip archive. I have created and just uploaded a LambdaRogue-1.0.1-Setup.exe to SourceForge (the site seems to work again, but is still showing wrong statistics).
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Since almost 2 months there are no download statistics available for projects hosted by SourceForge, because they are doing some server migration stuff. Now even project pages are not accessible. And a few days ago they sent a mail that in some days (I think August the 18th) even more server migrations will take place. Well, it is good if you try to provide good servers and to improve overall performance of everything, but this process takes place a long long time now and I'm a little bit tired of it.
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Mainly to fix the broken NumPad in 1.0, I have released a 1.0.1 patch. Note that you NOW have to switch NumLock ON in order to make the NumPad work!
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Update: I managed to rip and edit some tiles from existing tilesets (mainly the Itakura Nethack tileset and the Gervais Angband tileset). Here is a screenshot. I will offer this as optional download for those who won't play ASCII games at all.
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In Rogue Hut, Krice wrote again about LambdaRogue. Besides other things, he writes about a strangely non-working NumPad:
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Once again I forgot to comment out the cheating options from the source before releasing the game ... So pressing Shift + B (i.e. B) will bring up the "cheat prompt" where you could enter certain commands if you knew them 
The key is hardcoded, so please do not use Shift + B for other commands.
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Over two years have passed since I started to develop a small little program where an @ could be moved on the screen. After lots of unfinished versions with lots of bugs and problems, and after a break of nearly one year, I again accelerated the development process, which resulted in the 0.3 tree in early 2008.
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While I have successfully redesigned the questlog of LambdaRogue, I still have not released 1.0. There are 2 reasons.
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Later this evening I will finally release LambdaRogue 1.0; two days later than planned, but with more bugs fixed. One thing that I really have to improve before the release is the questlog. At the moment, it is simply a list with all quests. But this list does not fit on the screen anymore, because of the high number of quests. So I have to find a way to make it scrollable. Once this works as intended, I will create the .tar.gz- and .zip-archives and upload the whole thing.
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Another great roguelike is certainly Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which recently has been released as version 0.4. Yesterday I played it for the first time and was immediatly impressed, especially by the great graphical version.
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It seems that I am infected by the "use oversized IDEs for developing small projects" virus. Today I installed the FreePascal IDE Lazarus and am now using it to develop LambdaRogue.
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Another useful function of my LambdaRogue Editor (see yesterday's post) is the Monster Balancing Test. It allows me to see effects of monster changes in relation to different player stats without playing the whole game everytime. The test is simple:
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A very helpful tool to create quests and monsters during LambdaRogue development is the LambdaRogue Editor (LRE), a small Linux program written in Gambas (some kind of Visual Basic-like language for QT and GTK+). I have updated this editor to handle the latest developments in LambdaRogue and to offer some new tools for me.
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Only 6 days are left (from the creation date of this blog entry on) until the release of LambdaRogue 1.0 ... As I wrote some days ago, I finally want to have a version of LambdaRogue which can be considered stable and more or less complete (although, of course, roguelikes are never complete and I will continue to add features and fix issues after 1.0). On July the 20th, the game is 2 years old, therefore this will be the glory day. 
I will update this blog entry regularly with DONE- and TODO-lists.
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The soundtrack contest for roguelike games, initiated by Jice and Mingos, has now entered the voting phase. You can hear all eight contributed songs at the contest's weblog. Vote and add your comments!
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Nearly two years ago I made a posting on rec.games.roguelike.developing, announcing my work on LambdaRogue. The game was a primitive thing, the dungeon generator most buggy and not producing any good, and it had no clear concept, but as you can see, it still exists. 
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Currently I feel (again) a bit uncontent with the wilderness in LambdaRogue. It looks good, but is very unstructured. I use puzzle tiles to create the levels in LambdaRogue, and this works great for dungeons and caves; the more puzzle tiles I have, the more interesting the levels. But for wilderness it's not enough and I think a need a second layer above the puzzle tiles to give structure to the wilderness - and make it, while still being randomly created, not to look arbitrary, but instead to provide certain fixed spots (like positions of the dungeon entrance, positions of NPCs etc.)
