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Angband

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. more...

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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 to the 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 levels 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 OAngband, ToME (formerly PernAngband) and ZAngband.

The Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.angband is a place to discuss all the aspects of the game. An IRC channel, #angband, exists on the WorldIRC network (irc.worldirc.org).

Source code

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 ongoing effort 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, after which Julian Lighton was announced as the new maintainer.

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.