The Dungeons of Moria is a single player dungeon simulation originally written by Robert Alan Koeneke, with its first public release in 1983. The game was originally developed using VMS Pascal before being ported to the C language by James E. Wilson in 1988, and released a Umoria.
Moria/Umoria has had many variants over the years, with Angband being the most well known. Umoria was also an inspiration for one the most commercially successful action roguelike games, Diablo!
Supported Platforms:
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux (Ubuntu/Debian)
Compiling and limited testing has been done for other Linux based system including NetBSD 8.1 and Fedora 32.
The main focus of the 5.7.0 release was to provide support for the three
main operating systems: Windows, macOS, and Linux. Support for all other
outdated computer systems such as MS DOS, "Classic" Mac OS (pre OSX), Amiga,
and Atari ST was removed.
Note: there have been no intentional game play changes in the 5.7.x releases.
Since the initial 5.7 release, a great deal of code restoration has been
undertaken in the hope of aiding future development of the game. Some examples
of the work done include reformatting the source code with the help of
clang-tidy and clang-format, modernizing the code to use standard C types,
breaking apart most large functions (many of which had hundreds of lines of code)
into smaller, easier to read functions, and fixing all compiler warnings when
compiling against recent versions of GCC and Clang.
Full details of all changes can be found in the CHANGELOG, and by browsing the commit history.
Due to its lack of Windows and macOS support Moria was inaccessible to many people. Hopefully these changes will give many more people a chance to play this classic roguelike game.
Umoria has been tested against GCC (10 and 11) and with ncurses 6.x,
although recent earlier versions should also work fine.
You will need these as well as CMake and the C++ build tools for your system.
Change to the umoria game directory and enter the following commands at the
terminal:
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
NOTE: use make -j $(nproc) to speed up compilation on Linux.
An umoria directory will be created in the current directory containing the
game binary and data files, which can then be moved to any other location, such
as the home directory.
MinGW is used to provide GCC and GNU Binutils for compiling on the Windows platform.
The easiest solution to get set up is to use the MSYS2 Installer.
Once installed, pacman can be used to install GCC, ncurses, and the
make/cmake build tools.
At present an environment variable for the MinGW system being compiled on will
need to be specified. This will be either mingw64 or mingw32.
At the command prompt type the following, being sure to add the correct label
to MINGW=:
$ MINGW=mingw64 cmake .
$ make
To perform an out-of-source build, type the following:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ MINGW=mingw64 cmake ..
$ make
As with the macOS/Linux builds, all files will be installed into an umoria directory.
Most of the original document files included in the Umoria 5.6 sources have been placed in the historical directory. You will even find the old CHANGELOG, which tracks all code changes made between versions 4.81 and 5.5.2 (1987-2008). If you'd like to learn more on the development history of Umoria, these can make for interesting reading.
There is also the original Moria Manual and FAQ. Although these are a little outdated now they are certainly worth reading as they contain a lot of interesting and useful information.
See here for details on our Code of Conduct.
For details on how to contribute to the Umoria project, please read our contributing guide.
Umoria is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
In 2007 Ben Asselstine and Ben Shadwick started the free-moria project to re-license UMoria 5.5.2 under GPL-2 by obtaining permission from all the contributing authors. A year later they succeeded in their goal and in late 2008 official maintainer David Grabiner released Umoria 5.6 under a GPL-3.0-or-later license.