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Once again I changed the template of this website. This is the way I wanted to look the website since months, with a big big picture above, colorful and strange. Yesterday I found the time to create the picture, again using the various stock photos which make also the most artwork of LambdaRogue itself. I have added a credits page on this website with links to the artists who permitted me to use their work.
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LambdaRogue and this website uses several stock pictures found on deviantART. From most of the artists I got the explict permission to use the photos in this project, but some of them did not answer to my request. So if you see your works used here or in the game and want me to remove it, please leave a note here or at my deviantART-Account.
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I've created several small video trailers to show some of the features of LambdaRogue. At the moment, they are rather outdated, but still interesting to watch. I will add new videos from time to time.
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LambdaRogue's feature set, esp. the number of different monsters and items, is rather small compared to many other roguelike games. However, all features are chosen in a "less is more" manner by me with clear concepts in mind.
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I just have seen some of the recently released trailers for Diablo III, and I really want to play that thing some day. Unfortunately, as my computer is old and slow, it won't work. It is a shame... *sigh*
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One of the roguelikes I really like is Frozen Depths by Mikko »Glowie« Karttunen. The most distinct feature of Frozen Depths is its temperature feature: there's always the danger of freezing to death if you do not keep warm by wearing clothes, but may also suffer fever if getting ill.
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I just saw that Paul "Krice" Pekkarinen, developer of Kaduria, has set up a blog on a smaller new roguelike project called Teemu. In this blog, he also wrote an entry about LambdaRogue. And, I am really shocked, it is not entirely negative. But of course, the reason why he mentions the game at all is mainly criticism.
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Although I'm not Thomas Biskup (the developer of Adom), who introduced the concept of »postcardware« into roguelike development, I love to receive handwritten mail, too.
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I managed to upload an updated version (some tracks changed, addes two new titltes) of the game's soundtrack to SourceForge. Due to message the windows version of mpg123 shows when playing some of the tracks I stripped all ID3-tags from the files.
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I discovered two small bugs which are by no means critical, but nevertheless you should know:
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So, after I wrote only four little lines about the new release of LambdaRogue, I will now edit this blog entry to provide a little more information. First of all, you might have noticed it already, I released the next major update on LambdaRogue, we are now at 0.3.1, which polishes many things, improves the look (both in console and SDL mode) and offers many new features which should make gameplay more interesting.
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I made some changes to wilderness generation. In particular, they are:
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Most of the changes and additions I wanted to implement in 0.3.1 are finished, but there are still some things to do. Currently I'm writing several short texts (stories, somehow) which can be read ingame by buying or finding several scrolls. These stories give many information on the history of the game's world and especially on the role of the god s in some of the events which lead to the situation the game starts in.
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While testing 0.3.1, I discovered a small bug in monster data file. Two unique monsters, the "weapon smith" (inhabiting LambdaRogue since the earliest versions) and the new unique "lonely librarian" accidently had the same dungeonlevel number.
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Once again, I've created a small trailer for the next release, showing some new features. Enjoy.
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The last few days I wasn't able to do anything on LambdaRogue, mainly because of much work to do at university, but also because it was nice to come back to some other things in my freetime. I finally tuned my Mandola and it is fun to play with that thing.
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I implemented a new effect today, force. It is available as spell with the same name and as potion called "Dust". I can't say why, but I have fun using it.
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I've finished the graphical changes for SDL mode, except perhaps the brightness of newly introduced tiles. This I'll have to check before 0.3.1 will be released. Besides this issue, the adjustments for doubled tile size are complete and I will now concentrate on gameplay additions.
