Dwarf Fortress Engine? - Developers

I know this is a pretty n00bish question, but what game engine/ programming language did Tarn Adams use to make Dwarf Fortress and Liberal Crime Squad? How hard is it to make these type of...text...ASCII...games? I hope you don't say "C++ from scratch" because I looked at and was like :wtc:

OpenGL and C++ Could be done in pretty much anything though, you might want to look up Curses.

[QUOTE=Aftershock51;21127185]I know this is a pretty n00bish question, but what game engine/ programming language did Tarn Adams use to make Dwarf Fortress and Liberal Crime Squad?[/QUOTE] As mentioned, C++ with OpenGL for graphics, and fmod for sound. The game engine is most likely coupled completely with the game. [QUOTE=Aftershock51;21127185]How hard is it to make these type of...text...ASCII...games?[/QUOTE] It's actually harder than it might look. Before someone else kicked in and gave him some advice on efficient rendering with OpenGL (there's a separate version with efficient rendering), it had pretty bad frame-rates and it was terrible on the CPU. Rendering aside, the game logic of Dwarf Fortress is obviously pretty complex and is not something a beginner should be aiming for. [QUOTE=Aftershock51;21127185]I hope you don't say "C++ from scratch" because I looked at and was like :wtc:[/QUOTE] What did you look at?

[url]www.love2d.org[/url] would be the easiest way to do it.

[QUOTE=jA_cOp;21127417] What did you look at?[/QUOTE] I was confused because I was looking at the built-in help guide that comes with Microsoft Visual C++ 2008....then I realized it was just showing different compiling techniques...or something..

In case you didn't notice Dwarf Fortress may look like a console based application but as people above said it's actually running off OpenGL. I'm not sure if you want to make a console based application or follow the same OpenGL approach.

Some guy is remaking SS13 using his own ASCII engine or something like in DF. So far he has an inefficient renderer, but on is latest blog post he noted [url=http://www.facepunch.com/showpost.php?p=21009965&postcount=1524]this post[/url], possibly for a better rendering technique.

I've made a couple of Roguelike games myself (although they're not fit for release, far, far too bare where features are concerned) and you'll want to look at C++, with the library "libtcod". It's very, very flexible, has 24-bit true colour, and comes with dungeon-generation functions, pathfinding functions, and line-of-sight functions. Very, very handy. It can also convert images into ASCII on the fly with PNG transparency, scaling, rotating, and anti-alisasing. It compiles fast, it runs very smoothly and very fast with little-to-no overhead and uses SDL as the base. You can replace the terminal font with one of your own. Have a look at its site here: [URL]http://doryen.eptalys.net/[/URL] It's fully documented, and it is simply the best Roguelike-specific library I have ever seen. You can make some real beautiful stuff with it. Here's some screenshots. [IMG]http://doryen.eptalys.net/files/forests.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://doryen.eptalys.net/data/libtcod-projects/ubooks_001-full.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://doryen.eptalys.net/data/libtcod-projects/jacob_001-full.jpg[/IMG] Oh, and it's platform-independant too, so Linux/Mac fun can he had. It has bindings for Python and C# too, so you don't have to use C++ if you don't want to. You can also generate fantasy-style names from a set of rules (which you can modify).

It's funny you should ask this actually. I'm working on a c# and XNA ASCII game myself right now and I'm hoping it will work out alright. I'm certainly interested to know how well XNA will handle it because when I've tried before with SFML I think it was and I had awful frame rates. I've actually tried to get into DF myself recently to get ideas and to try and work out nice ways of working with the interface. I can only say good luck if you do try anything yourself. Also libtcod is very nice, you should try it if you don't want to mess around with working on some of the difficult features yourself.

[QUOTE=Wickedgenius;21229706]It's funny you should ask this actually. I'm working on a c# and XNA ASCII game myself right now and I'm hoping it will work out alright. I'm certainly interested to know how well XNA will handle it because when I've tried before with SFML I think it was and I had awful frame rates. I've actually tried to get into DF myself recently to get ideas and to try and work out nice ways of working with the interface. I can only say good luck if you do try anything yourself. Also libtcod is very nice, you should try it if you don't want to mess around with working on some of the difficult features yourself.[/QUOTE] What. You either don't have OpenGL hardware support or in my experiences you are compiling SFML in debug mode. I saw a 5x-7x performance increase with software rendering when I compiled in release mode.

[QUOTE=Jawalt;21229803]What. You either don't have OpenGL hardware support or in my experiences you are compiling SFML in debug mode. I saw a 5x-7x performance increase with software rendering when I compiled in release mode.[/QUOTE] It was a long while ago and I was probably doing something wrong at the time. I have since moved over to c# and like it a lot more than c++ so I've stuck with what I like. And XNA just makes it all a lot easier.