   New to forums, making roguelikes
  Hello all, First off a little about myself. My name is Rob, I am 31 years old and have been a gamer all my life (since the 80's).  I love all things games related. My career is Product development team manager and Tech support manager, for a website based Lead generation database suite. I basically manage 2 teams of programmers and designers for getting new features in our program. This is all fine and good for work, but I have always wanted to learn more code then just the CSS, HTML and &#106avascript we use at work (I don't get to code the fun stuff, thats what my team is for.)I  took 2 years of community college courses in JAVA (actually learned it before going to the classes), and have taught myself basic C/C++ (no oop or pointers yet) and would like to program my own Rogue-like game.That is my goal a rogue like game , it can be text based at first, but I would like to make it use different tile sets later on. What language would be best to use for this? C/ C++ or Java, I know some in each (but not graphic programming, just text console in C and text and swing/awt gui in java) Is there any tutorials out there for building the basics of a top down rogue -like game? I would really like to learn how to render a map and move someone around on it.  I am sure I can figure out the fighting engine parts, as I built many a AD&D character builder programs back in QBasic in the late 80's /early 90s. I want to start out simple and do this in my spare time. Maybe after building the rogue-like i can move on to a larger RPG or turn based strat game. But for right now i think a rogue like is the perferct project!Any advice, langauge to use, tutorials?   
Rogue Basin is a great resource.   ;  Hi Rob :DI had a similar story to you (with the exception of college as I haven't even finished high school yet). I started off with Java and am currently working on C/C++.Since you already know Java and were learning it for well over 2 years, my guess is that you are more or less proficient in Object-Oriented Programming. Choosing the best language for making games is more or less going down a checklist and outweighing cons vs pros. Java, C, and C++ are all excellent languages and both will allow you to accomplish what you aim for. The trade-off between Java vs C/C++ are portability vs speed, respectively. Overall, probably the best language for games is still C++, mainly because it's OOP enabled structure allows you to cut down on a bunch of code as opposed to plain C, and the memory requirement (when used properly ;]) is a bit less painful than that of Java which requires the presence of a virtual machine. For text based games, I'm certain you can handle yourself on your own no matter which language you choose as they are all suitable.For graphics, the more famous choices are DirectX and OpenGL for C/C++ and I believe it is Java2D/2.5D/3D for Java. In the case of 2D games (as 3D games are probably a bit much to handle on your own) you may make those using the win32 API (assuming portability is not a problem).Java is an awesome language. It has a lot of functionality straight up built in so you don't have to wander about looking for different libraries as is the case with C/C++. Everything is centralized, the compiler, linker, virtual machine, libraries, and even a nice IDE that comes with it for absolutely nothing. I say, this language is quite viable and if you know it already, you may want to expand on it to be more fluent. It would make transition to other languages a matter of skimming over a tutorial to learn the syntax and maybe grasp onto some extra concepts.Anyway, there is my own $0.02 XD I hope it's not too confusing to read >.>   ;  I pretty much agree with boogyman here.Quote:Original post by boogyman19946For graphics, the more famous choices are DirectX and OpenGL for C/C++ and I believe it is Java2D/2.5D/3D for Java. In the case of 2D games (as 3D games are probably a bit much to handle on your own) you may make those using the win32 API (assuming portability is not a problem).Don't forget that some easier to use libraries are perfectly suited to the simpler graphical requirements of tile based games where obtaining maximum possible performance isn't really an issue - SDL, for example.   ;  I would recommend doing some little 1-2 hour programs to teach yourself pointers and OOP quick before you start.If you already have a decent grasp of Java and have worked with C/++ it really won't take that long and it will fill in a very important knowledge gap before you get too deep into your rogue game.A good way to kill a potentially cool project is to find out you've been doing something fundamentally wrong that will be both too hard to fix and crippling in the long run. If you're just doing the rogue-like game to learn then by all means go for it though :).   ;  I'm doing a roguelike in java at the moment, but we don't seem to get many roguelike developers around here, so it's nice to see another one. :)For language I'd suggest using whatever you're more comfortable with or whichever you enjoy using most. Roguelikes are (IMHO) all about interesting gameplay and logic, so you want something where you're free to focus on the actual game bits rather than wrestling with the compiler.You might also consider looking into some of the roguelike libraries (like this one). Again that leaves you free not to worry about things like line-of-sight and get right into the more interesting bits.I also found How to write a roguelike in 15 steps was very helpful. It's not really a tutorial but it does a nice job of breaking things down into the various bits and pieces you'll need to write and some of the issues you'll face.   ;  Programming roguelikes are fun!You may also want to check out libtcod here: http://doryen.eptalys.net/libtcod/It can be used with C, C++, C# (.net or mono), Python, and probably others that I don't know about.  It uses SDL at its base, and can do fast high color text blitting (among other stuff, such as pathfinding and LOS algorithms).As Organgy pointed out, a library such as this can allow you to (relatively) quickly create something, and later when you want to delve into the details you can just go through the source.   ;Quote:Original post by OrangyTangI also found How to write a roguelike in 15 steps was very helpful. It's not really a tutorial but it does a nice job of breaking things down into the various bits and pieces you'll need to write and some of the issues you'll face.Damn, neither those sites, or the google cache will load up.People use graphics APIs for roguelikes now? Has the console been abandoned?   ;  Thanks for the advice everyone. I have started making a simple rogue-like. So far I just have a static map, player movement, debug messages, and working open/close door functions. Damn acsii arrow keys are giving me problems though with getch(); Thanks again for the resources.   ;  One of my first "lets do stuff in perspective!"- adventures was practically a perspective visualized "roguelike" ( The mechanics were identical to a topdown one, appart from fake first person perspective ) done in Java. Im ashamed of the things quality these days, but it was fun nevertheless. A picture to chuckle at.Here is an image for preview.That toy ant costed around 7 euros...So, I say that Javas AWT is more than enough for any roguelike needs.Rendering speed should not be an issue./ AdditionIm not certain there is a meaningful counterpart to [up][down]... and so arrows in ascii. You would probably be better off using some kind of an input library?   