Allure of the Stars

[](https://gitter.im/AllureOfTheStars/Allure?utm_source=badge&utm_medium=badge&utm_campaign=pr-badge&utm_content=badge)

Allure of the Stars is a near-future Sci-Fi roguelike2 and tactical squad combat game. Binaries and the game manual are available at the homepage6. You can try the game out in the browser at 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. Please offer feedback to mikolaj.konarski@funktory.com or, preferably, at any of the public forums.

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, for Windows, dev versions continuously from AppVeyor18). 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 and libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0 on Ubuntu). On Mac OS X, you need SDL2 installed, e.g., from libsdlorg. For Windows, the SDL2 and all other needed libraries are already contained in the game's binary archive. Note that Windows binaries no longer work on Windows XP, since Cygwin and MSYS2 dropped support for XP.

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 and consequently window size can be changed by editing the config file in the user data folder. The default bitmap font 16x16xw.bdf covers most national characters in the Latin alphabet (e.g. to give custom names to player characters) and results in a game window of exactly 720p (standard HD) dimensions. The 8x8xb.fnt bitmap font results in a tiny window and covers latin-1 characters only. The scalable 16x16xw.woff font results in window sizes dependent on the scalableFontSize parameter in the config file. With scalableFontSize = 16 it should look almost the same as the pixel-perfect 16x16xw.bdf.

If you don't have a numeric keypad, you can use mouse for movement or you can enable the compact laptop keys (uk8o79jl) or 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.

If you are using a terminal frontend, e.g. the best supported vty frontend, numeric keypad (e.g., keypad '*' and '/') may not work correctly depending on versions of the libraries, terminfo and terminal emulators. Toggling the Num Lock key may help or make issues worse. As a workaround for the vty frontend, numbers are used for movement, which sadly prevents the number keys from selecting heroes. The commands that require pressing Control and Shift together won't work either, but fortunately they are not crucial to gameplay.

Some effort has been put to help using the vty frontend with screen readers, but without feedback it's hard to say how accesible that setup is. As a side effect of screen reader support, there is no aiming line nor path in vty frontend. Screen readers may also work better with animations turned off using --noAnim or the corresponding config file option. Note that unicode and cursor support are now necessary for correct output.

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, clone 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--2019 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 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Exceptions and detailed copyright information is contained in file COPYLEFT.