AGPL-3.0-or-later licensed by Andres Loeh, Mikolaj Konarski and others
Maintained by Mikolaj Konarski
This version can be pinned in stack with:Allure-0.11.0.0@sha256:a35c9b1bb3cf795d4dc1fc878ddf3de83e426419e7669b1065fff7308f2e6ba1,8767

Allure of the Stars

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Allure of the Stars is a near-future Sci-Fi roguelike2 and tactical squad combat game. Binaries and the game manual are available at the homepage6. You can also try the game out in the browser at http://allureofthestars.com/play.

gameplay screenshot

Not a single image in this game. You have to imagine everything yourself, like with a book (a grown-up book, without pictures). Once you learn to imagine things, though, you can keep exploring and mastering the world and making up stories for a long time.

The game is written in Haskell1 using the LambdaHack10 roguelike game engine. Please see the changelog file for recent improvements and the issue tracker for short-term plans. Long term goals are high replayability and auto-balancing through procedural content generation and persistent content modification based on player behaviour. Contributions are welcome. Please offer feedback to [email protected] or, preferably, on any of the public forums.

Game installation from binary archives

The game runs rather slowly in the browser (fastest on Chrome) and you are limited to the square font for all purposes, though it’s scalable. Also, savefiles are prone to corruption on the browser, e.g., when it’s closed while the game is still saving progress (which takes a long time). Hence, after trying out the game, you may prefer to use a native binary for your architecture, if it exists.

Pre-compiled game binaries are available through the release page11 (and Linux dev versions from GitHub Actions18 and Windows from AppVeyor19). To use a pre-compiled binary archive, unpack it and run the executable in the unpacked directory or use program shortcuts from the installer, if available. On Linux, make sure you have the SDL2 libraries installed on your system (e.g., libsdl2-2.0-0 and libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0 on Ubuntu). For Windows (XP no longer supported), the SDL2 and all other needed libraries are included in the game’s binary archive.

Max OS X binaries for the few most popular OS versions are accessible from Homebrew via brew install allureofthestars, which also takes care of all dependencies.

Screen and keyboard configuration

The game UI can be configured via a config file. The default config settings, the same that are built into the binary, are on github at GameDefinition/config.ui.default. When the game is run for the first time, or whenever the config file is deleted, the file is written to the default user data location, which is ~/.Allure/ on Linux, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Allure\ (or C:\Documents And Settings\user\Application Data\Allure\ or something else altogether) on Windows and Inspect/Application/Local Storage under RMB menu when run inside the Chrome browser. If the user config file is outdated or corrupted, it’s automatically moved away together with old savefiles. At the next game start, the new default config file appears at its place.

Screen fonts and, consequently, window size can be changed by editing the config file in the user data folder. The default bitmap font 16x16xw.bdf used for the game map covers most national characters in the Latin alphabet (e.g. to give custom names to player characters) and results in a game window of exactly 720p HD dimensions. The 8x8xb.fnt bitmap font results in a tiny window and covers latin-1 characters only. The config file parameter allFontsScale permits further window size adjustments, automatically switching to the scalable version of the large game map font (16x16xw.woff). Config file option chosenFontset governs not only the main game map font, but also the shape of the rectangular fonts, if any, in which longer texts are overlaid over the map.

For high resolution displays and/or if fullscreen mode is requested in the configuration file, allFontsScale needs to be set. E.g., scale 3 works for 4K displays. Otherwise, the letters may be too small or, in fullscreen or on retina displays in OS X, the screen may be automatically scaled as a whole, not each letter separately, softening letter edges of the square fonts that should rather be pixel-perfect and crisp.

If you don’t have a numeric keypad, you can use the left-hand movement key setup (axwdqezc) or Vi editor keys (aka roguelike keys) or mouse. If numeric keypad doesn’t work, toggling the Num Lock key sometimes helps. If running with the Shift key and keypad keys doesn’t work, try the Control key instead. The game is fully playable with mouse only, as well as with keyboard only, but the most efficient combination may be mouse for menus, go-to, inspecting the map, aiming at distant positions and keyboard for everything else.

If you run the ANSI terminal frontend (--frontendANSI on commandline), then numeric keypad (especially keypad *, / and 5) may not work correctly, depending on the terminal emulator you use. Toggling the Num Lock key may help or make issues worse. As a work around these issues, numbers are used for movement in the ANSI frontend, which sadly prevents the number keys from selecting heroes. The commands that require pressing Control and Shift together won’t work either, but fortunately they are not crucial to gameplay.

Some effort went into making the ANSI frontend usable with screen readers, but without feedback it’s hard to say how accessible that setup is. This doesn’t work on Windows, due to extra code that would be required. As a side effect of screen reader support, there is no aiming line nor path in ANSI frontend and some of map position highlighting is performed using the terminal cursor. Screen readers may also work better with animations turned off, using --noAnim or the corresponding config file or main game menu options.

Compiling native binary from source

To compile with the standard frontend based on SDL2, you need the SDL2 libraries for your OS. On Linux, remember to install the -dev versions as well, e.g., libsdl2-dev and libsdl2-ttf-dev on Ubuntu Linux 16.04. Compilation to JavaScript for the browser is more complicated and requires the ghcjs15 compiler and optionally the Google Closure Compiler16.

The latest official version of the game can be downloaded, compiled for SDL2 and installed automatically using the ‘cabal’ tool, which may already be a part of your OS distribution, but if it’s too old (version 3.4 or later is required) you can download the whole current compilation suite as described at https://www.haskell.org/downloads/. Get the Allure of the Stars package from Hackage3 as follows

cabal update
cabal run Allure

For a newer, unofficial version, clone the game source from github5, clone a matching LambdaHack library snapshot into ../LambdaHack and run

cabal run --project-file=cabal.project.LH.dir

Alternatively, if you’d like to develop in this codebase, the following speeds up the turn-around a lot

cp cabal.project.local.development cabal.project.local

and then you can compile (and recompile) with

cabal build

and run the game with

make play

The SDL2 frontend binary also contains the ANSI terminal frontend (--frontendANSI on commandline) intended for screen readers and a simplified black and white line terminal frontend (--frontendTeletype) suitable for teletype terminals or a keyboard and a printer (but it’s going to use a lot of paper, unless you disable animations with --noAnim). The teletype frontend is used in CI and for some tests and benchmarks defined in Makefile. The terminal frontends leave you on your own regarding font choice and color setup and you won’t have the colorful squares outlining special positions that exist in the SDL2 frontend, but only crude cursor highlights. The terminal frontends should run on Windows, but Windows disables console for GUI applications, so they don’t.

Testing and debugging

Integration tests can be run and displayed with

cabal test --test-show-details=direct

The Makefile contains many sample automated play test commands. Numerous tests that use the screensaver game modes (AI vs. AI) and the teletype frontend are gathered in make test-locally. Some of these are run by CI on each push to github. Test commands with prefix frontend start AI vs. AI games with the standard SDL2 frontend to view them on.

Run Allure --help to see a brief description of all debug options. Of these, the --sniff option is very useful (though verbose and initially cryptic), for displaying the traffic between clients and the server. Some options in the config file may prove useful for debugging too, though they mostly overlap with commandline options (and will be totally merged at some point).

Further information

For more information, visit the wiki4 and see PLAYING.md, CREDITS and COPYLEFT.

For developer-focused information (coding style, overview of the codebase), please see the README of LambdaHack10.

Have fun!

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2008–2011 Andres Loeh

Copyright (c) 2010–2021 Mikolaj Konarski and others (see git history)

Allure of the Stars is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program in file LICENSE. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Exceptions and detailed copyright information is contained in file COPYLEFT.

