Angband
Angband is a freeware roguelike based loosely on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It was created by Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand at Warwick University in 1990. It is named after the fortress of Morgoth in Tolkien's works, with "Angband" literally meaning "Iron Prison". The latest version is version 3.0.6, released June 18, 2005, which is available for a wide variety of platforms.
| Angband | |
|---|---|
| Developer | Alex Cutler, Andy Astrand, and many others, including Julian Lighton, the current maintainer |
| Theme | fantasy |
| Influences | Moria |
| Status | Stable 3.0.6 |
| Released | 1990 |
| Updated | June 18, 2005 |
| Licensing | see article |
| P. Language | C |
| Platforms | Windows, Windows CE, MS-DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, RISC OS, OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Atari, SiliconGraphics, Solaris |
| Interface | ASCII, Graphical Tiles, Optional multiple console windows, keyboard input |
| Game Length | {{{length}}} |
| Official site of Angband | |
Overview
The player may choose a character from several classic Dungeons and Dragons classes and races. The player starts in a town with different kinds of shops, a house of their own and the entrance to the dungeon. The player must explore the 100-level dungeon, and become strong enough to finally face Sauron and Morgoth.
An Angband game usually takes longer but is easier than NetHack, if you have the patience.
Angband's dungeons are not persistent; every time the player moves up or down stairs, a new dungeon is randomly generated. The dungeons are large and are composed of halls and passages of different shapes.
History
Angband has a very long history. It started in 1990 as an improved and more "Tolkienized" variant of UMoria 5.2.1. Moria itself was created in 1985 and was inspired by Rogue (from the late 70s). Countless changes have been made by a large number of programmers since.
The Angband source code was cleaned up by Ben Harrison around 1995, culminating in the release of Angband 2.7. This was a massive and very buggy rewrite, but it brought the beginnings of easy porting to multiple platforms through cleaner code, and by Angband 2.7.4, there were ports to Windows, various IBM machines, OS/2, Linux and the Amiga (at least). This rewrite also made the code much easier to understand, thus providing an easy base for others to build on.
Variants
Angband has many "variants", largely because its code is relatively clean and well-commented. The first major modern variant was Zangband, which remains maintained today, and other notable variants include ToME, NPPAngband, Posband and Hengband. Wikipedia has a more complete list of variants.
Angband is the origin of one of two major lines of roguelikes, the other being Hack. The tendency of Angband variants' names to be suffixed with "band" has resulted in the genre characterized by Angband being refered to as the *bands.
Licencing
The traditional Angband licence is as follows:
- Copyright (c) 1997 Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke
- This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research, and not for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement are included in all such copies. Other copyrights may also apply.
This licence places Angband squarely out of the realm of "open source" or "free software", as the licence was first written before such concepts had become widespread. As a result, there are issues with Angband being placed in Linux distributions, being hosted on sites such as SourceForge, and with use of GPL code within Angband.
Robert Rühlmann, in 2000, created the Angband OpenSource Initiative to try and have Angband placed dually under the traditional Angband licence and the GPL. This requires getting everyone whose code is in Angband to agree to it being used under the GPL, and for those who don't agree (or cannot be contacted), removing or rewriting it.
Notable developers who have allowed their code to be dual-licenced include Jim Wilson, the UMoria author, and Robert Koeneke, author of VMS Moria.
Resources
- thangorodrim.net, the official Angband site.
- angband.oook.cz, the home of the Angband ladder and the Vanilla CVS repository
- What is Angband?, from the official site
- rec.games.roguelike.angband is a newsgroup dedicated to Angband. It can be accessed through Google Groups.