LambdaHack [![Build Status](https://secure.travis-ci.org/kosmikus/LambdaHack.png)](http://travis-ci.org/kosmikus/LambdaHack)
==========

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, but should also work with
other GHC versions (see file .travis.yml for GHC 7.4 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.


Further information
-------------------

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

Have fun!



[1]: http://www.haskell.org/
[2]: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation
[3]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/LambdaHack
[4]: https://github.com/kosmikus/LambdaHack/wiki
[5]: http://github.com/kosmikus/LambdaHack
[6]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Allure