Probably Been Asked But...

[SirDinkus]

I'm somewhat of a newish player to crawl, and never got into it when it was only ascii. I was just wondering if there has been any interest by the developers to create a desktop client that supports access to the server. I really like the set up of the downloadable version (the inventory and mouse input) but alas I also like having my stats kept track of and encountering other player's ghosts too. Once I have every key memorized playing webtiles will probably be no biggie, but I do think that being able to connect to the server through the desktop version would help suck new players in. Just wonderin'

[yogaFLAME]

Yes, asked before

Yes, people agree it would be a good idea

It's complicated. The codebase is more than a little spaghetti-fied at this point, and, y'know, is written in C++. The number of people with the time/experience/fortitude of will to take on a project like that is not a particularly large number.

[SirDinkus]

I totally understand. It's a shame that there aren't hordes of people tossing money at this game...but at the same time, I'm not sure the fans would like what it would become if it got that kind of attention. Although, I really do wonder what would happen if something like a kickstarter was created for this game. Heck, I'm not sure exactly what kind of structure the dev team has...but I've seen far lesser things make a killing on project funding sites.

[rosstin]

I've thought about making Crawl-Spelunky before. No, it doesn't make any sense, but it sounds awesome!

[galehar]

It's just a lot of work to code. And with webtiles, there's even less incentive. No current dev seems to be interested in tackling this project. And webtiles is likely to get mouse support at some point.