Allure of the Stars

Allure of the Stars is a near-future Sci-Fi roguelike2 and tactical squad game. Binaries and the game manual are available at the homepage6, where you can also try the game out in the browser: http://allureofthestars.com/play (It runs fastest on Chrome. Keyboard commands and savefiles are supported only on recent enough versions of browsers. Mouse should work everywhere.)

Not a single picture in this game. You have to imagine everything yourself, like with a book (a grown-up book, without pictures). Once you learn to imagine things, though, you can keep exploring and mastering the world and making up stories for a long time.

The game is written in Haskell1 using the LambdaHack10 roguelike game engine. Please see the changelog file for recent improvements and the issue tracker for short-term plans. Long term goals are high replayability and auto-balancing through procedural content generation and persistent content modification based on player behaviour. Contributions are welcome.

Game installation from binary archives

The game runs rather slowly in the browser (fastest on Chrome) and you are limited to only one font, though it's scalable. Also, savefiles are prone to corruption on the browser, e.g., when it's closed while the game is still saving progress (which takes a long time). Hence, after trying out the game, you may prefer to use a native binary for your architecture, if it exists.

Pre-compiled game binaries are available through the release page11 (and continuously from AppVeyor18). Note that Windows binaries no longer work on Windows XP, since Cygwin and MSYS2 dropped support for XP. To use a pre-compiled binary archive, unpack it and run the executable in the unpacked directory or use program shortcuts from the installer, if available.

On Linux, make sure you have the SDL2 libraries installed on your system (e.g., libsdl2-2.0-0, libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0 on Ubuntu; also libdw1). For Windows, the SDL2 and all other needed libraries are already contained in the game's binary archive.

Screen and keyboard configuration

The game UI can be configured via a config file. The default settings, the same that are built into the binary, are in GameDefinition/config.ui.default. When the game is run for the first time, the file is copied to the default user data folder, which is ~/.Allure/ on Linux, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Allure\ (or C:\Documents And Settings\user\Application Data\Allure\ or something else altogether) on Windows, and in RMB menu, under Inspect/Application/Local Storage when run inside the Chrome browser.

Screen font can be changed by editing the config file in the user data folder. For a small game window, the highly optimized 16x16x.fon and 8x8x.fon bitmap fonts are the best, but for larger window sizes or if you require international characters (e.g. to give custom names to player characters), a modern scalable font supplied with the game is the only option. The game window automatically scales according to the specified font size.

If you don't have a numeric keypad, you can use mouse or laptop keys (uk8o79jl) for movement or you can enable the Vi keys (aka roguelike keys) in the config file. If numeric keypad doesn't work, toggling the Num Lock key sometimes helps. If running with the Shift key and keypad keys doesn't work, try Control key instead. The game is fully playable with mouse only, as well as with keyboard only, but the most efficient combination for some players is mouse for go-to, inspecting, and aiming at distant positions and keyboard for everything else.

Compilation from source

If you want to compile native binaries from the source code, use Cabal (already a part of your OS distribution, or available within The Haskell Platform7), which also takes care of all the dependencies.

The recommended frontend is based on SDL2, so you need the SDL2 libraries for your OS. On Linux, remember to install the -dev versions as well, e.g., libsdl2-dev and libsdl2-ttf-dev on Ubuntu Linux 16.04. (Compilation to JavaScript for the browser is more complicated and requires the ghcjs15 compiler and optionally the Google Closure Compiler16 as well.)

The latest official version of the game can be downloaded, compiled for SDL2 and installed automatically by Cabal from Hackage3 as follows

cabal update
cabal install Allure

For a newer version, install a matching LambdaHack library snapshot from a development branch, download the game source from github5 and run cabal install from the main directory.

Testing and debugging

The Makefile contains many sample test commands. Numerous tests that use the screensaver game modes (AI vs. AI) and the teletype frontend are gathered in make test. Of these, travis runs test-travis on each push to github. Test commands with prefix frontend start AI vs. AI games with the standard, user-friendly frontend.

Run Allure --help to see a brief description of all debug options. Of these, the --sniff option is very useful (though verbose and initially cryptic), for displaying the traffic between clients and the server. Some options in the config file may prove useful too, though they mostly overlap with commandline options (and will be totally merged at some point).

Coding style

Stylish Haskell is used for slight auto-formatting at buffer save; see .stylish-haskell.yaml. As defined in the file, indentation is 2 spaces wide and screen is 80-columns wide. Spaces are used, not tabs. Spurious whitespace avoided. Spaces around arithmetic operators encouraged. Generally, relax and try to stick to the style apparent in a file you are editing. Put big formatting changes in separate commits.

Haddocks are provided for all module headers and for all functions and types from major modules, in particular the modules that are interfaces for a whole directory of modules. Apart of that, only very important functions and types are distinguished by having a haddock. If minor ones have comments, they should not be haddocks and they are permitted to describe implementation details and be out of date. Prefer assertions to comments, unless too verbose.

Further information

For more information, visit the wiki4 and see PLAYING.md, CREDITS and COPYLEFT.

Have fun!

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2008--2011 Andres Loeh Copyright (c) 2010--2018 Mikolaj Konarski and others (see git history)

Allure of the Stars is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program in file LICENSE. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Exceptions and detailed copyright information is contained in file COPYLEFT.