Release notes for Angband283-xg-0.2.0 (ALPHA RELEASE) ===================================================== February 27, 2000 These notes cover a pre-release (alpha) version of Angband283-xg. This version is not yet complete, but provides an opportunity for those people who have been following the development of this version to try it out and find some more bugs for me :-) I believe that this version contains no serious gameplay bugs, but until it has received more serious playtesting it is possible that serious bugs remain. PLEASE MAKE REGULAR COPIES OF YOUR SAVE FILE (lib/save/Player.XXX) IN CASE THE GAME CRASHES ON YOU!!! What is Angband ? ----------------- More info on standard Angband can be found Here and Here . My version uses this standard codebase for the game logic itself, but replaces the user interface. Background on this version -------------------------- Angband283-xg attempts to be "Vanilla Angband with a nicer display". As far as possible the core game is standard Angband 2.8.3 (the current "vanilla"). The normal text 80x24 display module has been replaced by one that uses the Linux/X11 graphical display system to provide some nice animation and lighting effects and also replaces some of the standard symbols with graphical tiles. All creatures & objects are drawn using graphical tile equivalents to their normal ASCII symbol, so they should look the same as the text version, except that they are drawn onto 28x28 pixel tiles and so appear somewhat larger than the standard text versions. The standard display of 66 columns and 22 rows has been replaced with a display that defaults to 33 cols X 22 rows. ie This version uses a smaller display than the standard. It is possible that this will change the gameplay balance somewhat in unexpected ways. I don't yet have enough experience with this smaller screen to feel confident that the gameplay isn't adversely effected. Feedback on this is welcomed. Features -------- * Replaces the text display with a hybrid text/graphical system that uses 28x28 pixel tiles when displaying the dungeon map, and a 7x14 text font for the normal text. * Dynamic lighting that casts a circular pool of light around the player. The radius of this light depends on the players light source. The light flickers around the edges. * Dynamic animations for mineral seams, causing them to gleam occasionally. * Dynamic animation for multi-hued creatures, causing their colours to change smoothly over time. System requirements - Video --------------------------- Angband283-xg runs only under intel Linux/X11. It has been developed using RedHat Linux 6.0 and a recent release of XFree86 (3.3.5). It should compile and run on other systems, but this has not been tested. The animation system uses the MIT Shared Memory extensions for performance reasons, and this means that the game must be run from the same machine that is hosting the X server. It will NOT run over a remote-displayed X session from an X terminal or similar. You must have a display of at least 1024x768 in either 16,24 or 32 bit colour depth. 8 bit colour depths are not supported. If you are running a display of 1280x1024 then I reccommend starting the game with the command "./angband -- -D33x33" to get a larger map that fits neatly onto larger screens. Otherwise you will get the default display size of 33x22 (33 cols X 22 rows). This size is suitable for screen of 1024x768 pixels. System requirements - CPU --------------------------- The animation engine will require something faster than a 486 to work properly, but I don't know what the lower limit is. On my development machine (P3-650) it appears to use no CPU time at all, but I would expect that any machine slower than about P-200 might have trouble. (feedback accepted!). Installation ------------ The latest version will be available here. Download the archive (Angband283-xg-0.2.0.tar.gz) and uncompress it into a convenient directory with the command: tar xvzf Angband283-xg-0.2.0.tar.gz If you are running a recent intel Linux distribution, then you may be able to use the binary that is in the package without recompiling. To try this, chdir to the angband283-xg directory and running "./angband". If this doesn't work then chdir into the src directory and give the "make" command. This should recompile the whole thing and generate a new angband binary. If you don't wish to set any paths or environment variables, then you can always chdir to the angband283-xg directory and run the program as "./angband". Feedback -------- Remember that this is an _alpha_ release. There are still some known obscure bugs in the display code. If something doesn't look right, then refresh the screen and it should correct itself :-) Feel free to email me (Anthony.Wesley@acquerra.com.au) with comments, suggestions etc. Good luck. I hope you like it (I certainly do!)... P.S. ---- Diablo 2 has since been released, and I see that they have also decided to make items "gleam" occasionally so as to subtly highlight them to the player. Well done guys, but I got there first :-) Cheers, Anthony Wesley Angband-283-xg developer Anthony.Wesley@acquerra.com.au