So I'm listening to my own advice and ditching all the needless complexity that I'd built into the very front of my roguelike plan, and skipping ahead to the playable part. Worldgen can wait until later (and seriously, just you wait, it'll blow your minds).
I'm a C# vet, but I'm considering doing this in Java. Never actually did much with Java aside from it being a bludgeoning tool in university and writing a couple 'droid apps, so I know my way around it but not any of the libraries or compatibility issues.
I want Windows and Linux compatibility. This is NOT a strict Curses based game; ASCII is just the default tileset. Does anyone have experience with:
A. How much of a bitch it is to compile C# with SDL on Linux? It works fine for me on Windows (observe my Darklands remake), but I've never tried porting.
B. How much of a pain it is to make Java not have a braindead, moronic windowing system? Last time I used Java for much, it was very insistent on "Your menus must look like Java menus! Your windows must look like Java windows! Platform independence means ugliness!". I hate it so much. Can Java actually look pretty on different OSes?
C. Just to get off the ground a little faster, does anyone know of a simple tile engine for C# or Java? If there are any, they've probably already been posted in this thread, but it's a lot of pages and search sucks on these forums...
Thanks!