Output libraries

It can be difficult to decide which output library to use when creating a Roguelike. There are many different ones available. Libraries differ in portability, ease of use, speed, and other factors. This article compares different options.

conio.h

Do not use conio.h. It is unportable. It only works on DOS and Windows. If you use conio.h, then unless you design your code extremely well, when you try to port your game to other platforms, you are going to have problems.

Advantages:

• Easy to use

Disadvantages:

• Unportable

Curses

Curses is a library for I/O to a terminal. It's quite portable, and applications will often compile on different operating systems with little or no change. It is probably your best choice if you don't need more than 8 or 16 colors.

Advantages:

• Portable
• Relatively easy to use

Disadvantages: Only allows up to 8 foreground colors and 8 background colors. (It's possible to get 8 more foreground colors by using the bold attribute.)

Windows API Calls

It's possible to call the Windows API functions directly. This is usually a bad idea, because they are obviously unportable. It's almost always better to use someone else's library instead.

Advantages:

• Fast

Disadvantages:

• Very hard to use
• Completely unportable

libtcod

Libtcod allows 16 million colors, and larger consoles than available otherwise. It's portable, but unfortunately it takes some time to get used to. (Can someone add more to this? I'm not really familiar with libtcod.)

Advantages:

• Portable
• 16 million colors
• Many capabilities besides a command-line interface, like mouse support and a configuration file parser, and advanced features such as perlin noise

Disadvantages:

• A little hard to learn
• The default font is hard to read, especially on large screens

RLLib

RLLib is being developed by Nathan Stoddard. It isn't available for download yet. Unfortunately, it won't be available in time for this year's 7DRL competition. Before I release it, it will need a better name, because "RLLib" is too generic, and too similar to "Roguelikelib" which is completely different.

Advantages:

• Portable
• 16 million colors
• Mouse support, an RNG, config file support
• Doesn't rely on any additional libraries
• Allows access to individual pixels, and drawing characters at any position on the screen
• A simple message printing system
• Multiplayer support
• Relatively easy to use
• Hexagon support
• Simple graphics support

Disadvantages:

• Not released yet