It's hard to remember, given the way Angband is thriving at the moment, that a few years ago it was apparently about to die. The fact that it didn't was due to a desire within the community to keep it alive, and from that Andi Sidwell emerged as maintainer. Right from the beginning he had the intent to make Angband development more of a community effort - to steal an analogy, to move from the temple to the bazaar.
As a variant maintainer, I have been very much in favour of this movement. I have at times been very vocal in my views that various features need to be incorporated. And my loud-mouthedness on this issue has got me a place on the dev team, albeit a kind of special guest roaming correspondent place. Which leads me to the point.
I have promoted the whole AngbandBase thing, and my aim in V development has been to include all the features in FAangband that I don't want to lose on moving FA onto AngbandBase. Which is all very well, but with power comes responsibility. And I've now included features which are turning up bugs, and I'm in a "playing, not developing" phase and so the burden of fixing them is falling on the real dev team members.
So I guess this is really just a wordy apology, and thanks to takkaria, Magnate and d_m and others for a fine job. Although it's kind of a cheap trick to make a public apology that no-one will ever read...
What's there to apologize for? Finding bugs? Better now than later! ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm reading (after a hiatus, I'll admit). If your contributions are turning up bugs it means they're both useful and ambitious - both xchars and bigtile fall into that category. AngbandBase is a superb achievement.
ReplyDeleteNow back to needling you on Oook.
I think I was the number one cause of bugs in V in the last decade, so don't worry too much. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks guys. One quibble - AngbandBase is a notch or two short of a superb achievement. I think I have finally worked out how to make it update cleanly, so that is getting closer; the next thing is to actually have a variant that uses it...
ReplyDeleteI think it's the way of the world that whenever you try refactor code or add new features you introduce a bunch of bugs. Both xchars and bigtile address real problems Angband has, so thanks for adding them.
ReplyDeleteAchievement, concept ... concept, achievement. Hardly different. (That joke copyright Stephen Fry - did I say environment? I meant to say trousers.)
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