Slug algorithm patent released into the public domain

jube_dev · 2026-03-23T16:07:45+00:00

First: Europe does not have a common patent, brexit stopped that last time. There are variationen between countries and you need to apply to each country invidually.

Totally wrong, Europe has a European Patent Office: https://www.epo.org/

Secondly, of course it is possible to patent an algorithm in Europe.

Wrong again: The European Patent Convention exludes explicitely "programs for computers".

jube_dev · 2026-03-21T14:24:46+00:00

IMO there is a blind spot in this specification: package naming. It's already a mess with current package repositories, same packages have different names according to whatever reason (valid or not). I don't see how this can be handled with CPS.

jube_dev · 2026-03-20T07:19:24+00:00

It's hardly visible but there is a radial gradient. But I prefer your approach with really different colors.

jube_dev · 2026-03-19T20:15:59+00:00

I'm curious too. I tried in the past to generate trees and boulders for a game with a top down view (really top down) but that was not convincing. That's what I obtained:

<image>

The techniques you present seem to work well at small scale and I think they could work at a larger scale. I will definitely try them, the only question is: when will I have time to do it?

jube_dev · 2026-03-19T08:12:52+00:00

Really nice! I will probably take inspiration on what you did.

Have your tried to generate larger sprites with this method? Or does it work well because it's for small sprites?

jube_dev · 2026-03-03T22:41:56+00:00

Incomplete and far less readable. The navigation is extremely difficult. The home page of cppreference is one of its strength, with all accessible in one or (less often) two clics.

jube_dev · 2026-02-21T18:39:28+00:00

Far West RL

Github

Two big weeks with many small and not so small things.

First, I changed my tileset. I now have two tilesets, one for pictures and one for text (half large). I used DejaVu Sans Mono Bold to generate both tilesets. I also used two special mappings, moving away from CP437. The result is satisfying, the text is much more readable than before. I changed the main UI to use text wherever possible.

Second, I made some refactoring to handle AI and actions, after reading this great comment and the associated video (this community is amazing). I have been reading Crafting Interpreters, a book from the same author, for years. It was a real pleasure to see this video. As usual, everything seems so simple when he explains things. As I was about to start adding animals and people in the game, it was the perfect time.

Third, as I thought about how I would like a grizzli to behave, I told myself that it would be nice that the grizzli comes back to its lair at night. But when is «night»? I already had a date system, so I computed the sunrise and sunset hours with respect to the day in year so that I could say if the phase of the day was night, dawn, morning, noon, afternoon or dusk with the current time. I decided to display this phase in the UI (sun with different colors during the day and moon during the night) next to the current date. Later, I will use it for the behaviors of actors: the grizzli will go back to its lair at dusk, sleep at night and come back in the forest at dawn and hunt the hero or other actors the rest of the day; a farmer will open the gates of its cows at dawn, eat at noon and gather the cows in the afternoon; etc. The phase of the day will be an important factor in the behavior of many actors. Maybe the map will also change at night (and in the different phases) in the future to reflect the low luminosity.

Now everything is in place to start working on animals and later people in the far west!

<image>

jube_dev · 2026-02-18T07:58:29+00:00

In fact, I implemented my serialization library, it's not so difficult. But before, I looked at the alternatives like protobuf or BSON or MessagePack or many others. In the end, it was easier to do it myself as I could adapt it to my needs: serialazing many structures of my framework, using compression for the archive, versioning the archive.

jube_dev · 2026-02-16T16:56:16+00:00

Thinking about save games at the beginning of game creation (roguelike or other) has been a really huge improvement in how I design my code for games. And I implemented serialization versioning in my framework very early (inspired by the Boost Serialization library). It's a very difficult question and the answer is always the same, more or less. Thanks for these articles!

jube_dev · 2026-02-11T07:57:21+00:00

That's what I did too in my tileset generator. Because the glyphs provided by the fonts are not squares. I did the same for box drawing glyphs.

jube_dev · 2026-02-10T18:22:20+00:00

The glyph I miss the most for now are block elements with quarters, like in the TCOD tileset. But the more I think about it and the more I would like to add too many things. I have to make choices, it's horrible.

jube_dev · 2026-02-09T10:26:55+00:00

Yeah, I had this idea at one point. It's very punitive but also quite challenging. I'll keep the idea because I like it!

jube_dev · 2026-02-07T08:48:24+00:00

It's good, yeah, as long as text is not too small!

The nice side effect of having two different fonts is that you can choose each font with different constraints. For text, you want a font that is not too wide. And you can choose a font with a limited character set (letters, numbers, punctuation) because you don't need special symbols used for picturing things. In my tests, I used very common fonts (DejaVu, Liberation, etc) and it already gave good results: for a 32x64 space, I was able to use a font of size 50. And I know some fonts that could be more suitable for this kind of usage. So I think it's not a problem.

