Why do we do this?

I guess every Angband variant maintainer has their own reasons for making a variant. In my case, one of the chief things that attracted me to Angband in the first place was a deep and lifelong love of the entire Tolkien Middle-earth mythology. Given that, the main theme that I pursued - immersion in Middle-earth - was an easy choice. So I made my variant.

The thing I was unprepared for was the interaction with players. I already knew that Angband had a vibrant, interesting community; but the thing that has kept me maintaining is that other people have actually enjoyed the thing I do for my own enjoyment.

Two things stand out for me. One is the long developing collaboration I have had with Si Griffin - starting with the Windows CE port of FA, and including a release (v0.3.6) by Si rather than me.

The second one, which needs no further comment, is this.

The Curse of Posband

Posband is/was a wonderful variant, branched off NPPAngband by Alex Ulyanov. After much fruitful work, he declared it orphaned, and more or less left the *banding community. Then it was taken over by Graham Phillips and Avenger, who made a home page and now aren't around much. Rick Frankum (now vanished) did some work on artifact reward generation. And here is the latest - last seen on the forums about two months after starting this thread.

So this is the first step (no actual work done) in adapting Pos to AngbandBase.

It was nice knowing you all.

AngbandBase

So, the Angband Variant Project has taken a bit more shape, with a code repository (edit 5/12/10: now moved here). Anyone interested is welcome to help; just get a github account, and I'll add you as a collaborator.

The idea in brief is to have the code for file-handling, display, UI etc separated out from the code for the game proper (where game can mean Vanilla or a variant). AngbandBase should contain all the code that there would be no reason for a variant maintainer not to want.

As I see it, the two big advantages are easier UI maintenance, and portability to more platforms for everyone; the main disadvantage is just getting it organised and keeping it organised.

There are some tricky issues at the boundaries of what to include and what to exclude (targeting, pathfinding and menus among them).

Some day, I may actually do some work on it instead of talking about it and pasting stuff from the forum into my blog.

Mortality

I've thought a lot about this, and I can't say I'm a fan.

Angband Variant Project

A couple of years ago I made an unofficial UI update of Oangband 1.1.0. I have been vaguely planning for a while to do a similar thing for Posband, but it would be more work and I haven't got around to it yet. One of the main reasons against doing this is the issue of now keeping Oangband 110u up to date; every time I fix a UI bug or add a feature to FA, there's pressure (from me, if no-one else) to do the same thing for O110u.

A few years earlier Christer Nyfalt wrote Anglib, a C++ library to do the low-level Angband code, intended for use as a base to build variants on. A couple of variants were basically ported to it, but it never really caught on.

A few years earlier still, Tim Baker had written Omniband, which was a very impressive Tk interface to Angband, Oangband, Zangband and Kamband.

So first there was Angband. Then it was rewritten so that it was easy to write variants, and people did. And variant maintainers, and the Angband maintainer, are constantly borrowing ideas and code from each other. And every now and then, someone will collect some of the features of variants back together. And that's all good.

Some other relevant developments include the involvement of multiple developers in Angband under takkaria's maintainership; and the increasingly continuous development cycle, where many people are playing with the latest code instead of playing the same version for months or years until the next version is released.

I guess I would like to see a less ambitious version of Anglib - a shared low-level/UI codebase, with multiple variants (as FA and O now) having their own code built on top of it. This raises questions:

1. What would the relationship to Vanilla be?
2. How best to package and distribute?
3. What variants?
4. Who would contribute?
5. How do you manage it all?

Answers and opinions welcome.

Death. Again.

So, another Oangband Shadow Fairy Necromancer bites the dust. As so often, it was just stupidity that killed this one. I was trying to dispel a red dragon pit for the experience and treasure, and let too many of them get too close, and didn't bail out in time, and surely one more breath won't kill me...

Here's the washup. Note the -4HP.

For the most successful bits of the whole epic saga, see here.

Twitter

The problem with twitter is you can't say anything meaningful in 140 characters.