Changes

v0.11.0.0

  • Partially work around regression in libsdl2 2.0.16 (https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/issues/281); to also avoid deformed boxes around tiles on the game map, please switch to a different SDL2 version
  • Deduplicate UI code for exiting game, with extra style points
  • Create monadic test harness and use it for UI and other unit tests
  • Validate empty content and fix other soundness issues revealed by unit tests
  • Add extra hints in –more and similar lines when tutorial is on
  • Show full history at SPACE press and let second SPACE close it
  • Spawn insects in the swamp
  • Remove slot letter display in menus and instead display subtle bullets
  • Repurpose item slots to item roles
  • Redo display and control of main menu and its submenus
  • Make Teletype frontend a bit closer to playable
  • Switch right pane item description display from mono to prop font
  • Ensure score not zero if victory
  • Add a custom SDL cursor, working around a bug in SDL2 bindings
  • Gut out most content symbols; weren’t used even in lore menus after all
  • Add a flag to disable the costly optimizations (that give 15-25% speedup)
  • Add faction kind content and redo game mode content to use it
  • Display seen faction lore
  • Simplify and fortify faction and client assignment code
  • Make a few unique items that were identified meta-game identifiable instead
  • Fix persistence of meta-game discoveries in save files
  • When assigning a faction, first try the group actor was picked from
  • When assigned faction is dead, don’t spawn the actor
  • Don’t use benign weapons on projectiles not to lose the fun
  • Make the unique harpoon worth saving for a unique foe
  • Spawn enemies closer and fix too random spawning location
  • Improve display of item’s range
  • Warn when SDL game windows is resized not via config file
  • Ban or force sleep on levels
  • Protect against unset or primitive OS locale
  • Add temporary hearing aids
  • Disallow generating a door beside an opening in room’s wall
  • Permit smaller caves and validate cave content more accurately
  • Try harder to generate escape from dungeon in a level corner
  • Avoid exit/escape confusion in content names and descriptions
  • Add Gauntlet game mode and Machinarium spaceship level
  • Don’t require identification for cooked plants
  • Make Bob speak less often and explode more often
  • Make Bob’s monologue less repetitive
  • Make oriels lit, until there is any game-play fun in having to go to them
  • Make loot in initial caves more consistent
  • Rule out giant octopus on initial levels to teach simple tactics better
  • Give player more time to hunt bees before they die
  • Fix raid heroes not having genetic flaws contrary to description
  • Many fixes, refactorings, tweaks and balancing changes

v0.10.3.0

  • Work around regression https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/issues/1076 by making the scalable square font the default as the map font; the tiny map fonts, for which there is no such workaround, won’t work for anybody with freetype 2.11.0
  • Enable display of details in right pane in many menus
  • Switch mouse wheel to move selection now that it changes right pane display
  • Make the line where messages wrap configurable in config file
  • Remove rarely used options from config file and code
  • Prepare client-server for delays when operating over the network
  • Reveal all map at game over and make it explorable
  • Don’t run with -threaded, increasing speed by a couple dozen percent
  • Don’t show messages during enemy turn (except when under AI control)
  • Spawn many actors at once with probability correlated to spawning at all
  • Gut out Ubuntu Font Family fonts
  • Add a few tutorial messages, reword some in-game texts
  • Move with CI from Travis to GitHub Actions (but GHA can’t keep up as well)
  • Make place content directly define legends instead of overriding them
  • Add a warning that crosshair is out of flinging range
  • Add ANSI display to SDL2 frontend; remove vty, hcurses and GTK frontends
  • Make Teletype frontend more usable (input, speed, overlays)
  • Remove sight malus from light sources to avoid micromanagement
  • Keep convenience settings between new games
  • Add an option to mark FOV area with grey background
  • Refactor and clean up a lot of the code
  • Unhardwire various constants (hat tip to Jamie)
  • Fix a couple of bugs and improve documentation
  • Add whole new kinds of tests (even greater hat tip to Jamie)

