LambdaHack: A roguelike game engine in early and active development

[ bsd3, game, game-engine, library, program, roguelike ] [ Propose Tags ]

This is an alpha release of LambdaHack, a game engine library for roguelike games of arbitrary theme, size and complexity, packaged together with a small example dungeon crawler. When completed, the engine will let you specify content to be procedurally generated, define the AI behaviour on top of the generic content-independent rules and compile a ready-to-play game binary, using either the supplied or a custom-made main loop. Several frontends are available (GTK is the default) and many other generic engine components are easily overridden, but the fundamental source of flexibility lies in the strict and type-safe separation of code and content and of clients (human and AI-controlled) and server.

This is a minor release, primarily intended to fix broken vty an curses frontends and an unrelated game crash, as well as broken builds on hackage and travis. Changes since 0.2.10 are mostly unrelated to gameplay: overhauled dungeon generation code and the use of the external library assert-failure for expressing assertions and error messages. Upcoming features: new and improved frontends, improved AI (pathfinding, autoexplore, better ranged combat), dynamic light sources, explosions, player action undo/redo, completely redesigned UI. Long term goals are focused on procedural content generation and include in-game content creation, auto-balancing and persistent content modification based on player behaviour.

A larger game that depends on the LambdaHack library is Allure of the Stars, available from http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Allure.

Note: All modules in this library are kept visible, to let games override and reuse them. OTOH, to reflect that some modules are implementation details relative to others, the source code adheres to the following convention. If a module has the same name as a directory, the module is the exclusive interface to the directory. No references to the modules in the directory are allowed except from the interface module. This policy is only binding inside the library --- users are free to do whatever they please, since the library authors are in no position to guess their particular needs.


[Skip to Readme]

Modules

[Index]

Flags

Automatic Flags
NameDescriptionDefault
vty

enable the vty frontend

Disabled
curses

enable the curses frontend

Disabled

Use -f <flag> to enable a flag, or -f -<flag> to disable that flag. More info

Downloads

Maintainer's Corner

Package maintainers

For package maintainers and hackage trustees

Candidates

  • No Candidates
Versions [RSS] 0.1.20080412, 0.1.20080413, 0.1.20090606, 0.1.20110117, 0.1.20110918, 0.2.0, 0.2.1, 0.2.6, 0.2.6.5, 0.2.8, 0.2.10, 0.2.10.5, 0.2.10.6, 0.2.12, 0.2.14, 0.4.9.0, 0.4.99.0, 0.4.100.0, 0.4.101.0, 0.4.101.1, 0.5.0.0, 0.6.0.0, 0.6.1.0, 0.6.2.0, 0.7.0.0, 0.7.1.0, 0.8.0.0, 0.8.1.0, 0.8.1.1, 0.8.1.2, 0.8.3.0, 0.9.3.0, 0.9.3.1, 0.9.4.0, 0.9.4.1, 0.9.5.0, 0.10.2.0, 0.10.3.0, 0.11.0.0, 0.11.0.1 (info)
Change log changelog
Dependencies array (>=0.3.0.3 && <1), assert-failure (>=0.1 && <1), base (>=4 && <5), binary (>=0.7 && <1), bytestring (>=0.9.2 && <1), ConfigFile (>=1.1.1 && <2), containers (>=0.5 && <1), deepseq (>=1.3 && <2), directory (>=1.1.0.1 && <2), enummapset-th (>=0.6.0.0 && <1), filepath (>=1.2.0.1 && <2), ghc-prim (>=0.2), gtk (>=0.12.1 && <0.13), hashable (>=1.2 && <2), hscurses (>=1.4.1 && <2), keys (>=3 && <4), LambdaHack, miniutter (>=0.4.1 && <2), mtl (>=2.0.1 && <3), old-time (>=1.0.0.7 && <2), pretty-show (>=1.6 && <1.6.2), random (>=1.0.1 && <2), stm (>=2.4 && <3), template-haskell (>=2.6 && <3), text (>=0.11.2.3 && <2), transformers (>=0.3 && <1), unordered-containers (>=0.2.3 && <1), vty (>=4.7.0.6), zlib (>=0.5.3.1 && <1) [details]
License BSD-3-Clause
Author Andres Loeh, Mikolaj Konarski
Maintainer Mikolaj Konarski <mikolaj.konarski@funktory.com>
Category Game Engine, Game
Home page http://github.com/kosmikus/LambdaHack
Bug tracker http://github.com/kosmikus/LambdaHack/issues
Source repo head: git clone git://github.com/kosmikus/LambdaHack.git
Uploaded by MikolajKonarski at 2013-12-15T13:48:23Z
Distributions Arch:0.11.0.1, Debian:0.9.5.0, LTSHaskell:0.11.0.1, NixOS:0.11.0.1
Reverse Dependencies 2 direct, 0 indirect [details]
Executables LambdaHack
Downloads 30069 total (86 in the last 30 days)
Rating 2.25 (votes: 2) [estimated by Bayesian average]
Your Rating
  • λ
  • λ
  • λ
Status Docs available [build log]
Successful builds reported [all 1 reports]

