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Archives - June 2000

Friday 30th June 2000
- Mac Maps. Programming your roguelike in REALbasic (an object-orientated BASIC dev environment for the Mac) and stuck for a dungeon generating module? Well, you're in luck because Bryan Winter has created just such a module, called MapMaker. Free to use, MapMaker features a slew of preferences that allow you to create map-related weightings according to your needs. There's even a demo program on the project homepage to show you how fiddling with these settings affects the output. Go take a look.
Thursday 29th June 2000
- Mac Ports. 'Gob' has a couple of late Mac ports you. The first is Borgband (300500) and the second is CthAngband (v4.0.1). You can find both the PPC and 68K version of each below...
- Pile'o'Patches. Shayne Steele has a number (um, 4 to be precise) of patches that can be applied to ZAngband (v2.5.1) should your desire run to such frivolities. The patches in question are a Vault patch, an Autoroll patch, a Chaos-Warrior patch and a Mutation patch. Descriptions of the effects and the patches themselves can be found on this page.
Wednesday 28th June 2000
- Amiga Beta. Further to yesterday's snippet about the new beta release of ZAngband (v2.5.1), there is now an Amiga port available courtesy of Bablos. You can grab the file from...
- Interview'band. Also kinda related to yesterday's post, Robert Rühlmann has been interviewed by the Linux Game Development Center. The article is quite interesting and covers Angband development, Robert taking over as maintainer and the future of the game. Pop along here to take a peek.
Tuesday 27th June 2000
- ZAngband Beta. Another in-development beta version of ZAngband (v2.5.1) is available from Robert Rühlmann and the ZAngband DevTeam. As per usual, the changes list is a nice hulking thing so I've decided against adding it below. If you're interested, you can find it here). The files, on the other hand, you'll will find listed below. Infact, here they are...
Monday 26th June 2000
- New AllegroHack. 'Wingnut' has a new version (1.31) of AllegroHack, this time just a couple of changes. The first is a exterminated bug in the shape of female characters being drawn as red X's. The second is a new HUD mode to display map and current weapons. You can grab the new version, source and DOS binary, from the project homepage.
Thursday 22nd June 2000
- Another SLASH'EM. Warren Cheung has a new version (0.0.6E1F4) of his Nethack/SLASH variant SLASH'EM available. This release incorporates Allegrohack v1.3 code and is available as source, Windows binaries and DOS binaries (2 versions, one using Allegro libraries and 32x32 tiles).
- New MJB. Michael Barnes has released a new version of his variant - MJBand (0.0.6). Here are the changes...
  • A new class: The Elementalist.
  • Useless equipment is getting a use.
  • Added a degree of combat-based stat loss.
  • Creatures which can 'point at you and curse' now get a chance to curse your equipment.
  • Rebalanced weapons once more.
  • Future-proofed savefiles.
Wednesday 21st June 2000
- Calling All Gnomes. Seems like the GnomeHack project (Nethack for GNOME) has come to a close. The author, Erik Andersen is however looking for someone willing to take over as maintainer of the project. So, if GNOME is just your thing and you're at a bit of a loose end at the moment, send him a mail and tell him you fancy a whack.
Tuesday 20th June 2000
- New Dev Article. Gordon Lipford has sent in a new article for the Development section. It's called 'Computing LOS For Large Areas' (LOS standing for Line Of Sight, BTW. Uh, BTW standing for By The Way). So, if you're in need of calculating the line of sight for large areas, Gordon's article would definitely be the place to start...
- Hall Of Fame. Some of you may recall last month a mention of an article/cartoon featured by GameSpy, the online gaming news network. Well, the same author has put together a little 'ode to Nethack' style article for their Hall of Fame section. Follow this link to the article. Thanks to Rodrigo Citon for the tip-off
Monday 19th June 2000
- Another Port. Following on from last Thursday's port, Robert Rühlmann has created both Windows and DOS ports of Prfnoff's other recent variant of a variant - ZAngbaA (2.3.5). You can grab the files from...
- May Archived. Boy, it's hot out here. Way too hot to be in this office... erm, yeah, May has been dislocated from the main News clump and man-handled into the Archives section. Did I mention it was hot?
Friday 16th June 2000
- Windows Moria. David Goodenough has ported Moria to Windows. If that floats your boat, you could do worse than pop along to his website here and pick it up.
Thursday 15th June 2000
- Unofficial Ports. Robert Rühlmann has created a couple of ports (Windows and DOS) of Prfnoff's unofficial Angband (a2.9.0b). Files available for download below...
Wednesday 14th June 2000
- ZAngRelocation Time. After freeloading off of Thangorodrim for such a long time, never refilling the fridge and leaving dirty towels on the bathroom floor, the ZAngband devteam have been evicted. Worry not as they've taken up residence at http://www.zangband.org. Robert's ZAngband page on Thangorodrim is still there and still offers a lot of juicy ZAngband flavoured info which should keep you happy while the new official home gets up to speed - it's a little 'under construction' at the moment.
- Dirty SCOUNDREL. Another new project which is currently making it's home on SourceForge (those of you with memory problems, see yesterday's news) is SCOUNDREL. The work of one Christian M. Deibler, SCOUNDREL is a new platform-independant, object-oriented roguelike which hopes it's modular design will encourage other coders to create their own display routines (vanilla ASCII or full-on 3D, you choose). The SourceForge page features forums where you can pop along and share your opinions/ideas on the project, all of which I'm sure Christian will welcome.
