Roguelike Header Kit (RLHK)

The Roguelike Header Kit is a collection of public domain, portable, efficient, C header libraries for creating roguelikes. If your goal is a terminal / console roguelike, then you won't need any additional libraries no ncurses, libtcod, etc and since these are header libraries it's trivial to integrate without any linking headaches.

Supported platforms

• POSIX (ANSI terminal with UTF-8 encoding)
• Win32 console
• MS-DOS (DJGPP, requires DPMI server, e.g. cwsdpmi.exe)

Assuming the proper compilers are available, try out the demo on different platforms:

make CC=x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc
make CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc SUFFIX=.exe
make CC=i586-pc-msdosdjgpp-gcc SUFFIX=.exe

The demo can also be built using Visual Studio's cl.exe, though not with this Makefile.

Design Philosophy

RLHK is designed for single-threaded roguelikes that completely blocks on user input. While this isn't strictly required, should you want to use multiple threads be mindful that RLHK functions are neither thread-safe nor re-entrant.

For maximum portability, RLHK is written in strict ANSI C89 except for some isolated bits of platform-specific code. RLHK also uses none of the stdio.h functions, meaning your program won't have to link with these formatted output functions in a static build.

RLHK functions do not make dynamic allocations. Either static storage is used, or a work buffer must be passed to the function, such as the case for rlhk_algo_shortest().

RLHK, being a header library, is designed to be embedded within your program. This reflected through its API, such as not using function pointers for callbacks. Its functions are intended to inline naturally with your program's own functions. For example, a modern optimizing compiler will inline parts of your rlhk_algo_map_call() directly into the library's functions, eliminating many of those function calls. Think of it like poor-man's templates but with cleaner semantics and faster compilation.

Character Set

Any ASCII character can be used directly as-is. For fancier characters, rlhk_tui.h provides a fully portable character set that work on the more limited Windows console and MS-DOS. It's essentially just code page 437. Each character is available in the host system's encoding via the macros named RLHK_TUI_<unicode_name>.