plomrogue
=========

plomlompom tries to build his own roguelike engine. There is one game for it so
far, which is loaded by default: "Please the Island God". See ./README_PtIG for
details on it.

System requirements / installation / running the game
-----------------------------------------------------

The engine is expected to run:
- on Unix systems with a vt100-like terminal environment (xterm will do)
- that contain the ncurses library
- and Python3 (version >= 3.2.3).

To build it, this is furthermore necessary:
- gcc (version >= 4.7.2); some llvm masked as gcc was tested successfully on OSX
- libc library headers (libc6-dev?)

To build and start it with the default game, just run:

$ ./roguelike

./roguelike is a shell script that executes a union of ./roguelike-server and
./roguelike-client, with the server as a background job. You may ignore the
script and start either or both of the two by hand if you please.

Save files, replay game recording, starting over
------------------------------------------------

Every move of yours re-writes a file "save" that describes the new state of the
world, if more than 15 seconds have passed since its last writing. Once you
re-start plomrogue, the game state is recreated from the "save" file. To start
over in a new world, simply delete this file and re-start the engine.

The save file is called ./save be default, but another file name to use can be
given with the -l option (i.e. start the game with "./roguelike -l
alternate_savefile"). The -l option can also be used to start over in a new
world whose state will be read and saved with the alternate file path, without
overwriting other games saved in other save files.

Once you start a new world, every game action of yours is appended to a file
called "record_" plus the save file name. Run "./roguelike -s" to watch the
current game's recording from the beginning. Hit any player action key to
increment turns (they will not trigger the actions usually mapped to them, only
repeat the actions done at that point in the game as defined in the record
file). Other keys do their usual thing.

Append a number to the -s option (like "-s100") to start the recording playback
at the respective turn number. (Don't forget to delete / empty a game's record
file when deleting its save file, or different game's moves will get mixed up in
one record file.)

Hacking / server internals and configuration
--------------------------------------------

The game world is set up and made subject to player commands by
./roguelike-server. It's controlled by commands explained in the file
./SERVER_COMMANDS. The server usually reads these from the files ./server_run/in
(written to by ./roguelike-client), ./confserver/world, ./record_save and
./save.

The ./roguelike-server executable can be run with a -v option for possibly
helpful debugging info (mostly: what messages the client sends to the server).

Server and client communicate via files in the ./server_run/ directory
(generated when the server is first run). The ./server_run/in file is read by
the server for newline-delimited commands. The ./server_run/out file contains
server messages to be read by clients. The ./server/worldstate file contains a
serialized representation of the game world's data as it is to be visible to the
player / the player's client.