It Lives! (if you can call that living)

FAangband updated to the V3.2.0 codebase now compiles and runs, if you're not too fussy. New exciting features include not being able to see any terrain, or move. Or save the game.

I <3 angband-dev

Fourish weeks into the process of moving FA to V codebase. It's a long process but that's because of the phenomenal amount of work done by the dev team in cleaning up code, facilitating new changes, etc. The biggest advantage I'm seeing is that it becomes easier to tweak gameplay without breaking everything - which means that game balance becomes easier to achieve in the long run.

Fantastic effort. I am in awe.

Back to it.

Two weeks on...

...and the chaos is worse. The aim is to make the file structure, etc., of FA look like Vanilla's, with differences only where they are necessary. Maybe I'm halfway through - I really have no idea.

Spiralling out of Control

A weekend, you say. Good chance to get some programming done, you say. And you'd be right, after a fashion.

So the plan was to copy AngbandBase files over to FA, make such changes as were warranted to get it compiling, then make the other (minor) changes I was planning for 1.2. And it looked fine at the outset. Some things were always going to have to change - option handling, for example. But then there was the question of whether to make only minimal changes to command handling. Answer: no.

That was OK, and the minimal changes took over again - until we reached spellcasting. I started just hacking the spell menus to get them to work, but then went deeper into how V has modified the whole casting system. The results speak for themselves. There are half-finished files all over, V files copied over unaltered, headers hacked enough so they don't conflict with the few files that do compile, and still plenty of unanswered questions about what will end up included and what will be rejected.

And that ignores the planning thread I recently started in order to tie up a few loose ends, and which now seems to be hurtling pell-mell toward a complete rewrite of wilderness and the possible elimination of towns and/or shops.

One hour of weekend left. What could possibly go wrong...

Life after Death

Well, Psi has well and truly pointed out to me that my inability to win Oangband with a Shadow Fairy Necromancer was due to my own inadequacies. So I decided to try and actually win the game with a more reasonable combination, which seemed to be going well for a while.

Wrong again.

AngbandBase, again

New plan - only update AngbandBase from Vanilla at version changes. This means much less updating work for me, and more stability for any variant maintainer choosing to use it.

Why didn't I think of this before?

One's Place in the World

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...