A Bit of Buried Treasure: libtcod-net

So I was wandering around the Intertubes, having a hankering to play around with writing a Roguelike. (Why? Because I can.) Since I’m officially a C# snob, I needed a curses library (because my own old fake-SDL-console project, RogueSDL, quite frankly sucked–someday I’ll put it up on this site for everyone to laugh at). MonoCurses looks pretty nice, but it binds to ncurses; I couldn’t find ncurses for Win32 and while I could probably compile it via Cygwin, that would involve installing Cygwin and that’s just not fun for anyone involved. Curses# looks to be dead, as well as being a very thin wrapper over pdcurses and ncurses.

After a few magic words to Elgoog, this popped up in my search results: libtcod-net. I went “ooh!” and started poking around, and yea, verily, it is awesome sauce. It’s a wrapper around the BSD licensed libtcod, and to rip off a McDonalds’ trademark, I’m lovin’ it. My only issue is that it doesn’t feel very C#-ish: while the functionality is great (check out the sample demos to see what kinds of stuff this library can handle, it’s like the emacs of Roguelikes), it seems to have inherited some C-isms. Makes sense, though, as it seems to be a project mostly for his own use in his own Roguelike, Magecrawl. I shot him an email asking if he’d be interested in collaborating, because if I end up using libtcod-net for anything I’m going to have to make changes to make the bits and pieces more C#-ish. (I’m nitpicky enough to find something like “TCOD_key” as a class name absolutely painful. Yes, it’s a horrible habit. No, I can’t suppress it.) What’s especially cool is that he’s been filing bugs against Mono as he goes along. Anything to help Mono’s gravy by me.

Anyway, many kudos to Chris Hamons, the dev, and I encourage everyone to take a look at this library. It’s good stuff.