v0.10.2.0

  • Make GLASS_HAIL less deadly and less noisy visually
  • Advertise the C-Tab command instead of A-Tab
  • Tweak some wearables rarity
  • Make intruder’s explosions less deadly
  • Disable testing ubuntu fonts, because they can’t be distributed in Debian
  • Be more consistent about moving corrupted files aside
  • Make torches a bit more common
  • Help AI not to leave a scout guarding the stash
  • Ensure some gems in escape scenario
  • Prevent occasionally few gardening tools
  • Make explosions definitions small and symmetric again
  • Fix heroes starting on exit in escape scenario
  • Reword some scenario texts
  • Change organ symbols to avoid ‘eat’ when activating them
  • Make gardening tools less common, but keep metal pipes
  • Fix ‘Letting Go’ message, because it could get activated
  • Hack buckler definition once more
  • Hack shield definitions to help AI understand their value
  • Explain in Q&A why sometimes timeout weapons are never used
  • Fix backstories, because they can be manually triggered
  • Replace the special periodic activation handling with effect conditions
  • Fix the healing necklace better used from the backpack
  • Replace the special effect handling under ranged with effect condition
  • Reduce and describe the micromanagement of bucklers and shields
  • Fix Letting Go not identifying even at death
  • Fix typos in content texts
  • Update documentation files
  • Add a group for exlusively tools; unused ATM
  • Fix small oil explosions never getting anywhere
  • Reword initial scenario texts
  • Talk about the relevant lore command in manual
  • Signal that lore command is sometimes context-sensitive
  • Simplify desertedAirlock description
  • Reword a virtue description
  • Make embeds easier to recognize knowing their tiles
  • Don’t end stairs with a path
  • Don’t describe the goal tile when performing mouse goto
  • Declare the codebase lens-free
  • Explain why whiskey not drunk, but smashed only
  • Improve initial level descriptions
  • Reword backstoryNeutral3
  • Avoid distributing test.exe in Windows packages
  • Fix comments about easy stairs vs hard stairs
  • Fix intruders not exploding on death
  • Fix Heavy Eyes preventing reaching level 4
  • Remove savefiles if config file too old
  • Use lz-string.js externs for minification
  • Update LambdaHack.cabal.flattened
  • Make focused explosions more likely to hit nearby actors
  • Let one more common embed provide bad missiles
  • Hlint the codebase
  • Provide an excuse why the flask from fire cabinet is not identified
  • Make barrels less common in raid tutorial
  • Explain the flags of genetic flaw
  • Avoid ‘you are less more tidy’
  • Help the raid scenario opponent survive a little longer
  • Prevent too many torches in raid, causing blindness
  • Use MinorAspects flag for backstories
  • Do not include the default config file that Windows users can’t read anyway
  • Read config file in UTF8 mode even on Windows
  • Prevent premature identification of ‘Letting Go’
  • Prevent premature identification of backstory items
  • Update the copyright year
  • Update manual wrt backstory items addition
  • Add a comment about geneticFlaw not in CONDITION group
  • Reorder actor and organ content
  • Give the new alien a unique and glaring colour
  • Shorten a backstory name to pass validation
  • Make sure the backstory descriptions are actually a backstory
  • Register the recently added backstory items
  • Add bravery virtue
  • Add alcoholist backstory item
  • Add three more backstories and unify names
  • Add two more vices
  • Use question marks in verb effects
  • Try to amass explosive monsters on arena levels
  • Add an alien with an explosive organ (fixes #108)
  • Add the explosive flotation bag organ
  • Make sure hero professions are not randomly changing
  • Hardwire the player team continuity token
  • Unify and shorter backstory group names
  • Flesh out initial backstory items
  • Change the symbol of backstory items
  • Use the flavours specialized for stories
  • For now, assign heroes a backstory from a mix of all categories
  • Mock up categories of backstory content items
  • Add the first backstory organ
  • Make sure heroes spawned in safari mode are properly numbered
  • Add a few more hero names
  • Mark the personal genetic flaws as meta game persistent, as they should be
  • Express variety of genetic flaws as multiple content items
  • Add team continuity across scenarios to content
  • Make buckler and shield attacks and messages not so spammy
  • Fix bucklers too powerful and shields too weak when UnderRanged activates
  • Describe the new challenges in the manual
  • Make shields more common and attractive to AI
  • Add UnderMelee and tweak the Old Gorget
  • Add a potion of melee deflection
  • Buff shields with ranged deflection
  • Add deflection temporary conditions
  • Explain the pointman/leader discrepancy
  • Write key names as on the keyboard, button names as in the button
  • Unify pluralization of skills and challenges
  • Mark some game modes as tutorials
  • Split a list in manual in many paragraphs for better in-game display
  • Keep the rest of the manual in content
  • Simplify an address in manual not to spill over 80 columns
  • Hint in config file to disable the special movement keys
  • Hint that stealth if possible and AI vs player symmetric
  • Limit mentions of ‘playing’ not to break immersion
  • Change ‘scenario’ to ‘adventure’ to be more immersive
  • Add a scenario lore menu
  • Mention that scale needs to be configured for high dpi displays
  • Add the fullscreen option to the UI config file
  • Don’t configure the unused data directories when invoking cabal
  • When installing don’t create the now empty GameDefinition/fonts/
  • Don’t limit jobs to 1 now that cabal shows errors fine
  • Don’t embed the fonts in the web frontend version
  • Get rid of datafiles from .cabal
  • Kill the font license files that are duplicated in COPYLEFT file
  • Get rid of the now unused fontDir option
  • Embed game-supplied font files
  • Version config file
  • Write the homepage address in full in Main Menu; fixes #98
  • Make historyMax divisible by screenful
  • Don’t let ESC clear messages in aiming mode; was confusing
  • Add Discord and Matrix addresses to the manual
  • Add links to discord and matrix chat
  • Tweak unique entities in content, adding ‘the’ as needed
  • Add extra config options for messages
  • Customize messages more comfortably
  • Simplify restarting client
  • Adjust weapon colours slightly towards colour meaning table
  • Name the robot until somebody comes up with a better name
  • Semi-retire the Allure gitter
  • Reflect changes in highlighting in the manual
  • Avoid unfortunate line gluing in main menu text
  • Wrap messages after 53 columns
  • Lower cminStairDist for shallowRogue now that margins forbidden
  • Fix a missing mouse command description
  • Update documentation to the config changes
  • Add Debian desktop files, as per packaging policy
  • Fix screensavers broken by UI faction not being the first
  • Fix ‘open main menu’ command of Dashboard
  • Comment the config file some more
  • Gut out Ubuntu Family Fonts from Debian package, because non-free
  • Beautify CREDITS
  • Rank the fontsets differently
  • Make the fontset tests more random
  • Permit text usage in tests
  • Settile on ‘auxiliary fonts’ instead of ‘long text’
  • Update config wrt engine changes
  • Molify Debian’s lintian
  • Fix license name
  • Legalize all the long text fonts even more
  • Legalize all the long text fonts
  • Add the ubuntu font family set of long text fonts
  • Add another set of long text fonts
  • Add new long text fonts based Adobe Source
  • Remove old long text fonts
  • Explain the communication overhead concept
  • Fix Allure.cabal.flattened test component
  • Parse config at compile time
  • Let foes occupiy exit in escape scenario, etc.
  • Add missing cskip specifications
  • Bring back SPACE as clearning messages
  • Update the default config wrt changes to RET keybinding
  • Don’t mention the spaceship in outdoor stairs description
  • Make the brawl scenario 2-level
  • Use the increased expressiveness of initial actor generation
  • Make long poles a bit more common and tweak content a bit
  • Don’t confuse the player when trying to convey the actor is malfunctioning
  • Reword ESC description again
  • Add a random item to each hero starting inventory
  • Tweak details of the content a bit
  • Update command docs to command help changes
  • Let only ESC clear messages
  • Prevent AI-inaccessible areas inside shuttles
  • Make spacesuits and tools more common, but later on
  • Avoid ‘jewelry case of gain jewelry’
  • Move SPACE to CmdAim category
  • Document that MMB and RMB cycle detail level
  • Bind SPACE to cycle detail level in aiming mode
  • Advise role-playing
  • Fix calling gameover an ‘endgame’
  • Advise to replay initial scenarios
  • Let the Welded Robot speak periodically
  • Don’t spoil the normal storyline in the hint about blowtorch
  • Add a comment that blowtorch is safe from item polymorphing
  • Add a hint about the puzzle to the manual
  • Make the torn spacesuit even more common
  • Name or prepare for naming all uniques
  • Give all uniques their last words
  • Add extra hints in the signboards on first level
  • Reorder consistenly mode kind component definitions in the file
  • Make hints about the first puzzle more obvious and more common
  • Make torn spacesuit more common again
  • Add a couple of late spawn-only actors
  • Mark some actors as common among late spawns
  • Factor out victoryOutcomes
  • Shorten a field name to avoid >80 length lines
  • Make terrain names harder to confuse with items
  • Properly in-game document the screensaver scenarios
  • Add missing scenario motivation blurbs
  • Make the tools slightly less abundant at the start
  • Tweak the scenario meta notes
  • Rework game rules desccription similarly as in LH
  • Add bulbousBullfrog to credits
  • Add a comment to the default config with an example for rebinding a key
  • Hint in-game about how stairs work
  • Encourage interaction with terrain in outermost level
  • Clarify that nominal values of burning and wounding are used
  • Drive the point home that spacesuits differ
  • Drive the point home that tools are used for crafting
  • Be more explicit in the crafting tip
  • Ensure the position of the boss is reported as worth visiting
  • Document crafting in-game and in the manual
  • Explain why octopus copes on land
  • Add cabal.project.local.testing for ‘make fastCrawl’
  • Avoid building all exes
  • Add scenario rule notes to be displayed instead of full notes
  • Use hex character literals to simplify notation
  • Add make target to test minified JS for node
  • Make the safari easter egg less common as a screensaver
  • Disable compiling from source in brew-sdl2-osx travis build, due to OOM
  • Tone down and speed up animations of the deadliest explosions
  • Make space for vertical dormitory rooms
  • Make the dormitories more realistic given how tiny they are
  • Make all ignition blasts yellow
  • Hint in ambush description that somebody turned off power
  • Spread evenly the loot in ambush scenario
  • Make sure the initial entrance doesn’t appear in ambush scenario
  • Make safari scenario harder now that aliens are buffed up
  • Improve module haddocks for content
  • Give the player more ammo in ambush scenario
  • Make zoo easier to create an ambush position in
  • Make sure burning bush eventually transforms to a dark floor tile
  • Make escape cave easier to put on fire
  • Hide unneeded content group name patterns
  • Add short-caves debug game mode
  • Bump too rare places
  • Use the JS splitmix optimization
  • Tweak CI link in README in case it matters
  • Make firefighting items more common outside of fire cabinets
  • Add a Q&A about autoexplore (only relevant to Allure)
  • Make sure all non-seeing actors are described so
  • Move ClientOptions.hs to adhere to the convention about module hierarchies
  • Meld LH and Allure content
