Moria

Discussion about Rogue Touch for the iPhone and iPod Touch
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swhatley
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Moria

Post by swhatley »

Hi all,

First of all, I am so glad to find Rogue Touch for the iPhone. Rogue is one of my favorite games. And, Rogue Touch is the best implementation that I have come across. Great work and and I am glad to see that it is being actively updated.

In your road map, you mention an "advanced mode" that has a store. Well, this sounds more like Moria which is also one of my favorite games. IMO, Moria or Umoria is an advanced version of Rogue with larger levels, lots more items and creatures. Instead of just a rattlesnake in Rogue, snakes (S) can be brown, black, white, etc. There are uppercase and lowercase leters that mean different things. The lowercase (s) represetns skeletal forms of various creatures.

So, if you guys are thinking about making a version of NetHack for the iPhone, Moria Touch would be a good intermediate step towards that. I would love to see Moria Touch. So to me in the Rouge-like games the order in increasing complexity goes from Rogue -> Moria -> Nethack. In this way, Moria Touch could be the advanced Rogue while, keeping Rogue Touch closer to its current style. BTW, so far, I am enjoying the tweaks you have made to the classic Rogue game in Rogue Touch. The graphics a excellent. Personally, I'm not really interested in a Nethack Touch app but I see many folks here are interested. Maybe this three stage approach will help achieve this.

Again, thanks for this great game!
Steven
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CommanderData
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Re: Moria

Post by CommanderData »

Steve,
First off, let me say thanks for supporting us so we can be encouraged to continue here! Glad that you really like our implementation :mrgreen:

Surprisingly enough I never played Moria, but it does sound like it fits right in the middle of that complexity path towards those games that practically require reading the source to succeed!!! I'll be sure to take a look at it once I get some time to breath- is there a good OSX version you recommend I try?

Thanks again! We'll do our best to make sure you and everyone else here continues to have fun with Rogue Touch and other future games :D
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swhatley
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Re: Moria

Post by swhatley »

CD,

I have not found an Intel based Mac OSX version of Moria. In the past, I have compiled the Moria source on a Linux box. I also have a barely beta port of Moria called kMoria on my Palm TX. Here is the official Moria site, AFAIK:

http://www-math.bgsu.edu/~grabine/moria.html

And here is where I got kMoria:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/roguelike-palm/

BTW, I was reading a review of Rogue Touch and they made reference to the Atari ST version made by E.A. which is graphically similar to Rogue Touch. I used to have an Atari Mega 4 ST and, yes, I had that version of Rogue. Even though I bought a boxed copy of the game, it wold kill me on level 2 saying "Killed by AI Design. Software pirate: Scum of the Earth!". This really irritated me. Come to find out, there was something in its coding that didn't expect it would be ran on anything higher than a Mega 2 ST. My system had 4 megs of RAN so Rogue got confused. I did find a little hack on atari.archive.umich.edu called roguefix that disabled the annoying message. I did really like this version of Rogue. But, I like Rogue Touch much, much more. It would have been rather difficult to carry my Mega 4 ST in my pocket. :) The iPhone has a much better form factor.

Thanks,
Steven
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swhatley
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Re: Moria

Post by swhatley »

CD,

I've been doing some more checking. Here and over at TouchArcade, I see references to Angband. From what I can tell, Angband is based on Moria and Angband adds more stuff like character races, and extra town store, and probably much more. I would be very happy with with Angband Touch instead of Moria touch. It was easy to find a recently updated version of Angband that runs on a Intel OSX Mac.

Thanks!
Steven
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CommanderData
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Re: Moria

Post by CommanderData »

Steven, we definitely played a lot of Rogue on the Atari ST, of course we didn't have the luxury of 4 megs of ram! We only had a 520ST with 512K, and we liked it darn it all! :lol: Of course that was a luxury after an Atari 800XL with 48K of RAM...

Angband is one we're seriously considering. Thanks for the comparison on it and Moria. We have an OSX compatible version of Angband already to mess with, but I really don't want to copy the source as then we're potentially in a sticky spot with distribution in the App Store. We may just end up with our own Roguelike in the end, borrowing ideas from the best of them! That's how Rogue Touch was made, so I think we'll manage...

Thanks again for the support and the ideas :D
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Zakia
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Re: Moria

Post by Zakia »

CommanderData wrote:...We may just end up with our own Roguelike in the end, borrowing ideas from the best of them! That's how Rogue Touch was made, so I think we'll manage...

Thanks again for the support and the ideas :D
DO IT.

Angband is a perfect project after RT, although, why can't we just integrate them all? Build-your-own roguelike? I mentioned before that there should be customizable games, but you should be able to make your own game out of a pool of premade advanced/classic/exclusive features you like! (Excluding hall-of-fame scores)

To be fair, why sectionize when you can do what you want? I think it'd be best to have classic rogue, enhanced rogue, and free modes to choose features from a large variety of games =)
There's nothing in the world as ruthless or impartial as death. All living matter ages over time and eventually dies... No matter how mighty or tiny its life force... So being alive means you're creeping closer to death with every second...
~Miguel
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swhatley
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Re: Moria

Post by swhatley »

I thought the code for Angband was open source?

Maybe the way to make the game your own is to somehow combine Angband and Gauntlet. :) Anglet Touch? Gauntband Touch? :)

Thanks,
Steven
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Re: Moria

Post by CommanderData »

swhatley wrote:I thought the code for Angband was open source?

Maybe the way to make the game your own is to somehow combine Angband and Gauntlet. :) Anglet Touch? Gauntband Touch? :)

Thanks,
Steven
Yes, Angband is open source! The problem being we have to comply with their OSS licensing policy. That means if we take their source and modify it to make our own game out of we must supply that source code freely for download by others. I'm sure you can see where that leads- somebody takes 6 months of hard work by us, copies the source, and puts a free version up on iTunes... Then we end up with no sales and nothing to eat, especially once we manage to start doing this full time :)

Some people might say just ignore that policy, but we really can't. Gandreas may be ignoring the GPL with his Nethack game in progress (at least I haven't heard anything about him posting the source code when it goes up for sale/download in iTunes) and if he does it will probably come back to bite him someday.

I kind of like the idea of something a bit more action oriented though... I really have a hard time visualizing the child of Angband and Gauntlet :lol: but maybe there is some neat middle ground there!
JonathanCR
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Re: Moria

Post by JonathanCR »

Aha, just made a comment about how much I'd like to see Moria in the update suggestions thread.

Moria was the roguelike game I ever played and it was astonishing. I later moved on to Zangband, but even though it had much more to it than Moria did, I somehow didn't enjoy it as much. I think that Moria Touch would be better than Angband Touch (or similar), because it has far more depth and variability than Rogue but it's not overwhelmingly complex to get the hang of. If you still haven't played Moria I do urge you to do so. It would probably seem a bit stripped-down if you're used to Angband and its variants (it doesn't have anything that isn't in them) but it might at least be a good example of balance between simplicity and complexity. (That said, Angband Touch would be utterly amazing too. In fact a Touch version of any later roguelike would be amazing.)

But I also agree that best of all would be Newgame Touch where you just take all the ideas you like from all of these games, add a whole load of original ones, and see what you end up with. If you're writing a game from the ground up anyway, why not?
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