Allure of the Stars

Allure of the Stars is a near-future Sci-Fi roguelike2and tactical squad combat game. Binaries and the game manualare available at the homepage6. You can also try the game outin the browser at http://allureofthestars.com/play.

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

The game is written in Haskell1 using the LambdaHack10roguelike game engine.Please see the changelog file for recent improvementsand the issue tracker for short-term plans. Long term goalsare high replayability and auto-balancing through proceduralcontent generation and persistent content modificationbased on player behaviour. Contributions are welcome.Please offer feedback to mikolaj.konarski@funktory.com 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 arelimited 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, for Windows, dev versions continuously from AppVeyor18).To use a pre-compiled binary archive, unpack it and run the executablein the unpacked directory or use program shortcuts from the installer,if available. On Linux, make sure you have the SDL2 libraries installedon 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 librariesare included in the game's binary archive.

Max OS X binaries for the few most popular OS versions are accessiblefrom 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 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 settings fileis 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 Windowsand Inspect/Application/Local Storage under RMB menuwhen run inside the Chrome browser.If the user config file is outdated or corrupted, it's automaticallymoved away together with old savefiles, which guarantees that the newdefault config file is ultimately put in its place.

Screen fonts and, consequently, window size can be changed by editingthe config file in the user data folder. The default bitmap font16x16xw.bdf used for the game map covers most national charactersin 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.fntbitmap font results in a tiny window and covers latin-1 characters only.The config file parameter allFontsScale permits further window sizeadjustments, automatically switching to the scalable 16x16xw.woffversion of the game map font. Config file option chosenFontset governsnot 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 requestedin the configuration file, allFontsScale needs to be set.E.g., scale 3 works for 4K displays. Otherwise, the letters may betoo small or, in fullscreen or on retina displays in OS X,the screen may be automatically scaled as a whole, not each letterseparately, softening letter edges of the square fonts that shouldbe pixel-perfect and crisp.

If you don't have a numeric keypad, you can use the left-hand movementkey 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 combinationmay be mouse for menus, go-to, inspecting the map, aiming at distantpositions and keyboard for everything else.

If you are using the ANSI terminal frontend (--frontendANSI on commandline),then numeric keypad (especially keypad * and /) may not work correctly,depending on the versions of libraries terminal emulators. Togglingthe Num Lock key may help or make issues worse. As a workaround,in the ANSI terminal frontend, numbers are used for movement,which sadly prevents the number keys from selecting heroes.The commands that require pressing Control and Shift together won't workeither, 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.As a side effect of screen reader support, there is no aiming linenor path in ANSI frontend and some of map position highlightingis performed using the terminal cursor. Screen readers may also workbetter with animations turned off, using --noAnim or the correspondingconfig file or main game menu options.

Compiling native binary from source

The recommended frontend is based on SDL2, so you need the SDL2 librariesfor 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.Other frontends are compiled similarly, but compilation to JavaScriptfor the browser is more complicated and requires the ghcjs15 compilerand 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 currentcompilation 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 ../LambdaHackand run cabal run from the main directory.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

There is a built-in ANSI terminal frontend (--frontendANSI on commandline)intended for screen readers and a simplified black and white line terminalfrontend (--frontendTeletype) suitable for teletype terminalsor a keyboard and a printer (but it's going to use a lot of paper,unless you disable animations with --noAnim). The teletype frontendis used in CI and for some tests and benchmarks defined in Makefile.The terminal frontends leave you on your own regarding font choiceand color setup and you won't have the colorful squares outliningspecial positions that exist in the SDL2 frontend, but only crudecursor highlights.

Testing and debugging

Integration tests can be run and displayed with

cabal test test --enable-tests --test-show-details=direct

The Makefilecontains 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 withthe standard, user-friendly frontend and auto-locating the game binary.

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

Further information

For more information, visit the wiki4and see PLAYING.md,CREDITSand 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 modifyit under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published bythe 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 ofMERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See theGNU Affero General Public License for more details.

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

Exceptions and detailed copyright information is contained in file COPYLEFT.