  • Don’t have noctovisor neavly guaranteed
  • Add items for detecting enemy stashes
  • Reflavour the stuck doors trap
  • Tone down spotlight
  • Explain the goofy handling of recharging in stash
  • Prevent exploiting deposit boxes ad infinitum
  • Make detection radiuses uniform, for ease of use
  • Make residential decks better connected
  • Add a couple more escape items
  • Adjust the SDL test to run without installing fonts, as Debian requires
  • Make the jewlery caches and deposit boxes much more lucrative
  • Make necklace explosions even less likely to block the way
  • Make octopus more common now that it’s more interesting
  • Make jewlery cases less disappointing for experienced players
  • Let blasts destroy ice pillars
  • Fix a pair of fire projectiles first igniting, second dousing a tile
  • Add Q&A about hearing
  • Make military knife again likely to appear in crawl dungeon
  • Let stuck doors be forced, inducing flight
  • Shorten brawl scenario note to fit on the screen with square font
  • Remove the confusing damage from bomb’s weight impact
  • Prevent exploit of getting cords from torches made out of rags
  • Move most tools to first 4 levels and laboratory
  • Fix crafting in water impossible when refrigeration coil equipped
  • Make hearing maluses less harsh
  • Make firefighting cabinets more common, particularly on outermost level
  • Fix too high melee armor of a spacesuit
  • Permit transformation of weld vis cold source, not only blowtorch
  • Enable crafting with water sources in fire tiles
  • Add some more tools and torn suits
  • Boil waste container to safely remove refrigeration coil
  • Differentiate the names of small fires and not the count
  • Don’t create the same 2 spacesuit parts when dismating a torn suit
  • Make crawl loot number randomness much less wild
  • Make tools more common on first two levels
  • Add cord as a bonding tool and wick
  • Have more tools at outermost level
  • Make thornbush a bit rarer, because it doesn’t exlode, so is boring
  • Make arena deck of double height, with trees
  • Avoid dark fences around lit interiors with no pillars in staircase defs
  • Shorten other item group names
  • Shorten hammer and shield group names
  • Use the DECON abbreviation to shorten messages
  • Fix patterns for hammers
  • Mention in hammer description that crafting replaces handles
  • Fit workshop crafting description into one screen
  • Don’t risk crafting scrap from hammers and axes
  • Display cooking after crafting in embed description
  • Factor out extraWaterAssocs
  • Equip rags by default; newbies don’t find them anyway
  • Mention in octopus description that it has high noctovision
  • Consistently create on the ground all items looted from terrain
  • Balance removing hunger via organ hits
  • Add random variety to crafted items to enable min-maxing
  • Move some item definitions and rebase them
  • Remove a trailing space in mode description
  • Don’t get two rags out of a torch that took one to produce
  • Reflect keybindings change in the start scenario menu
  • Increase the timeout of jumping pole
  • Prevent AI from hasting twice in a row
  • Add recharging and discharging self to a couple of weapons
  • Get rid of DropBestWeapon
  • Adjust to engine changes to charging effects
  • Let the rhino charge via pushing
  • Let all drones charge via pushing
  • Fix a mixed up organ name
  • Prevent the new organs from being dropped
  • Differentiate dragon and alligator by removing the pushing from the former
  • Add jumping organs
  • Move ink sac to equipment so that it can be explicitly triggered
  • Make octopus’s ink weaker but lasting longer
  • Add the ink sac octopus’s organ
  • Permit meleeing with construction glove
  • Let burning oil explode even on direct hit on actor, not only on the floor
  • Re-classify a couple of weapons
  • Fix razorwire fence
  • Make killing thornbush even more optional than before
  • Move to-dam bonuses from organs to actor definitions
  • Increase timeouts of animal organs to at least approach human weapon timeouts
  • Prevent sharp harpoon from being generated often and shallowly
  • Make armadillo into a proper tank
  • Touch up aliens actors
  • Prevent razor from excluding other weapons
  • Move the defition of lip to the proper place
  • Give tentancle a cooldown
  • Make clawing horror an early but mostly harmless armorless tank
  • Reorder organs
  • Balance organs
  • Add two organs from LambdaHack
  • Remove cooldown from two weapon kinds
  • Sometimes generate tools in threes
  • Generate torn spacesuits in bunches
  • Generate less items, particularly at shallow levels
  • Reorder items inside several item groups
  • Overhaul noise caves
  • Let some tools appear together
  • Designate some scouts for slack tactics factions
  • Add comments explaining why dL dice positive or negative
  • Adjust to crafint depth-neutral and tweak content a bit otherwise
  • Make the max HP maluses not so easy to ignore
  • Rebalance armor bonuses
  • Rebalance to-hit bonuses
  • Fix hammer stats and tweak a few others
  • Make Smithhammer interesting
  • Make it easier to use permanent tools
  • Make it possible to undo weapon crafting
  • Make axe worse than pipe
  • Make item-modification scrolls and torn spacesuits more common
  • Make cooking fruits less tedius, remaining defs
  • Place much more oil spills on the exit deck
  • Make cooking fruits less tedius
  • Let the player see if enemies carry even special lights, etc.
  • Don’t suggest that opening a deposit box destroys it
  • Improve name of a couple of item groups
  • Tweak frequency of detection items, etc.
  • Don’t let the alien boss waste time unequipping gems
  • Sometimes add a lift staircase to laboratories
  • Make more rooms dark to help with stealth
  • Make Laboratory deck less annoying by decontaminating only upwards
  • Fix weapon order of Smithhammer
  • Make it more common for aliens to carry light
  • Make using and crafting harpoons more worthwhile
  • Add workshop to a couple more places
  • Make it more likely there is workshop in laboratory
  • Tone down poison
  • Make the outermost deck a little more hectic
  • Hint that shields require empty space behind enemies to push them
  • Make buckler a weapon
  • Make the fancy shield weaker but more common
  • Give a fair warning about the rhino boss
  • Reorder crafting recipes to make them yet a tad safer
  • Avoid lit or filled rooms (except barrels) in exit level
  • Balance arena cave and scroll of pushing
  • Move keybinding content definitions to match display order
  • Make signboards less common in arena cave and more in casino
  • Ensure small caves have one or few stairs to prevent bloating them
  • Adjust cave content specifications to the engine tweaks
  • Make empty flasks less common deeper down
  • Clean up comments in tile definitions
  • Try to make the terrain transformation specs more readable
  • Mark steel file with red, since it’s double-purpose
  • Make blankets more common to help with light crafting
  • Start with some empty flasks, some of the time
  • Update the manual and keybindings printout
  • Explain why the farm is freshly abandoned
  • Reduce numbers of consumables now that some levels have more of them
  • Add extra items to crawl levels based on their name/description
  • Add ANY_FLASK group
  • Introduce vials via the brawl scenario
  • Customize the raid cave shape and places
  • Make sure tools are not needed and stimpack not obtainable in raid scenario
  • Introduce chips usage in the raid scenario
  • Fix a bushy patch that can block starting actors
  • Remove misleading comment about tiles being explorable
  • Comment why a tile is not explorable
  • Make impressing items easier to get
  • Fix missing terrain in TREE_SHADE_WALKABLE_DARK
  • Have lit bushes and dark floor in some dark places
  • Permit auto-generated tiles to be lit in dark groups
  • Comment tiles that are lit, dark or both
  • Add greenery to shallow levels and more rooms
  • Sometimes leave smoke after barrel explodes
  • Prevent the visual senser being misinterpreted as food
  • Prevent AI from wielding staves
  • Make gardening tools slighly more durable, but rarer
  • Set the main groups of items to equal weights and compensate
  • Let all actors chase enemies from a longer distance
  • Ensure few garden weapons in raid scenario and similar
  • Tweak assignment of items to the rare item groups
  • Rename or eliminate CURIOUS_ITEM
  • Generate less survival items in short scenarios
  • Add hints to crafting components’ descriptions
  • Tweak weapons slightly, mostly ranged damage
  • Clean up throwing stats of items
  • Make edible bushes possible in one more room kind
  • Make permanent weapons less common initially due to clubs and torches
  • Add craftable clubs
  • Make torch a destructible melee weapon
  • Make torch and lamp even less common now that they are crafted
  • Craft flasks of water, etc.
  • Fix crafting in oil and fire
  • Add missing content group definitions
  • Craft torches and oil lamps
  • Make harpoons better in melee than ranged
  • Rebalance weak weapons
  • Slightly simplify organ definitions
  • Add variety to armor deducting rings
  • Make boots auto-equip less disastrous for newbies
  • Make the echolocator ping periodically
  • Change the order of ordinary items for better display in menus
  • Reassign colours and symbols to embedded items
  • Make some actors deal low damage but with high hurt
  • Add negative armor to one boss and some conditions
  • Let some rings weaken armor
  • Tone down items that grant armor
  • Mark in dashboard where to find crafting recipes
  • Make it harder to obtain long poles from loot
  • Let the net drop more kinds of armor-like equipment
  • Fix broken content validation
  • Don’t confusingly refuse to display the pushing effect for shields
  • Balance piercing missiles
  • Make Rhino less of a pushover
  • Update manual wrt damage calculation changes
  • Avoid AI-unreachable spaces on the outermost level
  • Make it cheaper to dissect a torn spacesuit, for early game
  • Comment that transformations won’t generate warnings due to their position
  • Make tools even more common
  • Undo partially scaling down special terrain features at outermost level
  • Craft torch in fire, not workshop
  • Tweak terrain and items on the outermost level
  • Make the order of caves slightly more random
  • Make edible plants less common since they appear on bushes now
  • Make the starting enemy groups larger to favour throwing flasks
  • Generate flasks in bunches even at lowest levels to make throwing more fun
  • Make sure throwing flasks, etc., have limited radius, for safety
  • Make icy floor less annoying and escape puzzles harder to hack
  • Avoid generating 2-stacks of early projectiles
  • Don’t create equippable items in a stash
  • Make the crafted and doubly crafted weapons rarer
  • Fix lvl 2 description showing at game start instead of lvl 3
  • Prevent heroe’s foes in crawl from camping stairs on lvl 2
  • Dedicate flasks to throwing and vials to medicine
  • Add fixed enemies at the start of crawl, but don’t spawn often
  • Improve wording of a cave description
  • Reduce randomness of effects to make them exploitable
  • Prevent inability of taking off items that drain calm
  • Update wrt macro key changes in the engine
  • Disable brew audit that fails because line is too long
  • Vary the number of gardening tools in the bunches
  • Make craftable weapons less common
  • (Almost) guarantee a fire axe, but (almost) only one
  • Spawn friendlies and foes in deposit boxes
  • Make the airlock supplies more random
  • Create gardening tools in varied pairs
  • Convey more of the shuttle story via unique embedded item, not other content
  • Fix wrong game mode started due to only the first word inspected
  • Prevent meleeing electric fence forever
  • Port tests to tasty
  • Make weapons used for crafting less common later on
  • Prevent ‘you are more foo’ and immediately ‘you are no longer foo’
  • Don’t let faucents slow and flash themselves
  • Rename S_NITROGEN_MIST and S_FOCUSED_FLASH
