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.

This is a minor release, primarily intended to fix broken haddock documentation on Hackage by disabling gtk2hs dependency under GHC 7.6.1 (if you use GHC 7.6.1 and gtk2hs compiles for you, please run 'cabal install -fgtk --reinstall'). Changes since 0.2.6 are mostly unrelated to gameplay: strictly typed config files split into UI and rules; a switch from Text to String throughout the codebase; use of the external library miniutter for English sentence generation.

Upcoming new features: playable monsters faction, more than two factions inhabiting the dungeon, AIvAI, PvP, improved ranged combat AI, dynamic light sources, explosions player action undo/redo, completely redesigned UI. Long term goals are focused around 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 the library are kept visible, to let games override each, but reuse as many as possible. 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.

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Modules

[Index]

Game
- LambdaHack

Flags

Automatic Flags

Name	Description	Default
gtk	enable the gtk frontend	Disabled
vty	enable the vty frontend	Disabled
curses	enable the curses frontend	Disabled
std	enable the stdin/stdout frontend	Disabled

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

Downloads

LambdaHack-0.2.6.5.tar.gz [browse] (Cabal source package)
Package description (as included in the package)

Maintainer's Corner

Package maintainers

AndresLoeh, MikolajKonarski

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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 (info)
Dependencies	array (>=0.3.0.3 && <1), base (>=4 && <5), binary (>=0.5.0.2 && <1), bytestring (>=0.9.2 && <1), ConfigFile (>=1.1.1 && <2), containers (>=0.4.1 && <1), directory (>=1.1.0.1 && <2), filepath (>=1.2.0.1 && <2), gtk (>=0.12.1 && <0.13), hscurses (>=1.4.1 && <2), LambdaHack, miniutter (>=0.4.0 && <2), mtl (>=2.0.1 && <3), old-time (>=1.0.0.7 && <2), random (>=1.0.1 && <2), template-haskell (>=2.6 && <3), text (>=0.11.2.3 && <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
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 2012-12-10T20:35:57Z
Distributions	Arch:0.11.0.0, Debian:0.9.5.0, LTSHaskell:0.11.0.0, NixOS:0.11.0.0, Stackage:0.11.0.0
Reverse Dependencies	2 direct, 0 indirect [details]
Executables	DumbBot, LambdaHack
Downloads	29705 total (54 in the last 30 days)
Rating	2.25 (votes: 2) [estimated by Bayesian average]
Your Rating	λ λ λ
Status	Docs uploaded by user Build status unknown [no reports yet]

Readme for LambdaHack-0.2.6.5

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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. Long-term goals for LambdaHack include support for 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 game 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, a near-future Sci-Fi game in early development, see http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Allure

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 (keyboard support and colours) is gtk. To compile with one of the terminal frontends, use Cabal flags, e.g,

cabal install -fvty

To use a crude bot for testing the game, you have to compile with the standard input/output frontend, as follows

cabal install -fstd

and run the bot, for instance storing the output in a log

DumbBot 42 20000000 | LambdaHack > /tmp/log

You may wish to tweak the game configuration file for the bot, e.g., by helping it play longer, as in the supplied config.rules.bot.

Compatibility notes

The current code was tested with GHC 7.6.1, but probably works with GHC > 7.2. A [few tweaks] 6 are needed to compile with 7.0.

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!