CALDERA (terminal)

Climb the vent. Outrun the magma. The second version of the game, beside web/, on the magmacrunch engine's terminal backend. It is a cabinet in the magmacrunch arcade and its own command, and plays the same either way.

pipx install magmacrunch-caldera
caldera

For working on it:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m caldera

It is the browser's game, not a remake of it

The rules are a line-for-line port of web/js/tower.js, player.js, score.js and game.js, in world units at 60 Hz, with the same seeded generator. tests/test_oracle.py runs the real JS through tools/js_oracle.mjs, replays every input it fed into caldera/sim.py, and requires the same state back after every frame. Exactly the same, not close: both sides are IEEE doubles doing the same operations in the same order, so any difference is a transcription error. A tower is a seed on both sides, and a score means the same thing on both boards. Scores are filed under caldera, with the browser's floor, crunch and character fields beside them.

The terminal draws at 30 fps and steps the rules twice a frame. Stepping once would play the browser's game at half speed without anything looking wrong.

Running, in a terminal

A terminal reports that a key went down and never that it came up, and a held key goes quiet for about half a second before it repeats. Read as held state, that is a run that will not start and a climber that will not stop on a ledge. So running latches:

Tap the other arrow to turn round mid-run, and the browser's skid does what it does for a player who swaps keys. Hit a wall in the air and your heading turns with the bounce, which is what a good browser player does with their fingers at every wall. Walking into a wall on the ground just stands you there.

tests/test_sim.py checks that this can play the game: a bot only allowed to press keys climbs exactly as far through the latch as the same bot holding keys directly.

The rest

caldera --list-climbers      the cast
caldera --climber king       climb as somebody in particular
caldera --seed 42            the same towers every time
caldera --play               skip the title
caldera --ascii              no block or arrow glyphs

Every glyph it draws is in the engine's degradation table, so a cp1252 or cp437 terminal gets the same layout in plain characters. tests/test_app.py sweeps every screen for anything that is not. Under NO_COLOR the climber and the magma are drawn in glyphs rather than background colour, so they do not vanish when colour does.

Needs a 40x20 terminal; 80x24 is comfortable and anything wider adds side panels for the run's numbers rather than a wider vent.

Licence

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, as the rest of this repository. See NOTICE.