  • Have less particles in large oil explosions
  • Make blindness less common, because it pervents player from seeing fun stuff
  • Let Welded Robot establish a stash to make sure heroes be the blowtorch
  • Use local gifsicle, with the assertion failure fixed
  • Ensure unidentified hammers are equipped
  • Tone down ranged damage of some durable items
  • Replace permanent weapons with crafting even at low levels
  • Make needles a bit less deadly
  • Fix some Burn and RefillHP weapons becoming overpowered at range
  • Simplify sharpeningAssocs
  • Fix inaccessible fenceless dormitories
  • Help AI replace the armor that decreases melee skill
  • make cleaver weaker but more common
  • Make billiard balls more common initially, less so later on
  • Permit melee with gloves and helm in addition to boots
  • Refactor and tweak garden weapons
  • Fix gardening tools not fracturing
  • Fix mixed up resistance conditions
  • Describe how colours correspond to tile properties
  • Prevent curing of genetic flaw via any condition removal
  • Recolour transparent walls; cyan means inert, apparently
  • Recolour barrels; not burning; no collision with trees
  • Make the power node place more varied
  • Fix AI not eating to remove hunger
  • Recolour armors
  • Ensure enough weak weapons at the start
  • Add dormitories to the residential area cave definition
  • Don’t spam decent weapons at low leves now that weak weapons abound
  • Make projectiles more common so that shooter aliens are not overpowered
  • Craft torches out of staves
  • Add a rag tangle and obtain it from torn spacesuits
  • Give cleanerRobot excessive armor to make hammers useful
  • Clarify that chosen weapon needs not be optimal for a foe
  • Make hammers much different from all other weapons
  • Make a particular barrel yard place as common as others, not much more
  • Fix some terrain not alterable with projectiles
  • Mention that stats menu summarizes the organ menu
  • Add sample cabal.project.local files
  • Make the secret walls less boring
  • Use VerbMsgFail effect to ensure failed crafting doesn’t change terrain
  • Don’t report that an animal fondles its own meat
  • Add alterable floor to more rooms
  • Add alterable floor to more caves and trails
  • Rework frequency of immobile robots
  • Desynchronise vents a bit more
  • On outermost level let some faucets ignite fuel spread by other faucets
  • Make hammers a bit more common
  • Make frozen trail less common now that geysers produce floor ice
  • Make burning oil clear, as the symbol indicates
  • Adjust small fire description to match also burning oil
  • Adjust crafting embedded items to the new OnCombine semantics
  • Tweak timeouts of mostly harmless large sticks
  • Fix wrong use of AndEffect
  • Update crafting recipes to used tools and destroyed components
  • Safeguard some alien ammo and treasure against stash ransacking
  • Re-add perfumes; AI heroes were being slaughtered without them
  • Add a torn spacesuit for crafting
  • Make electric fences a less lucrative source of weapon upgrades
  • Make it more likely that armor and some other items appear before lvl 12
  • Generate more items now that a lot of crafting components appeared in the game
  • Make barrel stacks more varied and more frequent
  • Make barrel stack places more common
  • Recolour faucets to match the colour of terrain they create
  • Disable pathfinding through barrels and burning rubble
  • Give the same on-screen colour to items with similar function
  • Make the newly introduced items more common
  • Make the workshop terrain more common
  • Ensure item definitions are valid by having enough slots
  • Don’t generate ready spacesuits and avoid hard to see BrBlack items
  • Make most weapons less common now that they can be crafted
  • Harvest long poles from dead electric fences
  • Add two useless tools to harvest long poles from
  • Require a tool to but the pipe diagonally before sharpening
  • Avoid the exploit of turning staffs into pipes via crafting
  • Improve some weapon descriptions and comments
  • Make each water a sharpening workshop to avoid scrolling recipes
  • Correct some item group patterns to be singletons
  • Clean up and redefine patterns from ItemKindEmbed.hs
  • Let hammers be sharpened and elongated
  • Require identification for all hammers
  • Comment why axes and hammers are not tools
  • Avoid the no-brainer of durable tool use
  • Rename POLE and LONG_POLE
  • Add fire axe and craft poll axe from it
  • Craft long polearms and flesh out related descriptions
  • Don’t suggest that crowbar and cat’s paw can be sharpened or blunted
  • Doubly sharpen pole cleavers to ox tongues
  • Doubly sharpen cleavers to get daggers
  • Rename the knife item definition to avoid confusion with the new dagger
  • Reorder Allure item definitions
  • Sharpen halberds
  • Sharpen rapiers
  • Sharpen shields
  • Get pipes from garden tools and sharpen them
  • Enable sharpening harpoons
  • Add sharpening tools
  • Resking honing steel to barebones exoskeleton
  • Foretell future levels accessible with spacesuits
  • Add some tools
  • Rename BONDING_SOURCE to BONDING_TOOL
  • Fix, partially, pluralization of spacesuit trousers group
  • Update to the unified tile transformation syntax
  • Fix redundant Equipable or Meleeable
  • Switch to the simplied ConsumeItems definition
  • Eliminate the exploit of throwing durable tools at the workshop
  • Define the spacestuit
  • Assemble full spacesuit from the set of all its parts
  • Add a spacesuit boot
  • Make Autozoom Contact Lens appear in a larger percentage of games
  • Let workshop work from an adjacent tile as well
  • Use the new parameter of CreateItem to dilute perfume and create rose water
  • Use the new parameter of CreateItem in workshop crafting engine
  • Add the first workshop item crafting recipe
  • Add a workshop terrain
  • Remove an obsolete way of putting oil tile on fire
  • Add Discharge effect to content
  • Open doors with concussion blast
  • Avoid renewing terrain embeds, to avoid slowdown with faucets
  • Make vents terrain transforming
  • Keep underbrush fluorescent also inside places
  • Clean up non-essential talter attributes
  • Create frozen and water tiles from damp floor
  • Let underbrush grow randomly inside some places
  • Let oil float over water, etc.
  • Add explosive barrels
  • Extend and move terrain transformation abilities within content
  • Use less stuck doors while AI remains stubborn
  • Don’t create harpoons in bunches now that they are durable
  • Revert “Make better projectiles out of weapons now that they break”
  • Mark terrain transformations that are permitted with projectiles
  • Make better projectiles out of weapons now that they break
  • Make harpoon a weapon, but not auto-equipped
  • Fix signboards requiring extra keystroke to activate
  • Fix stuck doors often leaving AI helpless
  • Add stuck doors to be opened by tools
  • Fix unidentified embedded items impossible to trigger
  • Describe the less obvious tile-altering item properties
  • Add messages to dilluted OneOf effects
  • Make the new tools and weapons twice more common
  • Let strongest explosions breach stuff
  • Describe the properties of the tools to help the player connect the dots
  • Rename terrain patterns that denote possibly depleted resource
  • Add tool items for altering terrain and improvised combat
  • Make it possible to disarm jewelry traps
  • Make edible plants grow on bushes
  • Move extinguishers from walls to signboards to avoid uncovering all walls
  • Make looting rubble worthwhile if weapons urgently needed
  • Let actors trap down stairs with oil
  • Wipe oil with a cloth
  • Transform some tiles by pouring oil on them
  • Make it harder to quench burning oil
  • Separate singleton kind group names
  • Rename HideAs to PresentAs for item kinds
  • Switch texts to patterns for referring to content kind groups
  • Make plants slightly less common and cleavers slightly more
  • Make hunger twice as fast
  • Permit PatternSynonyms
  • Add a few sources of oil and fire
  • Let oil spill burn
  • Let signboards and pulpit burn
  • Make the area of nitrogen mist smaller, but dense
  • Let food thrown at lightly burning bushes get cooked
  • Make meat a less perfect projectile
  • Make the coil necklace not precious to freely use it
  • Make underbrush more common now that it has no embed
  • Get blakets and nitrogen out of walls
  • Make nitrogen flask a separate item now that its explosions freeze water
  • Quench fire with water and azbestos blanket
  • Bring back Alter skill requirement for weld to help AI open it
  • Make the spark necklace a source of cold
  • Reverse order of weld modification items to help newbies understand
  • Make weld durable to repeatedly depict sparking attempts to break the barrier
  • Let ice be transformed into water and back
  • Overcome weld with items instead of skill
  • Simplify igniting greenery
  • Update wrt addition of tiles altered by items
  • Make sword-class weapons and exotic hammers more common
  • Hint that the small fire is fine for cooking
  • Make burning trees and rubble even less common on the outermost level
  • Make it possible to cook plants
  • Add cooked plants
  • Update to binary AndEffect
  • Give player more hints to start cooking
  • Make burning bushes less common in crawl
  • Move underbrushBurning to the right section
  • Make it possible to also set bush and tree on fire
  • In crawl get torches from burning trees more often
  • Cook meat using a burning bush
  • Let burning bush turn into burning underbrush
  • Make it possible to set underbrush on fire and cook meat
  • Explain away only pointman moving
  • Bring hunger removal back in two places
  • Fix hunger removed by some melee weapons
  • Fix mercenaries using cutlery to fight
  • Explain lack of tools, food and maps in crawl scenario
  • Mention that all factions and actors are equal
  • Reverse stars and underscores in HP bar in HUD
  • Stress suvival in the game manual
  • Let animals drop chunks of raw meat, for player consumption
  • Mention clues and survival in backstory
  • Fix medbot fissure not marked as benign
  • Remove duplicated smell boost from walls (subtleFresco)
  • Add a hidden wall reminding about the need to find food upstairs
  • Pay for medbot healing with hunger
  • Add pumpkin and let other plants remove hunger, too
  • Add a hunger clock for humans and animals
  • Mention leap frog in game manual
  • Hint about leapfrog in brawl scenario note
  • Make it easier to understand trying to go below the bottommost level is futile
  • Handle the meta note about scenario separately
  • Make sure tutorial scenarios have enough melee weapons
  • Fix short scenario levels mistakenly thought to be relative to depth 15 not 10
  • Update wrt door closing changes in the engine
  • Reiterate win conditions in scenario descriptions
  • Improve the descriptions for the reaction fire rings
  • Mention in the manual that HP starts at half max
  • Reformat game peculiarities list in the manual
  • Overhaul the order and blurbs of game modes
  • Make raid scenario squad-based
  • Rework new game start menus
  • Fix a corruption of backstory text
  • Copy the list of distinguishing features from Allure homepage
  • Restructure chronologically the game manual with verbs as section titles
  • Get rid of ‘x-hair’
  • Mark some text files as out of date
  • Add a couple more paragraph breaks in content descriptions
  • Reformat backstory for display in main menu
  • Remove text data files
  • Replace old OFL-licensed font with new ones
  • Re-indent the backstory
  • Comment about why animals rarely eat food
  • Rename tactics to doctrine
  • Get rid of the henchman notion
  • Rename leader to pointman
  • Update decontaminator now that personal inventories are gone
  • Mention the ! key whenever KP_* is mentioned
  • Fix countless typos
  • Start using cabal-plan
  • Fix and improve Makefile, cabal file and CI scripts
  • Improve and update game manual and help texts wrt game changes
  • Countless changes in the LambdaHack engine and the induced changes in Allure