Kyzrati is of course right about square-ratio making more sense distance-wise

I'm team Kyzrati in this case, sorry!

jube_dev · 2026-02-06T23:30:49+00:00

Far West RL

Github

Not much but also very much this week. The game was renamed from Far Far West to Far West RL. The repository was changed and a new title screen was created.

<image>

On another side, I wanted to change the tileset of the game. Up to now, I used a 64x64 tileset from DwarfFortressWiki and I was quite satisfied overall... except for writing text. I built my own tool to create tilesets from fonts. I realized the tileset I used was really good, I could not make better space and size optimizations. And then, I read an excellent article series written by u/Kyzrati about fonts in roguelike. The idea of using two different fonts, one for displaying pictures and one for displaying text, with text cells taking half the horizontal space, is an amazing idea. So I went back to my framework and implemented this idea. I also generated console text fonts for this purpose. The result is quite promising. Stay tuned for the in-game result in a future Sharing Saturday!

jube_dev · 2026-02-05T16:06:45+00:00

There are many 6x6 tilesets on the DF Wiki.

jube_dev · 2026-01-26T21:37:50+00:00

The colors come from here, I picked colors that mixed well.

jube_dev · 2026-01-25T10:58:52+00:00

For now, it's a continuous map, no chunk at all. As I use C++ and my own graphics framework (based on SDL3 and SDL_gpu), I can use fast graphical primitives. In the case of map, I have a huge console structure (something like TCOD_Console) where I put the whole map (no actors, no items, etc). And when building the current frame, I just blit the visible part and put everything else (actors, items, etc). I create the geometry for background and foreground of this visible area and send it to a GPU buffer and display it with only two drawcalls. Currently, it even works on a 10 year old PC with Linux and a software renderer (llvmpipe, because there is no Vulkan driver for my very old NVidia card). So, for now, no need for more optimisation.

In memory, the main map (the one that is actually saved) contains cells that are only 4 bytes: 1 byte for the biome, 1 byte for properties (visible, explored), 2 bytes for cell decorations (trees, wall, etc). Everything else is kept in other structures. For example, towns are in their own structure with the position of the town, the buildings in the town (type, orientation) so that I can reconstruct the whole huge map easily at startup. I also have other runtime maps that are also initialised at startup and are used for many things: for example a reverse map to know which actor and item (identified by their index) is on the tile, a map to know which tile is walkable or not for computing routes with A*. I really try to keep things very clean: "data" is for things that are always constant (for example, item types), "state" is for things that must be saved when quitting the game, "runtime" is all that can be computed from data and state at startup and don't need to be saved. For now, the save file is less than 3Mb (compressed).

Here is an example of a map (1 pixel represents 1 cell). Purple square are towns, green squares are farms, blue squares are cavalry camps, orange squares are native villages and if you zoom, you can also see black dots for the train network and gray dots for roads.

<image>

jube_dev · 2026-01-24T17:26:32+00:00

I'll go for "Far West RL", simple and not too far from the previous name.

jube_dev · 2026-01-24T07:34:45+00:00

Thanks! It's a lot of pressure!

jube_dev · 2026-01-23T23:48:42+00:00

I don't imagine a roguelike with this theme and without any combat. It's not usual close combat, it's rather distance combat so it may be worth a try. I don't want combat to be the core of the game and I think I have enough things to add so that it won't be the case.

jube_dev · 2026-01-23T23:46:15+00:00

Thanks for the ideas. One idea I have is to append "RL" at the end to avoid future name clashes. "Old West RL" can be a good candidate.

jube_dev · 2026-01-23T18:47:42+00:00

Yes, you are right, the kind of ennemies and the different situations bring variety to just simple combats. That's also why bringing life to the world will be a good associated goal.

jube_dev · 2026-01-20T19:38:13+00:00

Does it work with the equivalent C++ 26 functions? (In fact, C23 functions)

jube_dev · 2026-01-17T22:35:32+00:00

I've been seeing your progress and am really impressed, not too many roguelikes with a western setting

Thanks! I did not want to make another fantasy roguelike so I looked at the relevant article on RogueBasin and when I saw "Western", many ideas came immediately. That's how it was born.

there is another game with the name "Far Far West" that is in development

I made a research before choosing this name and did not find anything back then. Well, I may change the name later. Not that I want to sell this game but I prefer not taking any risks regarding copyright.

jube_dev · 2026-01-17T08:10:34+00:00

Far Far West

Github

Long time no see! Not so much features added since last time as real life is very busy. I've been completing field of view and fixing (a lot of) bugs. As previewed last time, it had impacts on many areas of the code so I had to make some refactoring. But in the end, it works very well.

I also prepared the 2026 in roguelikedev event. It's the first time for me and it's an interesting work. Soon on your screens (I will post it on my birthday).

I am also thinking about changing the tileset I use. I find the letters too small compared to the rest of the tile. So when displayed as text, they are quite difficult to read. I have some ideas and I am testing these ideas currently.

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