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I thought it is a good idea to show a screenshot of the current development to LambdaRogue 0.3.1, so here it is;
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As mentioned before, I doubled the size of graphical tiles for the next LambdaRogue release. While this can improve the overall look of the game, it causes some problems.
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I really have to mention more often how configurable the game is. The mouse support I just implemented in version 0.3.0.2 can be switched off, of course. So if you prefer playing only with your keyboard and are annoyed by the mouse "dependance", esp. in menus, you can change this the follwing way:
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For the next major update to LambdaRogue, 0.3.1, I doubled the size of graphical tiles in SDL mode. There had been some complaints about the small 10*20 size of current versions, so it will be 20*40 for next releases.
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Once again an update, even minor than the last one: I released a patch that will bring your LambdaRogue 0.3.0.3 installation to 0.3.0.4 and fix mainly two bugs.
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Since several releases, LambdaRogue has the ability to play music while active. However, no official soundtrack was available until today, although since release 0.3.0.1, a selection of very nice and well fitting tracks (totally free and free to give away) had been created. Finally I had the time to upload this rather big package to SourceForge. Get the soundtrack here:
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Ah, how nice: Santiago Zapata a.k.a. Slash has mentioned LambdaRogue 0.3.0.2 at Temple of the Roguelike. He writes:
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I released a minor update to LambdaRogue. This update is available as binary for Windows and Linux. Source code is available, too.
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Since yesterday's release of version 0.3.0.2 of LambdaRogue, the game itself could be considered as nearly finished. All necessary quests are implemented, all textual content (except one textfile) is written and the game is winnable (technical and balancing-wise). So besides optimizing the existing content, fixing possible bugs and delivering the missing textfile, I could stop the whole thing and call it 1.0.
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[UPDATE on 21.05.2008, 21:56: If the game still crashes on startup of the Windows version, please download this replacement for fprl.exe, extract it to your LambdaRogue directory, start the game from a console window and send me the (now more detailed) output (or post it as comment to this blog entry). This might help to fix the bug.]
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As promised an a comment on the first trailer, here's a second one.
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I just uploaded a trailer for the next LambdaRogue release to GoogleVideo. The video shows the SDL version, with the mouse interface, lots of new artwork and parts of the soundtrack (which consists of tracks entirely licensed as Creative Commons).
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Today I optimized the mouse interface to allow movement along different distances.
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I just tried the last development version of LambdaRogue using Windows XP - and I am really shocked how fast the whole thing is. I wonder why the same program, compiled with the same version of FreePascal, is so slow under Linux.
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Here's a screenshot from the optional mouse interface which will be implemented in upcoming 0.3.0.2 update:
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The next update, to be released in a few days, will bring some changes to interface.
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As the r.g.r.d-thread on LambdaRogue 0.3 grows larger and larger, I will keep track of issues posted there concerning the handling and the gameplay of LambdaRogue in this blog entry, with the newest at the beginning.
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The first update to the 0.3 branch has just been released.
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The reactions on rec.games.roguelike.development on LambdaRogue 0.3 showed me that 1) the further development of the game seems to be appreciated; 2) that there are small details which heaten discussion; 3) that the game still has some nasty bugs.
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This page shows screenshots of the current and of some older releases of LambdaRogue. Click on an image to show the original sized version.
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Current version is 1.2
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It seems I was too optimistic concerning the release of LR 0.3 - I worked on polishing it hours and hours, but yesterday evening, between 22:30 and 23:00, I was too tired to go on. There are so many small things to optimize, and after optimizing it, there come alternate ideas in my mind which are not difficult to implement, but delay everything.
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Before packing the actual download files, I will just show a screenshot of the most current version:
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The following is a short summary of the story background of LambdaRogue since release 0.3.
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More than one year has passed since the last update on LambdaRogue was given on this website. Now, since the next major release in the development of this roguelike role playing game is near, I took the time to set up a blog for it. So after the announce of the Kharne-blog and after Krice's blog on Kaduria, it's the next roguelike development blog within a few days.
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