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...

Well, duh

After spending considerable time trying to work out how to manage keeping AngbandBase up to date, and how to make it an integral part of Vanilla, it turns out there is a simple solution. I simply had to make a branch of the official V repository called AngbandBase. Now keeping it up to date is as simple as 'git merge official/master', unless names change or new files come in.

And I suspect (but haven't checked) that incorporating it into a variant is about as easy - make the V repository a remote, and then merge the AngbandBase branch into the variant's master. All with the magic of git.

PS Well, not quite as magic as I'd hoped. Every Vanilla file deleted in AngbandBase causes a conflict in the merge; they then have to be forcibly removed and everyone's happy again. Is there a simpler way to do that?

FAangband at github

A bit over a year ago, for various reasons (including the fact that I predominantly used Ubuntu at the time) I made a repository for FAangband at Launchpad.

A couple of months ago Vanilla moved to github. Having been involved now in V development there, I've become very used to git - more so than I ever really did to bazaar. So I have now put FA on github. I have done this by making my master copy both a bzr and a git repository. Currently, I plan to do most of my day-to-day work with git, then push changes to both github and launchpad. Bugs can be reported in either place; I may one day use the wiki feature on github; and I will continue to do forward planning through launchpad.

We'll see how it all works out.

Extended Characters

V fork now has extended character support - a windows build is here. My next task is to extend the standard V font set to include extended characters (and probably, while I'm at it, NPP-style door etc. glyphs).