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The podcast is dedicated to weekly reviews of recent roguelike games and general discussion about the genre. This week it covers Ido Yehieli’s Cardinal Quest, with some talk on how a good UI can improve a roguelike game. Next week’s episode shall be focussed on Desktop Dungeons.

WHAT IS UMBRA?

Mingos: So, Jice, people have asked this question a few times in the past two weeks: What is Umbra? How would you define it?

Jice: Well… its long term goal is to be a roguelike framework built on top of libtcod. It’s currently only a chrysalis that proposes a clean code architecture (UmbraModules) and various generic utilities to handle logs, keyboard shortcuts, dynamic font detection and so on. It also makes you easily create a program in no time with a lot of built-in features like full screen switch, screenshots, game pause, advanced frame counter…

Mingos: Technicalities, technicalities – I say it’s a time saver. For me, Umbra is a framework that plainly takes programming to a higher level of abstraction. It takes care of the inner loop of any application and helps organise the application’s elements into separate parts. In other words: it makes software design simpler and makes the code easier to manage. So, in short: a high level framework/toolkit? Would that description be valid?

Jice: I wouldn’t say that. To me, high level means you handle game objects like Player, Dungeon, Item. Currently, Umbra only manages the deepest foundations of your game and we want to be sure it does it the best way before starting to build a higher level API.

Mingos: If, for instance, coding your own keyboard parsing routines is “low level”, then what would you call Umbra’s callbacks (a ready to use feature where all you do is create keybindings using ready-made tools and notify the engine of their existence)? Is that low level too? I will stick to my previous statement that Umbra takes programming to a higher level of abstraction – let’s just stress that this doesn’t make coding with Umbra high level.

Jice: Exactly.

WHAT ARE UMBRA’S RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE PROGRAM?

Mingos: Having talked about Umbra in general, what are Umbra’s responsibilities in the program? What does it take care of out of the box?

Jice: Umbra takes over the program’s main loop. This encourages you to use a better programming model by writing every game screen as a separate C++ class, but it’s up to you to decide how far you want to apply this model. You could as well put the whole game in a single module (which is not recommended) or do as I do in The Cave and have every independent UI component as a separate module (the message log, the status panel and so on). Once again: Umbra is not a restrictive framework. You can use it the way you like and two games using Umbra won’t look the same because Umbra has absolutely no impact on how the game looks like. Out of the box, Umbra takes care of anything not dependent on the game: fullscreen switch, screenshots, dynamic font switching and easy font customization for the end user (the player).

Mingos: Yes, this more or less sums it up. Umbra is the foudation of any application using libtcod, taking care of the innermost loop and the correct handling of all of the application’s elements. It also provides a way to log errors and some basic performance diagnostic tools. The developer focuses on the actual content, not the basic, low level functionalities.

WHAT IS A MODULE?

Jice: Ok, so basically, the developer only has to create the Umbra modules to feed the engine. But what are they exactly?

Mingos: I like to define UmbraModules as “separate logical elements of a program”. It’s really up to the developer to define a module: it can be as much as the entire game or as little as a single actor on the map. Neither of these extremes is recommended, of course. The developer needs to find a sane division and use it. The message log has its own separate logic and display, so it would intuitively be a module. Same applies, for instance, to the main map display, the menu or the inventory screen. Modules are generic enough to let the developer define them in any way. The only thing they provide are generic methods for updating their internal logic, displaying them on the screen and parsing mouse and keyboard input.

Jice: But modules are not limited to stuff displayed on screen. You don’t have to implement the render function. You can create modules that only implement the update function and act as optional gameplay rules. For example, imagine you code your game AI director as a module. It handles the monsters and items spawning. You can easily implement several totally different AI directors (for example for different dungeons or settings) and switch from one to another with Umbra’s activateModule/deactivateModule functions. You can have active quests handled as modules. There’s no limit to what a module can do.

Mingos: You can also go the other way round. The “Hello world” module only implements the render method, but not the update or keyboard/mouse parsing. In conjunction with inbuilt timeout support, I like to use such a combination to create the credits screen right before the main menu.