Tuesday 13th June 2000
- Hand Job. Back in March, I made mention of the Nethack-Palm project and how Karl Garrison had set up a mailing list for discussions on it's development. Well, now they've settled in to their plush new homepage on SourceForge and so I thought I'd give the project another plug. Plus, Don Brodale pointed it out to me :)
Monday 12th June 2000
- More Variants. Michael Barnes has re-started work on his variant - MJBand (0.0.5a). Based on Angband 2.8.5, source is available and Michael is an Acorn RISC OS user so binaries for that can be found below along with an Amiga port from Bablos. Here are the changes...
  • Weapons are now difficult to enchant to-dam above the maximum damage their base dice can do.
  • Branded weapons increase both damage dice and the weapon's + to-dam.
  • Some branded weapons will increase a spellcaster's power.
  • New Monsters.
  • Ring Activations (4 so far).
  • m and p do the same thing (no more remembering to pray when playing a priest)
  • Point based character generation.
Michael has also done a RISC OS port of Bleeding Edge Angband (v2.9.0) which can be found here...
- Another Aversion. Prfnoff has released a new version of his other confusingly named variation - 'unofficial' Angband a2.9.0b. Here are the changes...
  • Fixed a line of object1.c that caused compile errors.
  • Fixed a bug that allowed players to bypass the auto-haggle sales tax when selling an item priced out of range of the shop owner.
  • Applied Julian Lighton's AI fail rate hack.
  • Applied the following other bugfixes: armor_value, temple_blessed, store_pseudo_id, randart_load, repeat_command_pref, home_items, refresh_recall_windows, wizard_flags, bash, screen_dump, easy_floor, aggravate, recall_rubble, windows_validate, gcc_optimizer, artifact_diggers, poisonous_food, wizard_reroll, birth_score_cheat, hobbit_tiles, makefile.emx, repeat_open, object_description
  • Per Elsairon's suggestion, the last 15 messages are dumped if you request a character dump of your death.
  • Artifacts and special ego item powers are identified in character dumps.
  • There are two new birth options controlling dungeon rooms.
  • There is a new 'target special monsters' command ($), and the targetting mode has an option for marking a monster as 'special'.
  • Added a character death menu similar to Ed Cogburn's.
  • Applied Matthias Kurzke's ego-item generation patch.
  • Added Ben Harrison's new X11 support files.
  • Added Mark Howson's main-ami.c and Musus Umbra's main-acn.c with several other Acorn support files.
  • Added newer main-mac.c and graf-mac.prf files that support 16x16 tiles with transparency.
  • Separated the monster lore information from the monster race tables. Now there is the potential for over 900 monsters, even without hurting 64K-limited machines!
  • Added a 'z_info.txt' file that allows users to customize the sizes of the other '*_info.txt' files.
  • Made player races, player history, shop owners, and race-dependent price adjustments customizable.
And here are the files...
- Amiga Bits. Bablos also has a couple of Amiga ports of Prfnoff's two releases - 'unofficial' Angband (a2.9.0) and ZAngbaA (2.3.5). Here they are...
Friday 9th June 2000
- Happi Burfday! It's happened again! Roguelike News is doddering into the web-equivalent of Old-Fart territory by hitting it's 3rd year of existance. Well, can't think of anything else to add, so... um... Yay!
- Variant Variant. There is a new version of 'ZAngbaA' (v2.3.5) courtesy of Prfnoff. Previously (and rather confusingly) this variant was known as ZAngband (a2.3.5) but to avoid confusion, a name change was in order. The changes list is rather large but you'll find it listed below in the files as the read-me if you're interested. The other files you might need are...
Thursday 8th June 2000
- Roguelike In-dev. Although the author (Chris La Mantia) uses the term RPG to describe his project, he also cites roguelike games as his inspiration and the game itself certainly shares a number of roguelike traits. The game is called Infinite Worlds features a tile-based isometric display (akin to Civ2). Take a look at the homepage for more details.
- Amiga Angband/64. Bablos has port across Angband/64 beta 5 release 4 to the Amiga. You can find the file here...
Monday 5th June 2000
- New Article. Joseph Swing has sent in a new article - his second for the RLNews Development section. This one is called 'More Continuous Content' and explains how to avoid bad dungeon layout. Many thanks to Joseph for his contribution.
- Bleeding Amiga. Bablos has created an Amiga port of Bleeding Edge Angband (v2.9.0) made up of Angband plus a number of patches and alterations. You can get the file from...
Friday 2nd June 2000
- KAngband Ends. Sadly, it looks like Mark Howson and the KAngband devteam are calling it quits on the project. Citing lack of time and the quantity of work needed as their reasons, they made this post to the Angband newsgroup. Not wanting his hard work to go to waste, Mark would be willing to let others continue the project so anybody interested in doing so should get in touch with him. Hopefully, a new maintainer can be found for this promising variant.
- Whoops. Although Bablos has ported a large number of the Angband variants to the Amiga, he'd like to stress that his Angband Variants Page doesn't cater solely for Amiga users. Sorry, my mistake there. Also, along with the new site location, Bablos would like to add that he can be reached by his new email address (angband@blueyonder.co.uk) too.
- Mac Kamband. There is a Mac version (both PPC and 68K) of Kamband (v1.8c) courtesy of 'Gob'. You can pick up both files from...
- June's Logo. Yes, as a number of you have spotted, the logo used this month is the one that was scaled down to fit in the RLNews Link Tag. Of all of the logos I had yet to be used for RLNews, that one suited the small area of the link tag the most.
Thursday 1st June 2000
- Amiga Page. Of interest specifically to the Amiga *band players out there, Bablos has moved his ports site to http://www.angband.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk so if you've got his old one linked anywhere, it'd be an idea to update your pages.
© Copyright 2000 Darren Hebden.