v0.9.5.0

  • Fix NumLock disabled in the browser
  • In screen reader frontend, highlight active menu line with the cursor
  • Fix commited debug value of rwriteSaveClips
  • Clone the main main menu commands as map mode commands
  • Add C-RMB and C-S-LMB as alternatives of MMB
  • Announce prominently MMB binding for describing map positions
  • Break the misleading alignment of movement key help paragraphs and pictures
  • Clean up the default config file, keeping compatibility
  • Make scenario names longer and slighlty more informative
  • Make Vi movement keys the default in addition to keypad and mouse
  • Fix a bug where death prompt when autoplaying was capturing a keypress
  • Let ESC from main menu return to insert coin mode, if applicable
  • Make various small UI tweaks, especially to main menu and its submenu
  • Let main menu lines have 35, not 30, characters
  • Make the main menu ASCII art less intrusive (and easier for screen readers)
  • Don’t invalidate the score file due to game minor (only) version bump

v0.9.4.0

  • Tweak razor organs
  • In vty frontend highlight actors more
  • Clean up actor highlighting
  • Add yell/yawn to minimal command set, remove swerving the aiming line
  • Invoke yell/yawn exclusively with ‘%’, due tor Windows and terminal woes
  • Move C-c command to C, not to mask C-c on console frontends
  • Tweak and fix vty console frontends, for screen-readers
  • React specially at gameover under certain special circumstances
  • Simpliy assignSlot now that slots are auto-sorted
  • Get rid of explicit item sorting; let lore and menu slots agree
  • Make DetectExit non-modal
  • Mark in a game end confirmation message that more treasure can be found
  • Add a description to the escape embedded item
  • Reword gameover text for raid scenario
  • Be more verbose when confirming escape from the game
  • Don’t claim to summon, when not possible on this level
  • Fix missing ‘no longer poisoned’ when applying antidote
  • Don’t ask confirmation for neutral (e.g., not IDed) items
  • Fix ‘you fall down; you stand on a sword’
  • Prevent selecting regions via mouse down in web frontend
  • Deselect item if player declines to apply or fling
  • Hand-hold the player, warning if flung item is beneficial
  • Hand-hold the player, warning if applied item is harmful
  • Rewrite the condition in UI applyItem check
  • Improve the lobable item skill failure message
  • Let mouse buttons describe tiles, etc.
  • Unblock S-MouseButton in SDL2 frontend
  • Always describe things under mouse button
  • Make the message when hitting dead foe more varied

v0.9.3.0, aka ‘Double of everything’