Jice: Oh that’s another interesting feature of Umbra: since modules are independent, you can easily switch their order or insert new ones. That means the links between game screens are no more hardcoded in every screen. All the links are defined through fallbacks in the initialization part of the code. Thus, adding a screen between the menu and the game is a piece of cake.

WHAT DOES THE DEVELOPER NEED TO CODE?

Mingos: Yeah, it is – just an extra argument to a method you’ll be using anyway. But then again, Umbra doesn’t exactly code the game for you, does it? Let’s talk about the developer’s responsibilities. What needs to be coded in order to make a program using Umbra?

Jice: Well your videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRs38riiZw8, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSpslD69qe0) are probably the best answer to this question. Basically, you create a module and a few lines of code to register and activate it, then you run Umbra, that’s it.

Mingos: Still, you need to write those “few lines of code”…

Jice: Yeah, Umbra is not a roguelike engine where you tweak a few config files and get your game. You still have to code the actual game.

Mingos: This is what I’m getting at. Even though the UmbraModule gives you a ready recipe, telling you where to insert your update code or your rendering code, you still need to write everything yourself. Sort of like adding your own ingredients to that recipe. The base classes, such as the map and the actors, the interactions between them, etc.: all this is absent in Umbra and needs to be coded. Umbra simply helps you organise all that so it doesn’t become a shapeless mass of unmaintainable code as the project becomes more and more complex.

WHAT ARE WIDGETS?

Jice: Ok but if modules can be anything and everything, what’s the meaning of a widget in Umbra?

Mingos: Well, modules are extremely abstract. Widgets are more defined and are oriented towards GUI functionality. As of Umbra 10.10, Widgets are a special class of modules that have a few extra features that let them behave like a window: they have support for mouse dragging, close and minimise buttons and a few GUI elements such as buttons and checkboxes. They aren’t documented in any way though, as they are going to be replaced by a more generic widget system. Since you’re the guy that’s devising that new system, why don’t you tell us a bit about it? How is it going to work? How is it going to be different from the current one?

Jice: The current widget system was an attempt to create a complete widget toolkit inside Umbra. An ASCII widget toolkit for roguelikes is a frequently asked for feature. But if we provide the complete toolkit, every game using it will have the same look, except if it comes with a very powerful, CSS-like skinning system. A shorter term goal is to leave the rendering part on the user side, but provide everything else. Event handling, drag and drop, scrolling, widget containers, everything that is a pain to code should be done by Umbra.

Mingos: So your idea is to convert widgets into containers that take care of the mouse input, but leave all rendering and updating to the developer? Isn’t that what the current system does?

Jice: No, the buttons and checkboxes have hardcoded rendering and the widget class is not generic enough to allow complex UI interactions like the ones I use in The Cave. This shall be improved soon.

THE FUTURE OF UMBRA

Mingos: Alright, that certainly sounds interesting. And how about other plans regarding Umbra development? Are there any features that are planned but aren’t yet present in the framework?

Jice: I think our current goal is rather to polish the existing features and make them as easy to use as possible rather than rush and add more features. Umbra’s current architecture must have its baptism of fire with real life projects (other than Deliquium Solis and The Cave, of course). Once it’s tried and tested, we’ll be able to expand it to that mythical roguelike framework :).

THE END

Mingos: OK, thanks for the chat, Jice. I think that answers the questions that have been asked over at Roguecentral forums. For all those interested in trying Umbra out, it’s available at http://umbrarumregnum.110mb.com/download/umbra. You can ask questions about it in its forum board: http://doryen.eptalys.net/forum/index.php?board=37.0

Jice: Hey, thanks to you and to Slash for hosting this!

Too many roguelikes can languish with half-fixed features. If we can, once a year, ensure our roguelikes are polished and updated, we can avoid this trap.

All active roguelike developers are encouraged to release an update to their roguelikes on the appropriate date in September.

