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.

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.)

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 was developed by Nathan Stoddard. It isn't being developed anymore, because the author is now using Python, but the newest version is available for download, and it might be useful for some games. Note that it is different than Roguelikelib, which happens to have a similar name.

Advantages:

• 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
• Relatively easy to use
• Hexagon support
• Simple graphics support

Disadvantages:

• Not easily portable to platforms besides Windows and the X Window System.

conio.h

This only works with DOS and Windows and hence should not be used for any game required to be portable.

Advantages:

• Easy to use

Disadvantages:

• Unportable

Windows API Calls

It's possible to call the Windows API functions directly. As you can tell from the name this only works with Windows and is not portable to other platforms.

Advantages:

• Fast

Disadvantages:

• Very hard to use
• Completely unportable