| Angband (game) |
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Information AboutAngband (game) |
''Angband'' is a Dungeon-crawling Roguelike Computer Game derived from '' Umoria '' (the C for Unix port of a game called '' Moria ''). The first version was created by Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand at the University Of Warwick in 1990 . Sean Marsh and Geoff Hill, students at the University took on the maintaining of Angband following Cutler and Astrand's departure. They made many changes and co-ordinated its release on an unsuspecting public, releasing the first version for SunOS Unix in 1991. It was later enhanced by many others, and an enthusiastic online community quickly ported it to many operating environments. It is based on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien , in which Angband was the fortress of Morgoth . The adventurer is presented with 100 Level s of the title Dungeon , in which he or she 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 will be the same. A family tree of around sixty (around a dozen of which are active) variants of Angband exist, each often greatly differing in purpose and depth of changes. The best known variants are EyAngband , Hengband , OAngband , ToME , Steamband , and ZAngband . The channel, #angband, exists on the WorldIRC network (irc.worldirc.org).The source code to ''Angband'' is available for modification and redistribution, but not strictly Free Software or Open Source because it is licensed under "non commercial use" terms, as was its ancestor ''Moria''. However, there is an effort ongoing to re-license ''Angband'' under the GNU GPL . One advantage of this would be allowing it to be bundled with "commercial" Linux distributions. After Cutler and Astrand, the code was maintained at the University of Warwick by Geoff Hill and Sean Marsh. Following their departure, the later principal developers of ''Angband'' 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 , which lead to the large number of variants of ''Angband'' currently available, as well as the rather large number of ports to different platforms. Like other maintainers, he eventually moved on to other interests, passing the title to Robert Rühlmann in 2000 . Rühlmann's contributions included releasing the new major version 3.0, which included Lua scripting as well as many monster and object changes contributed by Jonathan Ellis. Rühlmann stepped down in October , 2005 leading to a brief period of uncertainty. It appears that a new maintainer has been chosen - Julian Lighton. [http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.angband/browse_thread/thread/b48557204d3843c7/fa720195b0bc4190#fa720195b0bc4190 {Link without Title} Originally ''Angband'' was written entirely in C . Starting in the 3.0 series, much of the code was duplicated in Lua , a dynamic language designed for embedding, with the intention of simplifying development of the mainline angband as well as variants. For the most part the ''Angband'' development community did not embrace this change (with the notable exception of ToME ), and it is slated for removal by the current maintainer Julian Lighton. As of September 2005, the current version of ''Angband'' is 3.0.6. It is available for all major operating systems, including Unix ( Curses and X11 ), DOS , Windows , Macintosh , Amiga , and many others. Gameplay of ''Angband'', as the original is now often called, is most often compared to '' NetHack '', though in reality the games are almost polar opposites. ''Angband'' adopts a more serious tone than ''NetHack'', takes far longer to win for even the best players, and the focus of the game is more on combat tactics, inventory management and risk minimalisation than ''NetHack''ish puzzle solving and special casing. This has been the source of light-hearted conflicts between the two communities. There were a number of "in jokes" for students at the University, for example the names of the shopkeepers in the town being linked with then students. Geoff Hill relates, "One particularly annoying student was Richard Broadley, a character who was known to cheat at all online games and was universally despised. Early versions of the game were hardcoded to prevent him from finding artifacts when playing from his user account "rebroad" at the University of Warwick. He is immortalised in the game as Draebor the Imp, an annoying character who can be immensely frustrating but (in early versions at least) guaranteed an artifact drop on death." ANGBAND TERMS
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