Some of these were efficiency choices, which have little effect even on what passes for a slow machine today, and others simply caused more trouble than they were worth. After suggestions from the newsgroup on a pre-release version, this was again changed for a new version that gave the player the choice of whether to simply hide "squelched" items from view, or to destroy them.Īnother major change was the clearing out of a lot of options that were little-used. Originally, the version of squelch used in NPPAngband was to be used, but as Anna didn't consider the code up to Angband standards she rewrote it and used a new approach based on EyAngband. In terms of gameplay, one thing that was always going to be added was "squelch" support to automatically destroy items the player decides they no longer want to be bothered with. This not only makes the code smaller but also makes it much easier to make the UI of the game consistent throughout. These included the new knowledge browser, birth screen, options and stores. The most notable of these was Pete Mack, who made numerous improvements to the OS X port, but also did a massive amount of work on cleaning up the internals of the game, and laying the foundations for even more improvements in the future by implementing a new "menu interface" and then moving large parts of the existing codebase over to use it. Reinvigorated by her new appointment, Anna set about drawing up plans for a 3.0.8 official release, and asked for anyone interested in improving the game to get in touch.Īs might be expected after such a long gap between this and the last release, there were a lot of changes waiting to be made, both internally and externally, and plenty of people queuing up to help, whether with code or suggestions. There was widespread agreement, though at the time of writing, Julian has yet to publicly comment. Shortly afterwards, he posted to the newsgroup explaining the reasons for him not having time to do much work on the game, and saying "If I'm still not getting around to getting anything done by the end of the year, I will likely step aside."Īnna released two more unofficial beta-versions, 3.0.7s2 and s3, before someone stepped forward and nominated her as the maintainer in March 2007. Julian made a few alterations to the CVS version of Angband, and spoke of the sort of changes he was intending to make (such as removing Lua, and adding support for "squelching"), but there was little progress.Īt the beginning of December, Anna Sidwell released her first unofficial beta version, 3.0.7s1, which made a number of the uncontroversial changes everyone agreed needed to be made, while keeping the quality of the code high so that it would be easy for Julian to reincorporate into the official release, which he indicated he would. Sadly, it soon became apparent that Julian, though he had the desire to improve Angband, had no more time than Robert had to devote to it, and so there was very little progress made. Eventually, in March 2006, Robert chose Julian Lighton as his successor, as someone who shared Robert's goals for the future, had a long history with the game, and who had proven his credentials as a coder in his own variant, Sangband. Version 3.0.8 was released on 8th July 2007 by Anna Sidwell, her first official release as Angband maintainer, after a long period of uncertainty for the game.Īfter Robert Rühlmann announced he no longer wanted the job of looking after Angband in October 2005, there was much discussion about who would be best for the job, with people nominating themselves or others (well, mostly others), and many discussions between candidates.
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