| paleface [sys=PC; cat=Roguelike; reg=EUR] |
| | | Zelazny "Amber"-themed Angband variant, was apparently the first Angband mega-variant, dumping in vast quantities of content, including new dungeon floor types and a wilderness around the starting town, in which other dungeons and towns could be found--at first this was a tiny postage-stamp-sized wilderness map, but it later switched systems to a randomly generated, vast-seeming wilderness with no map: looks gorgeous but pretty disorienting; wandering around, there is no demarcation between different-level areas, and lots of cookie-cutter random towns; you may not know what level area you're in until a wandering monster swoops in and kills you.
The Angband-style dungeons floors are actually pretty boring; this forked off a fairly early Angband version when the floor generation was pretty ho-hum, I guess. The new floor types are kind of gross: actually the only one I remember for sure (I'm afraid I might be confusing others with what I saw from watching RogueLOVE on YouTube play ToME2, a later variant of Zangband--by the way just about all well-known Angband variants are variants of Zangband, including Hengband and FrogComposband) reminds me of a schematic medieval Japanese village, with boring little house structures amid rowed fields, and lots of poison plants to trip through. Few tactical options in the open areas, and they look kind of bad, too.
The wilderness, on the other hand, looks amazing. Really gorgeous ASCII palette. If only it was fun to be in.
In its heyday--from what I can tell looking back through things--Zangband had its own dev team, cranking away on content: quests, new monsters, dungeons, etc. The huge change to the procedural wilderness seems to have been unpopular; though--the popular variants springing from Zangband all stemmed from before the procedural wilderness; Hengband was the main initial one, and expanded the postage-stamp-sized Zangband wilderness map to something resembling a fantasy Japan or UK; FrogComposband's map is a minor variant of it that one, with yet more dungeons and towns.
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my cryptic technical notes when I was trying to work out how to compile Zangband:
Used kinda generic system used for hengband. Had to edit out some win LIBS and LDFLAGS stuff generated into makefile. Copied CFLAGS and LIBS from Hellband src/makefile.org:
CFLAGS := -Wall -O1 -pipe -g -D"USE_GCU" -DL64
LIBS := -lcurses
remove the other lines around them and ddefault_path thing a little below
Commented out graphics and sound stuff in z-config.h; also commented out load delays, setuid and set lib path
--according to backwardsEric, 2nd one would take multiple overrides to set paths for lib subdirs, and first one needs "/home/smbhax/zangband/lib/" which is what you get from typing "cd ~; pwd" in Cygwin
removed readdib and other stuff from src/makefile.std and .zb, cyg def
changed colors in variable.c
make clean and make again
cd ./zangband
./zangband
ESC key laggy (tilde faster)
VVVV
Modern ESC key support was added to Angband bystefanor@cox.net on January 22, 2009 in github
Their description of that commit is
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* Make pseudo graphics the default for main-gcu, as they are for the other ports.
* Changed the default macros to use the new pre-processed keys, thus mostly eliminating the "escape delay" and being more portable.
* Implement support for the curses "alternate character set", used for pseudographics e.g. by nethack 'DECgraphics'. The high bit of characters is repurposed for this, hopefully the Eastern Europe community won't mind.
* We now use curses to parse keys, which does a much better job than the old "abuse of macro system". More portable and significantly faster, especially for Escape.
* Unprintable characters are blotted with ?s, removing another irritating display glitch from the visual editor.
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It DOES include that "ESCDELAY" section in main-gcu.c.
It went out in Angband 3.1.1, 26th July 2009, noted specifically as
"Use curses to parse keys, which is more portable and removes the Escape delay"
under the heading "Curses port."
For an example of how it was incorporated into a variant that had forked from an earlier version of Angband: PosChengband incorporated it on February 25, 2015 as "Curses Port: Fix unacceptable delay on ESC keypress" with changes to main-gcu.c, util.c, and externs.h; there were also changes to Makefile, main.c, and z-config.h in that commit, but those may have been incidental. |
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| | | Back to playing the Angband SDL2 front end, now with the Gervais tileset, compiled in MSYS2 with a few modifications. Hengband BGM--a bit loud, urk--via WinAmp.
ALSO looking at more features I found in the last DOS version of Angband, 3.0.6, by Robert Ruehlmann, from 2005 (running in DOSBox)--and his final version of the once-mega-variant Zangband, from 2004. Plus Hengband, with SFX and context-sensitive music!
Oh hey there's a DOS Zangband (and a Windows one). Quite similar in options to DOS Angband 3.0.6, actually. Graphics mode *really* confusing. : D And the ASCII (-mibm) wilderness doesn't look nearly as nice as the terminal version.
Late Zangband's switch to procedural wilderness removed quests; a revamped quest system was planned but didn't happen.
I say in the video that Zangband forked off Angband after Harrison's code cleanup, but EARLIER versions of Zangband, by original author Topi Ylinen, and initially named Angband--, came from PC Angband 1.31--that's the DOS version (Angband 2.4.Frog-knows is aka PC Angband 1.1). His next version was also DOS: PC Zangband 1.0; and he says some of his character graphics were used in Teague's PC Angband 1.4.; it was his third try that forked from Harrison's Angband 2.8.1.
That's from the Zangband.org version history doc via archive.org. There, Ruehlmann introduces himself, in part, as "the creator of the graphical Angband versions for DOS." |
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