T-Engine4 – roguelike game engine

T-Engine4 (TE4 for short) is an open source roguelike game engine operating in Lua and available for all major platforms.

The engine was used to write the classic open source game, Tales of May’Eyal. Other games written in T-Engine 4 are available here.

The engine is both flexible and straightforward, allowing games to be written in a few hours.

Features include:

• Cross-platform support. A T-Engine4 game is completely made in Lua, as such your game will run automatically on all platforms supported by the engine.
• Fast rendering through the use of OpenGL.
• Support for both “old school” ASCII display or graphical tiles.
• Generic save/load code, your objects are automatically saveable without anything to do at all in most cases.
• Object Oriented design with lots of flexibility, thanks to Lua.
• Map handling.
• Generic “Entities” concept that can become terrain features, objects, player(s), NPCs, …
• Keyboard and Mouse easy support.
• Various basic entities class interfaces to make your actors have life, stats, talents, … with the possibility to define your own.
• Generic “Zone” design, that can contain and define levels. A zone can be made into a dungeon, a forest, a wilderness map, a town, …
• Handle either (or both!) persistent and non-persistent levels.
• Malleable data structure design.
• Extendable “dialog windows” system.
• Many utility classes (chats, stores, default interfaces, character generator, …).
• Keybind system that allows to user to assign keys to abstract actions and then lets a game bind to those actions.
• Integrated download center: If you reference your game on te4.org then existing T-Engine4 users will be able to see the game in their list inside T-Engine.
• Particle effects engine allows advanced graphical effects to be easily added.
• Sound and music support.
• Modules are completly script/data driven, no C code hacking.
• Cross-platform support – runs under Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and various BSD.

Dependencies to compile the software besides a C compiler and premake4:

• OpenGL.
• SDL.
• SDL_image.
• SDL_ttf.
• SDL_mixer.

Website: te4.org/te4
Support: Documentation, Forums
Developer: Nicolas Casalini with many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

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