A simultaneous release will:

• provide moral support as we struggle with resurrecting code we left in an untenable state three months earlier
• encourage developers to release at least yearly through the wonders of deadlines
• celebrate the size and vibrancy of our community

This years’ ARRP will take place on September 19th, announce your participation on the roguebasin article! (or not :D).

Follo the development of the entries at teh newsgroup!

Seven Day Roguelike by ~purplearcanist on deviantART

In many communities a survey of people active five years ago will turn up maybe one or two that are still around.
Yet when I read the old roguelike usenet postings I recognize the majority of the poster’s names.

What factors have kept you from leaving?

Why are you still here?

Major

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.5.1

Stone Soup 0.5.1 has been released, fixing an abundance of bugs.

Runners

GearHead2 0.610

Since the start of development, GH2 has used mostly the same game system as GH1, but that changed in v0.600. The character rules have been streamlined. The number of skills has been chopped from 43 to 25. Conversation is no longer a mandatory skill, and the rumor system has been reworked. It should be easier to create distinct characters with a strong concept, rather than having every character end up the same.

Privateer: ASCII Sector 0.5.4.4

Privateer: Ascii Sector game trailer from Christian Knudsen on Vimeo.

Kamyran’s Eye 2 1.2

With our publisher Manifesto Games going down, we are making Kamyran’s Eye 2 freeware.

It features a dynamic world that is never quite the same, armies that fight each other and burn down cities in a branching storyline with multiple endings.

EgoBoo 2.7.4

We’re pretty proud of how the game has been shaping up lately, so we’d like to get the word out as much as we can! If you write for a blog or news site, it would be great of you to mention us

Triangle Wizard R6.04

Another addition is that you can now let your summons and allies handleyour spare weapons and items allowing for many new strategies and a relative harmless way of testing if an unidentified item is hazardous.

LambdaRogue 1.5

It is done, I have finally released the next update of LambdaRogue, we are now at 1.5.

First Age Angband 1.0

Anything from later than the First Age has been removed.  No more Rings of Power, Grishnakh, Anduril, Saruman, Witch-King, etc.  There are some new uniques, artifacts and ego-items (and some just renamed).  There are also new item sets, and some reworked artifacts.

Prospector 0.1.7a

# 5 new unique planets (actually 10, but 5 are pretty similiar to each other)
# “Water” in planet display now counts all liquids &frozen water (And i was wondering why it wasnt snowing ever…)

Kharne 0.03c

Goodbye Rusted Silk Pantaloons

Newcomers

G.O.R.E. 0.1.0

GORE is GNU Online Roguelike Environment (or “Gore’s not Only Rogue-like Entertainment”). It is written on Vala programming language.

3069 v2.8.2

The year is 3069. Earth has since been destroyed by a catastrophic geothermal experiment. Fortunately, you and many others were safely relocated onto planet Esperanza before the blast.

Plague 3.38

There is a desperate need for some better artwork for the Rocket Launcher (RT) and Flame Thrower (FT), both images and sounds.

The Dawn of The Dead The Roguelike

Dada su condición de Roguelike, cada partida que juguéis se generara aleatoriamente, por lo que es prácticamente imposible que una partida sea igual que otra.

Dungeon Adventure – the 133rd K.R.A.G. R4

The basic premise of the scenario is the story of a lowly Khazad guard, who fails catastrophicly in his duties. Instead of being exiled from the Clan, however, Lord Kandros Fir gives him a chance to redeem himself by drafting him into the service of the 133rd K.R.A.G. (Khazad Resource Acquisition Group).

The story takes place in the early days of the Khazad exodus (exile?) to the the Surface. At this time, the Khazad still have some holdings in the Underhome, and just starting to explore and colonize the Surface World.

Rogue Planets 1.2

A friend of me who loves roguelikes said it’s addicting and I got quite a bit addicted to it as well. Wish I could fight with someone over the best high score.

Treachery 0.0.0.0.1

Non-linear main plot is not based on the ancient evil wake or main hero’s amnesia.

HamQuest 1.0.0.7

Enjoy the game.

