Following discussions about the future of the variant, Aram Harrow
has decided that he will continue on developing only the rather more
way-out variant of PZiband (Psionic ZAngband), and resign the
maintainership of vanilla-flavoured Psiband (Psionic Angband) due to
lack of (1) time and (2) interest in maintaining two variants at once,
and he has asked me to look for a new maintainer for this variant.

     This happened while I was in the course of a long and continuing
email discussion with Matthias Kurzke about future ideas for Angband
(vanilla and vanilla-based variants), including about (1) his ego-item
patch, (2) my own current and future revisions to the user-editable
"edit" textfiles, and (3) other changes, some of them from the
"bleeding-edge" variant, and I ended up inviting him to take over the
co-maintainership of Psiband - firstly, because there are still several
coded bugs and "features" that need fixing in this variant in all facets
of the game including the psionics that give the variant its name, and
which I cannot fix, and secondly because it would be a useful
vanilla-flavoured testing ground for some of the more interesting recent
ideas that we are coming up with. After all, even though I can't code, I
can at least think of ideas to improve the game, and hack the text
files, and I also like many of his suggestions - including a few new
types of ego-item (including depth-dependent ego-types, of which I have
also contributed a couple, all intended to be rarer than the current
vanilla lot - and some of which have drawbacks as well as good points):
an identify-sorting patch so that you don't have to kill the top item of
a stack to identify the one beneath it: various ways of having ego-items
be heavier or lighter than normal items of the same type: raising or
removing the limits on the size of the info.txt files: and I have some
ideas towards improvements not only to the psionic side of the game but
to the other classes and differentiation between them. No doubt he will
have ideas of his own after reading the code - or possibly before. And
of course both of us can design new artifacts, ego-items, monsters (I'd
like also to reintroduce a few old Moria monsters as well, such as Giant
Brown Ticks and Disenchanter Bats) etc. And I have a long-standing
promise to keep, to write the first non-psionicist Psiband winner (Vesta
the Hobbit Ranger) into r_info.txt...

     After some thought, Mr Kurzke decided to accept. And so, therefore,
a dual maintainership is announced: Matthias Kurzke and Jonathan Ellis
are the new co-maintainers of Psiband. I will have responsibility for
the info.txt and help files, and he will write the code for compilation
into the executable, though all sides of the game will be designed (at
least in terms of thinking up ideas), discussed and playtested by both
of us.

     First priority is to get rid of some ugly hacks and clean the code
up (if not to the allegedly impossibly standard of Ben-like cleanliness
then at least to a more readily portable state), fix existing bugs and
ill-thought-out features (such as the "time-travel" effect of balefire,
or the fact that monster psionics can - still - paralyze through free
action and resistance) and update the code base to Angband 2.9.0 - this
may take some time but I hope to issue a preliminary "bugfix" release
when this is done. The textfiles and helpfiles will also be updated from
"283editC" patch to the as yet unreleased "290editC" patch at this time,
following discussion on the group about the changes made in "290editB".
A version number has not been decided on, but I am going to suggest that
it be 1.2.0 (missing out version number 1.1) to avoid confusion with
PZiband 1.1.0.
     After that, [voice=Gollum] we shall see. Oh yesss, my preciousss,
we shall see...

Jonathan.