Introduction

For configuring atrogue before building the program ("compile-time configuration"), both the "classical" Makefiles and the more modern configure scripts are supported.

• classical Makefile - you can change the options manually in the file Makefile using a text editor. The compile-time configuration option names begin with "OPTION_".
• configure script - you can specify the compile-time configuration options as command-line arguments for the configure script. The arguments begin with "--enable-", "--disable-" or "--set-"; in the description below, the value "1" corresponds to "enabled", "0" to "disabled". You can get a list of all script options with "./configure --help".

The Options

• OPTION_NCURSES / --enable-ncurses - the "curses" library which is installed on your system; the program currently supports "ncurses" (1; default) and "curses" (0). This library is used for displaying the dungeon map and other information on the screen during the game.
• OPTION_COLORS / --enable-colors - whether you want atrogue to display the dungeon map using colors (default) or only black-and-white characters; colors are very helpful for getting a faster, better overview of what's going on in the current dungeon section. In general, creatures are colored red, objects green (you'll note that there are some "special cases"...), and some other parts of the map are colored in different colors, e.g. blue and yellow. If you enable colors but your terminal does not support them, atrogue still works.
• OPTION_TEXTMODEMOUSE / --enable-textmodemouse - whether you want to get support for some "text-mode mouse" like gpm on text consoles or the mouse cursor in terminal emulators like xterm; if this is enabled and you click the map during the game (e.g. a creature or object symbol), you get a descriptive message about what's there; this is a comfortable variant of the keyboard command "g". You can turn mouse click recognition on and off during the game with the keyboard command combination "X"-"M". It depends on your curses library whether you can actually get this support - it's currently only available if the library provides ncurses-like mouse support (detected by the presence of the C pre-processor symbol NCURSES_MOUSE_VERSION).
• OPTION_ANIMATION - the time between two steps of the animation of a remote action in milliseconds; you can change it during the game with combinations of the "extended" keyboard command "X". A nice value for animation seems to be "500", which means that half a second passes between animation steps. "0" means "no animation at all". Currently, only throwing and zapping are animated.
• OPTION_RNG - the path to a special device file for random numbers provided by your operating system; normally, operating systems can generate "better" random numbers than the algorithms which are built into C libraries and atrogue, e.g. because operating systems can directly access the entropy which is generated by the hardware. (This option is not yet available with the configure script.)
  If your operating system doesn't provide random numbers, just don't care about this option at all: atrogue automatically falls back to the built-in generator. - atrogue's default random-number generator device file is "/dev/urandom"; do not use "/dev/random" instead, that one would block program execution until there's "enough entropy" to proceed. Depending on your hardware, this could mean that atrogue blocks for minutes (or, in theory, even forever) whenever the game needs random numbers. (And since almost everything in atrogue depends on chance, it could block frequently.) That device file is intended for high-quality encryption key generation, which atrogue doesn't need.
• CC - the name of the C compiler which is installed on your system; the default is "gcc", the GNU compiler collection.
• CFLAGS - special flags (command-line arguments) for your C compiler; it should not be necessary to change anything here, but anyway... For information about possible flags, please read the documentation of your C compiler.
• All the other configuration options ("CONFIG_...") in the file "Makefile" should stay as they are; the respective features have not yet been fully implemented.