  • Make maximal level size twice higher
  • Extend the spaceship to 15 decks
  • Expand game content to fill the more numerous and often twice larger levels
  • Vary size and position of levels
  • Adjust help screens to twice higher display size
  • Introduce message classes with configurable behaviour
  • Create a new 16x16 font and use it everywhere; tweak smaller fonts
  • Lock some levels or otherwise make ascending tricky
  • Add cooldown to most melee weapons, display that in HUD, adjust AI
  • Add per-scenario and per-outcome gameover messages in content
  • Add duplicate and reroll item effects in preparation for crafting
  • Add actor and item analytics as a preparation for XP gain quests
  • Implement piercing projectiles that may share a tile with a big actor
  • Increase the spawn speed now that monsters sleep a lot
  • Introduce actors falling asleep and yelling
  • Allow any level size and position
  • Mention places when looking at tiles and add place lore menu
  • Expand all kinds of content and rebalance
  • Create and rework all item, cave and plot prose (Dan Keefe @Peritract)
  • Make explosives in cramped spaces twice weaker
  • Tweak player fling command
  • Tweak equipping when equipment overfull
  • Start cycling stores at equipment since that’s the one mentioned in help
  • Overhaul CI scripts
  • Restructure and clean up codebase
  • Extend balance debugging tools, using item and actor analytics, places, etc.
  • Drop the gameplay option that first death means defeat
  • Avoid idle-GC between slow keystrokes
  • Put content data into a compact region to limit GC
  • Remove the border around web frontend game screen; seems unneeded now
  • Don’t draw aiming line nor path in vty frontend
  • Highlight xhair by cursor in vty frontend
  • Highlight player by cursor in vty frontend
  • Switch the default FPS to 24 for tradition’s sake
  • Highlight current high score
  • Remove most stopPlayBack, now spurious, because message classes used
  • Overhaul cabal file: define common options, split into internal libraries
  • Fix confusion of nub and uniq
  • Rename short wait to lurk and many lurks to heed
  • Show a red message when HP or Calm dip too low or when foe appears
  • Lose Calm and so alert AI even at weakest non-zero HP draining attacks
  • Enable screenshots while in menus
  • Rename config options related to fonts
  • Recolour aiming line not to clash with the red crosshair
  • Exchange the functions of yellow and red highlight
  • Tweak all colours, in particular to differentiate blues/cyans
  • Cap bright colours at 85 CIELAB Lightness at D65
  • Normalize dark colours to be between 42 and 57 CIELAB Lightness at D65
  • Get rid of colorIsBold option; KISS
  • Tint white in alternating lines with different hue for long text readability
  • Don’t split lines at articles
  • Set xhair to currently meleed foe to see his HP
  • Display speed on HUD; tweak status lines in other ways
  • Don’t show description of leader target in HUD; TMI
  • Help AI flee in a consistent direction over many turns
  • Expose the save backup command, for browser games
  • Don’t display target info when item selected
  • Let AI actors spawn even quite far from the player
  • Auto-select all new team members, to help new players
  • Replace O by zero on the map display; make zero distinct from O in all fonts
  • Flesh out the initial ? prompt
  • Add ‘I’ alias for pack-related commands, unless laptop key-scheme used
  • Turn off movementLaptopKeys by default not to confuse new players
  • Make sure AI attacks bosses even if distant and fleeing or non-moving
  • Lower bonus HP at extreme difficulty
  • Add a separate frame for each projectiles start
  • Don’t go modal at the frequent and weak hidden tile detection effect
  • Make AI pick closest stairs more often
  • Let apply-unskilled actors activate embedded items
  • Don’t boost damage by speed unless actor is projectile
  • If everything else fails, let AI flee by opening doors
  • Help AI actor prevent being dominated
  • Make computing gameplay benefit to items more accurate
  • Rename, clone and fine-tune effect Temporary
  • Simplify code and content by getting rid of Recharging effect
  • Let applying periodic items only produce the first effect
  • Tweak item detection to help in skipping boring level portions and in stealth
  • Invoke and display embedded items in the order specified in tile definitions
  • Let lit trails illuminate colonnades
  • Prevent an exploit for avoiding self-invoked firecrackers
  • Don’t let AI attempt summoning if not enough Calm
  • Improve item label bracket codes in menus
  • Pick randomly destination stairs if teleporting level
  • Display the number of items in store
  • Summarize value of player loot in shared stash menu’s header
  • Start history menu at the close-up of the last message
  • Make fast-dying insects aggressive
  • Overhaul game score DSL and particular scoring definitions in content
  • Add and extend messages, e.g., tell if victim blocks and with what armor
  • Extend and rework menu manipulation keys
  • Remove specialized quaff, read and throw commands; KISS
  • Split walls of text into more paragraphs and/or make them narrower
  • Extend and update help and manual
  • Don’t let AI waste time looting distant lone projectiles
  • Make Enum instances of Point and Vector contiguous, hackily
  • Make dominated actor drop all his items, for ID and in case he defects ASAP
  • Try to find a non-waiting action, if better AI leader can’t be found
  • Prevent summoning OoD actors
  • Let animals eat food and add several foods
  • Make Domination effect harder to activate
  • Let only actors and items with SkOdor property leave smell and add perfumes
  • Let spawning rate level out after a few dozen spawns
  • Describe smell, if present in an inspected tile
  • Let pushed actor fly after crashing a door open
  • Show passing time and heard events even if no actors in the UI faction
  • When movement impossible, describe the tile with SHIFT-direction
  • Catch and steal projectiles when braced instead of when weaponless
  • Let actors that are pushed perform any action in addition to movement
  • Improve deduplication of messages
  • When describing actor on map, tell if it has loot
  • Represent being braced as having an organ; also add other pseudo-organs
  • Overhaul hearing to facilitate triangulation based on sound cues
  • Prefer to spawn aquatic actors on aquatic tiles
  • Add swimming and flying skills and shallow water tile features
  • Boost/drain skills via many new items
  • Rework and extend skills and their effects as a preparation for XP rewards
  • Enable specifying each side of outer cave fence separately
  • Make definition of caves of a scenario more precise
  • Specify more properties of levels in content
  • Extend content validation
  • Improve placement and fitting stairs and rooms on levels
  • Don’t hardwire level size
  • Simplify game rules content
  • Change the format of game client content
  • Fix an arbitrary delay in killing dying actors
  • Fix arbitrary branch of a corridor chosen when running
  • Fix bush patches blocking off a level’s corner
  • Fix config file ignored at game reinit
  • Fix running disturbed by flavours of walls
  • Fix splitting lines one character too early
  • Fix Calm drain from nearby foes occurring only every other turn
  • Fix some AI looping movement, in particular when fleeing
  • Fix running into own periodic explosions, e.g., from necklaces
  • Fix ‘she painfullies collide’
  • Fix AI with vector targets unwilling to change them
  • Fix crash when attempting to fling at a target on remote level
  • Fix wrong timestamps in history
  • Fix, again, various kinds of frames intruding between fadeout and fadein
  • Fix wrong pluralization of some item names, compound and exceptions
  • Fix disabled items benefit recalculation after item kind learned
  • Fix in many ways too close initial faction and item positions
  • Fix performance in many ways and places, particularly for JS translation
  • Fix missing perception updates, causing missed AI actions concerning us
  • Fix uninitialized sarenas, which was probably causing resume to change state
  • Fix weak AI actors fleeing even if enemy can’t melee
  • Fix and optimize sifting free tiles for spawn/summon location
  • Fix various cases of excessive summoning
  • Fix recording of item first seen level
  • Fix many problems with item descriptions and other messages
  • Fix reporting of reduction and elimination of actor conditions
  • Fix reading and interpreting old format config files
  • Fix synced initial item timeouts and actor times, leading to artificial feel
  • Fix actors erratically following their leader
  • Fix lifts continuing as stars and the other way around
  • Fix various 32bit overflows
  • Fix other errors, probably not present or not visible in previous version

v0.8.3.0

  • Add a hack to run SDL2 on the main thread, fixing the OS X crash
  • Warn visually when impressed and Calm running low, risking domination
  • Display actor as red when low Calm and impressed or when low HP
  • Fix, complete and fine tune UI, AI and server skill and weapon checks
  • Fix a bug where item aspects look different to clients than to the server
  • Change the requirements for the main menu ASCII art
  • Tweak loot and terrain a tiny bit

v0.8.1.2

  • Fix typos detected by lintian
  • Fix the code that runs in case of old async (bug introduced in v0.8.1.1)

v0.8.1.1

  • no player-visible changes
  • make it possible to compile with old async package
  • rewrite copyright information according to Debian format
  • make github display the correct main license

v0.8.1.0

  • no player-visible changes
  • significantly reduce RAM usage when compiling library
  • update and extend CI

v0.8.0.0, aka ‘Explosive dashboard’

  • display initial bits of backstory as a help screen and in-game
  • rework greying out menu items and permitting item application and projection
  • rework history collection; merge message repetitions more aggressively
  • display HP in red when below (configurable) warning threshold
  • tweak AI: actors remember they are fleeing; better leader choice, etc.
  • add to content specialized explosive projectiles; tune the effects
  • calculate loot score component based on fraction of dungeon loot collected
  • don’t hardwire item price, but let it be specified in content
  • let all valuables glitter in the dark to avoid complete level exploration
  • teach AI to cure ailments and shake off impressions
  • rework detection effects; add detection of items embedded in tiles
  • automatically identify stolen items that only have minor effects
  • let projectiles hit each other if fragile and substantial enough
  • rework item kind identification code; change the way it’s defined in content
  • make more item kinds (including some traps) secret
  • protect paralyzed actors with a stasis condition to avoid infinite paralysis
  • implement dumping screenshots in SDL2 and create animated GIFs in Makefile
  • generate most common consumables less often, but in depth-scaled bunches
  • make pushed actors alter tiles and trigger effects of embedded items
  • validate and cross-validate more content; reduce content creation boilerplate
  • make summoning more varied and prevent chain-summoning
  • add many ways to conditionally sequence effects
  • create large, merged rooms more often
  • generalize the terrain altering player command (C-c, mouse)
  • let RET, SPACE and ESC clear pending messages, if any
  • add dashboard with links to all menus and info screens
  • scale some organ and trap power with level depth
  • simplify level-scaled dice roll semantics
  • change scaled dice notation ‘dl’ to ‘dL’ for readability in-game
  • rebalance items and decrease dice variety to unclutter backpack
  • colour-code beneficial and harmful conditions in menu and in HUD
  • display item lore (also for organs, embedded items, explosions, etc.)
  • display embedded item descriptions as if they were tile descriptions
  • tweak blast visuals, lower particle counts, beautify their spread
  • tweak projectile visuals, e.g., display an extra frame when projectile dies
  • add intro screen and work on other ways to convey story
  • simplify a lot of code, including a bit of game rules
  • fix some bugs, tweak content, speed up some AI bottlenecks

v0.7.1.0, aka ‘Ancient troubles’

  • add amazing cave and item (actor, blast, organ) descriptions
  • package for Windows as an installer and also as zip archives
  • fix a crash from SDL frontend under some OpenGL drivers (no thread-safety)
  • add WWW address to the Main Menu, for other sites that may run our JS blob

v0.7.0.0, aka ‘The dice are cast’

  • decouple tile searching from tile alteration
  • refrain from identifying items that are not randomized
  • switch away from incapacitated leader to let others revive him
  • make rescue easier by not going into negative HP the first time
  • fix crowd of friends on another level slowing even actors that melee
  • fix missing report about items underneath an actor when changing levels
  • API breakage: change the syntax of dice in content
  • API addition: introduce cave descriptions
  • keep all client states in the server and optimize communication with clients
  • improve item choice for identification and item polymorphing
  • reset embedded items when altering tile
  • replace atomic command filtering with exception catching
  • reimplement dice as symbolic expressions inducing multiple RNG calls
  • switch to optparse-applicative and rewrite cli handling
  • add stack and cabal new-build project files
  • improve haddocks across the codebase

v0.6.2.0, aka ‘Zoom out’

