Angband
Angband screenshot
Maintainer:	Julian Lighton
Latest release:	3.0.6 / June 18, 2005
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Roguelike
License:	Freeware
Website:	http://www.thangorodrim.net

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. 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 on an unsuspecting 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. Image File history File links About the Town in the game: “Angband”. This is a screenshot of a copyrighted computer game or video game. ... Image File history File links About the Town in the game: “Angband”. This is a screenshot of a copyrighted computer game or video game. ... Software maintenance is one of the activities in software engineering, and is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. ... A software release is to create a new version of the system or program and release it to the user community. ... June 18 is the 169th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (170th in leap years), with 196 days remaining. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... An operating system is a program required for the user to manage the system and to run third-party application software for that system. ... A cross-platform (or platform independent) programming language, software application or hardware device works on more than one system platform (e. ... A software genre is a classification of software by its common function, type or topic. ... A roguelike is a computer game that borrows some of the elements of another computer game, 1980s Rogue. ... A software license is a type of proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software — sometimes called an End User License Agreement (EULA) — that specifies the perimeters of the permission granted by the owner to the user. ... Freeware is computer software which is made available free of charge, as opposed to payware where the user is required to pay. ... The front page of the English Wikipedia Website. ... This article is about the computer game. ... A roguelike is a computer game that borrows some of the elements of another computer game, 1980s Rogue. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Moria is an old roguelike computer game, based on a story from The Lord of the Rings. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... The University of Warwick is a campus university in the United Kingdom. ... This article is about the year. ...

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. J. R. R. Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street (from by H. Carpenter) John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is best known as the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings. ... See Angband (game) for the computer game. ... // Sources This entire article references, and is based on, all the published works of J.R.R. Tolkien that deal with Middle-earth, especially The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin, 1977) and most volumes of The History of Middle-earth (ed. ... In computer and video games, a level (sometimes called a stage, course, episode, round, world, map, wave, board, phase, or landscape) is a separate area in a games virtual world, in modern games typically representing a specific location such as a building or a city. ... The dungeon of Bothwell Castle seen from the Great Hall A dungeon (derived from the Old French donjon, from the Latin dominus, lord), in its original medieval usage, was the keep, the main tower of a castle which formed the final defensive position the garrison could retreat to when outer...

A veritable 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 EyAngband, Hengband, OAngband, ToME, Steamband, and ZAngband. Hengband is a variant of the popular rogue-like game Angband, that evolved from a Japanese variant. ... ToME, or Tales (or Troubles) of Middle Earth, is a roguelike computer game created in 1998 by someone who identifies himself only as DarkGod. ... Steamband is a critically acclaimed variant in the Angband series of ASCII based, so-called Roguelike computer games. ... ZAngband is a freeware role-playing computer game. ...

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). Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. ...

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 effort ongoing to re-license Angband under the GNU GPL. One advantage of this would be allowing it to be bundled with "commercial" Linux distributions. Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... GPL redirects here. ...

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 [1], leading to a brief period of uncertainty. It appears that a new maintainer has been chosen - Julian Lighton. [2] [3] Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... Lua has a number of meanings: For the Roman goddess, see Lua. ... Look up October in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Originally Angband was written entirely in C. Starting in the 3.0 series, much of the code has been moved to Lua, an embedded scripting language that simplifies development and makes modification into variants simpler. 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. C# redirects here. ... The Lua (pronounced LOO-ah, or in IPA) programming language is a lightweight, reflective, imperative and procedural language, designed as a scripting language with extensible semantics as a primary goal. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... For the main meaning see curse. ... In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays. ... For other uses, see DOS (disambiguation). ... Microsoft Windows is a series of popular proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to 512KB. The Macintosh, or Mac, line of personal computers is designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... The original Amiga (1985) The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced game console. ...

Gameplay of Vanilla Angband, as the original is now often called, is most often compared to NetHack, though in reality the games are almost polar opposites. Angband adopts a more serious tone than NetHack, takes far longer to win for even the best players, and the focus of the game is more on combat tactics, inventory management and risk minimalisation than NetHackish puzzle solving and special casing. This has been the source of light-hearted conflicts between the two communities. NetHack is a roguelike computer game originally released in 1987. ...

There were a number of "in jokes" for students at the University, for example the names of the shopkeepers in the town being linked with then students.

Geoff Hill relates, "One particularly annoying student was Richard Broadley, a character who was known to cheat at all online games and was universally despised. Early versions of the game were hardcoded to prevent him from finding artifacts when playing from his user account "rebroad" at the University of Warwick. He is immortalised in the game as Draebor the Imp, an annoying character who can be immensely frustrating but (in early versions at least) guaranteed an artifact drop on death."

Angband terms

• Artifact: A special item with preset statistics that cannot be destroyed, and of which only one instance exists. Once identified, they are never generated again.
• *Band: Generic name for any Angband variant.
• Borg: An automated Angband player.
• Ego item: A standard item with special abilities, which vary according to its ego type. eg. Soft Leather Boots of Speed.
• RNG: Random Number Generator/God. Due to the importance of random effects in Angband, the game RNG is often referred to anthropomorphically.
• Unique: A monster of which only one instance exists. Once killed they are never generated again. They are immune by default to certain types of attack. Systematically finding and killing them can be important to victory in the game, since the hardest few uniques can magically summon other uniques and thereby overpower the player.
• Vanilla: The unmodified version of Angband.
• Vault: A special room which is not random, but is produced from a plan. Often filled with powerful foes and treasure.
• Wizard: A debug/cheat mode.

An example of anthropomorphic artwork (by Dark Natasha) An example of an anthropomorph (by Carrie J. Berman). ...

See also

• List of Angband variants
• quylthulg
• yeek

The computer game Angband is notable for having many variants based on its codebase. ... A quylthulg is a fictional invisible pulsating mound of flesh, found in the roguelike games Moria, Angband and ZAngband. ... Yeeks are a fictional race of goblin-like humanoids found in many roguelike games, such as Moria, Angband and ZAngband. ...

External links

• Thangorodrim is the primary Angband site. It features development information, a variant list. (no longer updated)
• FuryTech is the current Angband mirror site. It features almost all the variants.
• Angband.oook.cz (or oook) contains the Angband ladder, detailed spoilers, and other resources.
• The original Angband Comic, abandoned, but archived at the above website.
• Penance is a new Angband webcomic, but drawn in a more traditional style.
• Tales from the Pit A new Angband webcomic, drawing is in an Angband style, updating Mon to Fri, as of recently.
• The old official Angband home page was maintained by Ben Harrison until 2000.