Readme for LambdaHack-0.2.10.6

[back to package description]

LambdaHack Build Status

This is an alpha release of LambdaHack, a [Haskell] 1 game engine library for [roguelike] 2 games of arbitrary theme, size and complexity, packaged together with a small example dungeon crawler. When completed, the engine will let you specify content to be procedurally generated, define the AI behaviour on top of the generic content-independent rules and compile a ready-to-play game binary, using either the supplied or a custom-made main loop. Several frontends are available (GTK is the default) and many other generic engine components are easily overridden, but the fundamental source of flexibility lies in the strict and type-safe separation of code and content and of clients (human and AI-controlled) and server. Long-term goals for LambdaHack include support for multiplayer tactical squad combat, in-game content creation, auto-balancing and persistent content modification based on player behaviour.

The engine comes with a sample code for a little dungeon crawler, called LambdaHack and described in PLAYING.md. The engine and the example game are bundled together in a single [Hackage] 3 package. You are welcome to create your own games by modifying the sample game and the engine code, but please consider eventually splitting your changes into a separate Hackage package that depends on the upstream library, to help us exchange ideas and share improvements to the common code.

Games known to use the LambdaHack library:

  • [Allure of the Stars] 6, a near-future Sci-Fi game in early development

Compilation and installation

The library is best compiled and installed via Cabal, which also takes care of all dependencies. The latest official version of the library can be downloaded automatically by Cabal from [Hackage] 3 as follows

cabal install LambdaHack

For a newer snapshot, download source from a development branch at [github] 5 and run Cabal from the main directory

cabal install

For the example game, the best frontend (wrt keyboard support and colours) is the default gtk. To compile with one of the terminal frontends, use Cabal flags, e.g,

cabal install -fvty

Compatibility notes

The current code was tested with GHC 7.6.3, but should also work with other GHC versions (see file .travis.yml.7.4.2 for GHC 7.4.2 commands).

If you are using the curses or vty frontends, numerical keypad may not work correctly depending on the versions of curses, terminfo and terminal emulators. Selecting heroes via number keys or SHIFT-keypad keys is disabled with curses, because CTRL-keypad for running does not work there, so the numbers produced by the keypad have to be used. With vty on xterm, CTRL-direction keys seem to work OK, but on rxvt they do not. Vi keys (ykuhlbjn) should work everywhere regardless. Gtk works fine, too.

Testing and debugging

The Makefile contains many sample test commands. All that use the screensaver game modes (AI vs. AI) and the simplest stdout frontend are gathered in make test. Of these, travis runs the set contained in make test-travis on each push to the repo. Commands with prefix frontend run AI vs. AI games with the standard, user-friendly frontend. Commands with prefix peek set up a game mode where the player peeks into AI moves each time an AI actor dies or autosave kicks in. Run LambdaHack --help to see a brief description of all debug options. Of these, --sniffIn and --sniffOut are very useful (though verbose and initially cryptic), for monitoring the traffic between clients and the server. Some options in config files may turn out useful too, though they mostly overlap with commandline options (and will be totally merged at some point).

You can use HPC with the game as follows

cabal clean
cabal install --enable-library-coverage
make test
hpc report --hpcdir=dist/hpc/mix/LambdaHack-0.2.10.6/ LambdaHack
hpc markup --hpcdir=dist/hpc/mix/LambdaHack-0.2.10.6/ LambdaHack

The debug option --stopAfter is required for any screensaver mode game invocations that gather HPC info, because HPC needs a clean exit (to save data files) and screensaver modes can't be cleanly stopped in any other way.

Further information

For more information, visit the [wiki] 4 and see the files PLAYING.md, CREDITS and LICENSE.

Have fun!