DarkHall b04

3D RPG DarkHall

Sane Roguelike V2

Index of /

UR Rougelike 0.0.9.263

Dialog engine – Fallout style dialogs that may affect the game

Dev

Neon 0.2.5

The editor now supports map viewing. Several additions were made to the engine: a console, support for more than 1 data file, item status is recorded in savegames, new items

It is that time of the year again!

The sixth international 7DRL roguelike challenge is to take place next week (Starting from saturday, march 7 2009, ending thru sunday, march 15 2009).

Everybody, from in and outside the roguedev world, is invited to actively devote (him/her)self into releasing a complete and playable game.

Don’t miss the date, this year we will rock the house!

And don’t forget…. We are working, obviously, on the honour system!

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.4.5.

It can be played online; see crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org. The latter server also allows you to peek into the gameplay changes in trunk (the cool, new stuff).

Privateer ASCII Sector 0.4.7

When a fixer or wingman has left his chair due to a fight breaking out, he will now stay inside the bar and will in time sit down again when the fight is over.

WarpRogue 0.8.0b

General Guderian now offers the Iron gate mission until you *really* reject it.

crashRun 0.3.0

The main new feature is cyberspace as an area that can be explored. When you jack into a terminal, instead of getting a menu of options, you instead can enter cyberspace

Newborn

Gruesome 0.0.3

It is pitch black.  You are likely to eat someone…

Downfall 0.2

This release adds multiple dungeon levels and items.

AmoebaRL 0.2

You play as an amoeba that decided to grow eating others

Tomb of Radwin

Amulet of Yendor / Rodney…
Wizardry / Trebor + Werdna…
Rawdin.. Darwin.. only the strong survive…
blah. cheesy I know.

Faeries’ Lair 7DRL

I have tried to make the game experience varied by designing monsters to be qualitatively different from each other; nearly every one has a special ability or behaviour

Settlement 1.3

After a long travel your group of settlers finished a basic settlement. The land seems to be very hostile. The next group of colonists will arrive after a month, therefore you have to last 30 days. Keep at the end as much money as possible.

Development
CL-TCOD

CL-TCOD has bindings for maybe 75% of tcod functions. All the console stuff, fonts, mouse, colours, images are in (I think).

ASCII-Paint 0.2

This version adds some features which make it easier to make and edit drawings.

Bonus
Triangle Wizard 4.01

Sacred Wrath, Cold Breath, Fire Breath and Acid Stream can now hit flying creatures starting from a certain spell level.

Quarker 0.03d

There’s no menu for loading games, just type in the name of the character to load.

Privateer ASCII Sector 0.4.4

Your risk of being scanned at a nav point is now based on: your confed and militia standing, how often you’ve been caught smuggling in the past, how controlled the nav point is by confeds and militia, and whether or not you’ve just attacked or destroyed any pirates, retros or Kilrathi at that nav point.

GearHead v0.5.11

High performance engines are designed to provide maximum instantaneous power to the mecha’s body. This improved performance comes at the cost of safety, as engines of this type are prone to going nova if handled roughly. In addition, since most of the energy produced is being directly channeled into the limbs, a mecha with a high performance engine cannot use beam weapons as effectively as others.

Nate’s RL Lib

I know that libtcod offers most of these features, but I think it’s very complicated, and it relies on several other libraries. RLLib doesn’t need any other libraries, and is less bloated.

LambdaRogue 1.2

I just released LambdaRogue 1.2.

Lords of Darkhall 1.2.87

Imbue your ranged attacks with a magical seed, which bursts upon impact. Grasping vines hold the target in place while you continue to destroy it from afar, or deal with closer attackers.

Hokuto No Rogue 0.3.0

Added Goshi Retsu Dan technique. Explodes opponent hands.

Z+Angband 0.2.3

If you aren’t familiar with recent versions of Zangband, they feature a fractal random wilderness with multiple towns and dungeons. Z+Angband further enriches the world by adding farms and inns, independent fragments of civilization outside of towns.