FAangband 1.2 released

It may be crap, but it's my crap.

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?