Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is an open source fork of the 1997 roguelike game Linley's Dungeon Crawl, maintained and developed by The Stone Soup Team.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup polled second in a 2009 poll of over 500 roguelike players, coming just behind DoomRL, after winning the same contest the year previous.[1]
Contents |
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup was begun in 2006 by greensnark and Erik Piper as an attempt to restart Crawl development, which had progressed slowly in the years since Linley Henzell, creator of the original Linley's Dungeon Crawl, had retired from developing the game. Several interesting patches had been made to the game in recent years, particularly one by greensnark known as the 'Travel patch', which borrowed the implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm from NetHack to provide an auto-exploration ability in game. These patches were compiled into the Stone Soup project, which was eventually released publically on Sourceforge.[2]
Stone Soup has since then developed an unprecedented variety of extensions which fit into this general vein of "play aid", such as allowing searching through every item ever discovered by regular expression.[3] Additionally, Stone Soup has made a number of user interface improvements, such as mouse interaction and an (optional) graphical user interface.[2]
In order to avoid featuritis, Stone Soup has also pruned gameplay elements which they considered superfluous, including several races and a magical school.[4] The development team has also expressed a desire to maintain the current total length of the game, and so as new areas are added to the dungeon, old ones have been shortened or even removed to compensate.[5]
One notable addition of the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup branch is the ability to play locally using a graphical tile version of the game. Players unfamiliar with the genre may find the tile version more accessible.
A few servers support online play through an ssh client, the best known of which are crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org.[6] Recently, an online tiles version (called WebTiles) with basic features has become available at tiles.crawl.develz.org.[7]
Features of online play include automated high-score tracking[8] and real-time recording of online play for later viewing.[9] Also, ghosts of other players' characters are frequently encountered on a player's journey, providing an additional challenge. An annual tournament for all Stone Soup players is held every August on the servers.