nlarn
A rewrite of Noah Morgan's classic roguelike game Larn from 1986. NLarn tries to maintain the atmosphere and story of the original game while improving the gameplay by using state-of-the-art roguelike technology and a simplified user interface. more..Recent News
-
Jun 19, 2025
Release 0.7.7
After another hiatus finally some news! Fresh and colourful comes NLarn 0.7.7.
In the last five years, most terminal emulators do no longer interpret bold
as bright anymore, as 256 colours are supported everywhere and people seemingly
decided that backwards compatibility to the eighties is not required anymore.
In the result, the game looked quite broken and had to be fixed. With more
colours!
256 colours
Games created by the previous version 0.7.6 are not compatible. Hopefully
future additions will not break save files anymore!
Download NLarn 0.7.7 from Sourceforge.
Changes:
- Switch to 256 colours
- New weapon: the elven longsword - elves may be equipped with it
- Overhaul the material of some weapon:
- All spears are made of wood
- The elven short sword is now made of mithril
- The flail is now made of wood
- Reduce the probability of monsters with powerful weapons
- Reduce the probability of weapons breaking
- Reduce the probability of monsters dropping weapons
- Show carried gold in yellow (suggested by jv84)
- The potion of see invisible now cures blindness (suggested by jv84)
- Modified potions of instant healing: they now always cure poisoning
and sickness. The previous special behaviour of blessed potions of
instant healing got removed.
- Healing spell and healing potion no longer cure sickness
- Show attended courses in school
- Stay at home until explicitly leaving (with ESC)
- More robust save file format. Future additions of items will not break
existing savegames anymore
- Toggle full screen mode with ALT-Enter (macOS and Windows)
- Change font size while the game is running (macOS and Windows)
- Switch Windows build to WIN64
Fixed bugs:
- Fix a crash bug fighting regenerating monsters when playing on
difficulty level 10 (spotted by r0cc0r0cc0)
- Fix getting numeric input (macOS and Windows)
- Fix enlightenment effect wrapping around map borders
- Improve handling of terminal resizes while showing dialogues
- Fix typo in monastery (spotted by jv84)
- Fix compilation with recent compilers (patch by Frank Uhlig)
- Fix compilation on FreeBSD (found in r7st’s fork)
-
Feb 15, 2025
Switching to 256 colours
Starting the game again after a long time, I’ve noticed that modern terminals
no longer interpret the Curses attribute A_BOLD as bright colour. This sounds
obscure, but as the traditional Curses interfaces only supported 8 colours,
this was the way to go to get 16 (!) colours. Hence the display of this game
was broken in some terminals in their default configuration! I’ve noticed this
in the new Terminal included in Fedora 41, but also the sweet COSMIC Terminal
behaves like this.
Release 0.7.7
After another hiatus finally some news! Fresh and colourful comes NLarn 0.7.7.
In the last five years, most terminal emulators do no longer interpret bold as bright anymore, as 256 colours are supported everywhere and people seemingly decided that backwards compatibility to the eighties is not required anymore. In the result, the game looked quite broken and had to be fixed. With more colours!
256 colours
Games created by the previous version 0.7.6 are not compatible. Hopefully future additions will not break save files anymore!
Download NLarn 0.7.7 from Sourceforge.
Changes:
- Switch to 256 colours
- New weapon: the elven longsword - elves may be equipped with it
- Overhaul the material of some weapon:
- All spears are made of wood
- The elven short sword is now made of mithril
- The flail is now made of wood
- Reduce the probability of monsters with powerful weapons
- Reduce the probability of weapons breaking
- Reduce the probability of monsters dropping weapons
- Show carried gold in yellow (suggested by jv84)
- The potion of see invisible now cures blindness (suggested by jv84)
- Modified potions of instant healing: they now always cure poisoning and sickness. The previous special behaviour of blessed potions of instant healing got removed.
- Healing spell and healing potion no longer cure sickness
- Show attended courses in school
- Stay at home until explicitly leaving (with ESC)
- More robust save file format. Future additions of items will not break existing savegames anymore
- Toggle full screen mode with ALT-Enter (macOS and Windows)
- Change font size while the game is running (macOS and Windows)
- Switch Windows build to WIN64
Fixed bugs:
- Fix a crash bug fighting regenerating monsters when playing on difficulty level 10 (spotted by r0cc0r0cc0)
- Fix getting numeric input (macOS and Windows)
- Fix enlightenment effect wrapping around map borders
- Improve handling of terminal resizes while showing dialogues
- Fix typo in monastery (spotted by jv84)
- Fix compilation with recent compilers (patch by Frank Uhlig)
- Fix compilation on FreeBSD (found in r7st’s fork)
Switching to 256 colours
Starting the game again after a long time, I’ve noticed that modern terminals no longer interpret the Curses attribute A_BOLD as bright colour. This sounds obscure, but as the traditional Curses interfaces only supported 8 colours, this was the way to go to get 16 (!) colours. Hence the display of this game was broken in some terminals in their default configuration! I’ve noticed this in the new Terminal included in Fedora 41, but also the sweet COSMIC Terminal behaves like this.
Subscribe via RSS