Some of you following this blog since the beginning might remember TCOD’s procedural portraits.
Well the source code is now available on the demos page, along with the complete cheesy 100% developer made artwork. Here are the features :

• portrait customization

There are 5 templates (male kid, female kid, adult male, adult female, elder male). Each template contains various layers (face, eyes, nose, mouth, …). Each layer can contain versions (to have different haircuts or eye types for a template). There are jewels layers (necklaces, bangles, earrings, …), marks (scars, beauty spots,…).

You can also customize the eyes, nose and mouth position, the complexion and the hair color (everything only works in monochrome though).

• emotion

Once you defined the portrait (how the character looks like…), you can alter the emotion. Eyes, eyebrows and mouth have several versions. You can change the eyebrows, eyes and pupils position or add tears and “shame blushing”.

Note that not all templates support every feature though. Only the kids have emotion support. The adult female has the most clothes and ornaments layers but no emotion support. The adult male is even simpler and generally looks like a dumb folk singer in pyjama… The elder male has the fewer layers… and no clothes…

The original code uses dynamic font updates to render the portraits but it’s quite buggy. I replaced it with the SDL callback.

After the cave, it’s now the turn to the original TCOD engine to give away some gems.

For this one, I had to use Linux to squash a nasty memory corruption bug, so the zip contains both windows/mingw and linux binaries and makefiles.
Features :
- day/night cycle
- weather system with
- varying cloud thickness
- varying wind speed and direction
- rain
- lightning

Get it here.

To be honest, I wouldn’t use libtcod for a tile based game myself, but for a game that must support both ascii and tile rendering, it might be an option. I’ve seen people on Goblin Camp’s forums trying to fork the game into a tile based one and I made a few experimentation to see if that was possible with libtcod.

The result is on the demo page. It’s far from being a full featured tile engine and the right way to do it is probably to use both libtcod and an existing SDL based tile engine. Anyway it’s a working proof of concept and it’s always good to know that you can go beyond the ascii limitations with the SDL callback.

I was also interested in making this demo because I’ve always wanted to use this breathtaking free tileset.

No, no, not The Chronicles of Doryen v1.0… Not the cave v0.0.1a1 neither… but at least something has been released !

I’ve grown tired of showing off stuff and never being able to release anything so I decided to extract the niftiest pieces of code and make small tech demos with them. This way, they’re no more bloggish vapor and the source code is easier to understand and reuse once extracted from the main project.

There are 3 of them right now, I’ll dig in the archives to see if there are other interesting bits I could process. Get them on the new Demos page.

A lot of people have been asking for a compiled 1.5.1 version. Here it is ! You can put your roguelike dev greasy hands on it on the download page . Note that, as stated on the download page, it’s been compiled “as is” without being in a particularly stable state. During the beta, the renderer defaults to GLSL (with fallback to OpenGL, then SDL) but there are known issues with it (fullscreen and fading, not even speaking of openGL drivers), so you’d better force SDL use when you release a stable version of your game.

A big thank to anyone involved in this release, especially :
- Donblas for his work on cmake, swig, C# and OSX versions
- Mingos for various bugfixes, work on gaussian distribution and colors and an upcoming butt-peeling MRPAS2 fov algorithm.
- Dividee for python polishing and various bugfixes
- Jotaf as always, for his unshakable support and suggestions
I’m probably forgetting people, so have a look at the credits file

Also a big thank to all the developers who put their trust in libtcod for their game. Have a look at the projects page to check the latest promising games.