Angband (video game)

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Angband
Town level of Angband.
Developed by	Andrew Sidwell
Latest release	3.0.9b / March 19, 2008
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Roguelike
License	Moria/Angband license parts are GPL
Website	rephial.org

Angband is a dungeon-crawling roguelike computer game derived from Umoria. It is based on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Angband is the fortress of Morgoth. The current version of Angband is available for all major operating systems, including Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Angband is notable for spawning many derivatives. A family of around sixty variants exist, of which roughly a dozen are active. Each differs in purpose and degree of alteration. The best-known variants are ToME and ZAngband.

Contents 1 Gameplay 2 History 3 ZAngband 4 Community 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Gameplay

The game revolves around exploring a 100-level dungeon, in which the player seeks to amass enough power and equipment to ultimately defeat Morgoth. A new level is randomly generated each time the player changes levels, which gives Angband great replay value: no two games are the same.

Though stylistically quite different, the gameplay of Angband is frequently compared to NetHack. Angband is a more a pure tactics, combat risk, and inventory management challenge, as opposed to NetHack's puzzle solving and extensive application of special cases. NetHack is also a much shorter game, with playtimes measured in hours or possibly days; Angband games often in weeks.^[1]

[edit] History

The first version of Angband was created by Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand at the University of Warwick in 1990. They wanted to expand the game Umoria by adding items, monsters, and features. After Cutler and Astrand, the source code was maintained at the University of Warwick by Geoff Hill and Sean Marsh. They released "2.4.frog_knows", which was enhanced by others and widely ported to non-Unix platforms.

Following their departure, the later principals of Angband have included Charles Swiger, Ben Harrison, and Robert Rühlmann. Harrison was the maintainer responsible for the "Great Code Cleanup", modularizing, extending, and greatly improving the readability of the Angband source code. This in turn led to the large number of variants currently available, as well as the rather large number of ports. Like other maintainers, he eventually moved on to other interests, passing the title to Robert Rühlmann in 2000.

Rühlmann's contributions included releasing version 3.0, which included many monster and object changes contributed by Jonathan Ellis. He also introduced Lua, a lightweight scripting language, with the intention of simplifying development of both the main game and its variants. The Angband community, however, did not generally embrace the addition of scripting, with many expressing confusion over its usage, and as such it was later removed.

While Rühlmann was maintainer, he started the Angband Open Source Initiative, designed to place Angband under a Free Software license. Although the current license allows distribution of the game, it only does so if "not for profit", which precludes packaging with many Linux distributions or inclusion within a magazine cover disc. The license also does not explicitly allow code modification, something which is in practice ignored by the Angband community. In light of these perceived issues, there is an ongoing effort to re-license Angband under the GNU GPL.^[2]

Rühlmann stepped down in October 2005,^[3] leading to a brief period of uncertainty.^[4] However, Julian Lighton was soon announced as the new maintainer in March 2006.^[5] As of December 2007, he has not released a new version of the game. Due to the absence of Julian, Andrew Sidwell assumed leadership, with the blessing of the community.^[6] He released several beta versions of "3.0.7s", which eventually culminated in 3.0.8. The most recent version as of April 29, 2008 is 3.0.9b, released on March 19, 2008, by Andrew Sidwell. ^[7]

[edit] ZAngband

ZAngband (Zelazny Angband) was the most popular Angband variant until ToME, which is directly based on ZAngband, was released and popularized. Instead of being based on Tolkien's works like Angband, it is largely based on Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. The development of ZAngband was started by Topi Ylinen, though others including Robert Rühlmann were involved^[8] until the game apparently ceased development in 2003.

[edit] Community

The Usenet newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.angband and the Angband Forum are the loci of the Angband community, places to discuss all aspects of the game. An IRC channel exists on the WorldIRC network. In 1997 MAngband, a multiplayer version, was developed by a fan. This variant includes real-time elements necessary for multiplayer gameplay.

[edit] See also

• Quylthulg

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official site, with wiki and development information
• Angband at oook.cz, with forum, spoilers, and other resources
• Angband newsgroup on Usenet (alternative free web access using Google Groups)