  • make fireworks slower and so easier to spot
  • make rattlesnake deeper but more common
  • announce no effect of activation
  • describe original and current faction of an actor
  • highlight dominated actors
  • mark organs with comma instead of percent and gems with dollar
  • make the healing cave dangerous to prevent camping
  • slightly balance various content
  • by default move item the same as last time
  • often spawn between heroes and stairs going deeper
  • fix totalUsefulness computation for negative effects
  • fix abandoning distant enemy target despite no alternatives
  • fix slow pushing of actors
  • fix a crash when many actors run towards stairs
  • hotfix: Pass zoom keys through to the browser
  • help players find the info about changing the font size
  • depend on GHC >= 8.0 and new vector

v0.6.1.0, aka ‘Breaking one rule at a time’

  • major engine bugfix: fix redrawing after window minimized and restored
  • major engine bugfix: hack around vanishing texture on Windows
  • major engine bugfix: hack around SDL backends not thread-safe on Windows
  • update wrt the only breaking API change: specify font dir in game rules content
  • let the game use its own fonts, not fonts from the sample game in library
  • tweak some item creation to occur in character’s pack, not on the ground
  • slightly balance various content
  • make sure the ‘resolution’ effect is not a drawback
  • make artifact weapon rarities more regular
  • avoid creating lit, open dungeon at the bottom, where foes have ranged weapons
  • number scenarios in user descriptions

v0.6.0.0, aka ‘Too much to tell’

  • add and modify a lot of content: items, tiles, embedded items, scenarios
  • improve AI: targeting, stealth, moving in groups, item use, fleeing, etc.
  • make monsters more aggressive than animals
  • tie scenarios into a loose, optional storyline
  • add more level generators and more variety to room placement
  • make stairs not walkable and use them by bumping
  • align stair position on the levels they pass through
  • introduce noctovision
  • increase human vision to 12 so that normal speed missiles can be sidestepped
  • tweak and document weapon damage calculation
  • derive projectile damage mostly from their speed
  • make heavy projectiles better vs armor but easier to sidestep
  • improve hearing of unseen actions, actors and missiles impacts
  • let some missiles lit up on impact
  • make torches reusable flares and add blankets for dousing dynamic light
  • add detection effects and use them in items and tiles
  • make it possible to catch missiles, if not using weapons
  • make it possible to wait 0.1 of a turn, at the cost of no bracing
  • improve pathfinding, prefer less unknown, alterable and dark tiles on paths
  • slow down actors when acting at the same time, for speed with large factions
  • don’t halve Calm at serious damage any more
  • eliminate alternative FOV modes, for speed
  • stop actors blocking FOV, for speed
  • let actor move diagonally to and from doors, for speed
  • improve blast (explosion) shapes visually and gameplay-wise
  • add SDL2 frontend and deprecate GTK frontend
  • add specialized square bitmap fonts and hack a scalable font
  • use middle dot instead of period on the map (except in teletype frontend)
  • add a browser frontend based on DOM, using ghcjs
  • improve targeting UI, e.g., cycle among items on the map
  • show an animation when actor teleports
  • add character stats menu and stat description texts
  • add item lore and organ lore menus
  • add a command to sort item slots and perform the sort at startup
  • add a single item manipulation menu and let it mark an item for later
  • make history display a menu and improve display of individual messages
  • display highscore dates according to the local timezone
  • make the help screen a menu, execute actions directly from it
  • rework the Main Menu
  • rework special positions highlight in all frontends
  • mark leader’s target on the map (grey highlight)
  • visually mark currently chosen menu item and grey out impossible items
  • define mouse commands based on UI mode and screen area
  • let the game be fully playable only with mouse, use mouse wheel
  • pick menu items with mouse and with arrow keys
  • add more sanity checks for content
  • reorganize content in files to make rebasing on changed content easier
  • rework keybinding definition machinery
  • let clients, not the server, start frontends
  • version savefiles and move them aside if versions don’t match
  • lots of bug fixes internal improvements and minor visual and text tweaks

v0.5.0.0, aka ‘Halfway through space’

  • let AI put excess items in shared stash and use them out of shared stash
  • let UI multiple items pickup routine put items that don’t fit into equipment into shared stash, if possible, not into inventory pack
  • re-enable the ability to hear close, invisible foes
  • add a few more AI and autonomous henchmen tactics (CTRL-T)
  • keep difficulty setting over session restart
  • change some game start keybindings
  • replace the Duel game mode with the Raid game mode
  • various bugfixes, minor improvements and balancing

v0.4.101.1, aka ‘Officially fun’

  • the game is now officially fun to play, with a seal of the Galactic Council
  • introduce unique boss monsters and unique artifact items
  • add robots that heal the player, in particular as a mid-game reset for HP
  • move spaceship airlock to level 10 and beef up spaceship crew
  • let AI gang up, attempt stealth and react to player aggressiveness
  • spawn actors fast, close to the enemy and in large numbers
  • spawn actors less and less often on a given level, but with growing depth
  • prefer weapons with effects, if recharged
  • make the bracing melee bonus additive, not multiplicative
  • let explosions buffet actors around
  • make braced actors immune to translocation effects
  • make actor domination yet less common and deadly
  • use mouse for movement, actor selection, aiming
  • don’t run straight with selected actors, but go-to cross-hair with them
  • speed up default frame rate, slow down projectiles visually
  • rework item manipulation UI
  • you can pick up many items at once and it costs only one turn
  • allow actors to apply and project from the shared stash
  • reverse messages shown in player diary
  • display actor organs and stats
  • split highscore tables wrt game modes
  • move score calculation formula to content
  • don’t keep the default/example config file commented out; was misleading
  • update vs the naughtily changed v0.5.0.0 of LambdaHack content API

v0.4.100.0, aka ‘The last interstellar thaw’

  • update vs the unexpectedly thawed v0.5.0.0 of LambdaHack content API
  • unexpectedly add items with timeouts and temporary effects
  • start campaign on level 3 and don’t spawn aliens until level 4
  • rebalance campaign (probably still too hard)
  • tweak skills of some factions and actors
  • rename tablets to chips to make their vanishing easier to understand
  • make colorful characters bold (if it resizes your fonts, turn off via colorIsBold = False in config file or –noColorIsBold on commandline)
  • start the game with a screensaver safari mode
  • improve keyboard handling on Windows
  • add i386 Linux and Windows compilation targets to Makefile

v0.4.99.0, aka ‘Player escapes through airlock’

  • balance game content a bit (campaign still unbalanced)
  • fix a bug where doors can’t be closed
  • assign AI tactics to players, in particular use follow-the-leader in safari
  • specify monster spawn rate per-cave
  • generally update content to the new v0.5.0.0 of LambdaHack content API

v0.4.14, aka ‘Out of cosmic balance’

  • add tons of new (unbalanced) items, actors and descriptions
  • add a simple cabal test in addition to make-test and travis-test
  • add items of Wonder and of Marvel
  • add game mechanics, items and places to enable stealthy tactics
  • add lots of shrapnel (explosions) and organs (body parts)
  • expose a bit of the plot via new game modes and their order

v0.4.12

  • make walls lit by default to simplify exploration
  • improve and simplify dungeon generation
  • simplify running and permit multi-actor runs
  • let items explode and generate shrapnel projectiles
  • add game difficulty setting (initial HP scaling right now)
  • allow recording, playing back and looping commands
  • implement pathfinding via per-actor BFS over the whole level
  • extend setting targets for actors in UI tremendously
  • implement autoexplore, go-to-target, etc., as macros
  • let AI use pathfinding, switch leaders, pick levels to swarm to
  • force level/leader changes on spawners (even when played by humans)
  • extend and redesign UI bottom status lines

v0.4.10

  • screensaver game modes (AI vs AI)
  • improved AI (can now climbs stairs, etc.)
  • multiple, multi-floor staircases
  • multiple savefiles
  • configurable framerate and combat animations

v0.4.8

  • experimental multiplayer modes
  • a lot of gameplay changes induced by the engine overhaul and in particular the client-server rewrite

v0.4.6.5

  • this is a minor release, primarily intended to fix the broken compilation on Hackage
  • changes since 0.4.6 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

v0.4.6

  • the Main Menu
  • improved and configurable mode of squad combat

v0.4.4

  • missiles flying for three turns (by an old kosmikus’ idea)
  • visual feedback for targeting
  • animations of combat and individual monster moves

v0.4.3

  • the Allure of the Stars game depends on the LambdaHack engine library