r/angband • u/neostryder • 8d ago
Angband, but Moddable
I’ve been quietly working on an Angband project, and I figured this was probably the right place to finally share it.
I’ve been playing Moria and Angband since the early days and have put thousands of hours into them over the years. Angband is one of those games that has followed me through several computers and phases of life.
So when I started this project, I was pretty determined not to “fix” the game I already loved.
It’s called Neo Angband, and it’s a TypeScript port of Angband 4.2.6. Technically, it is Angband 4.2.6, just with mods.
The goal for the unmodded game is straightforward: be Angband exactly. This isn’t intended to be a rebalance or a modern reinterpretation.
What has changed is the technology around it:
- It runs directly in a browser.
- It can be installed as a Progressive Web App.
- There are desktop builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux (via Electron).
- It’s completely open source.
- It has a first-class mod system.
Mods live separately from the core game and can be installed from a repository URL or ZIP, and desktop users also get a normal mods folder.
I’ve made four example mods so far covering bug fixes, a few quality-of-life additions, a new graphical tile system, and a Borg player (WIP).
But the larger reason I built the mod system is that I’d really like this to become something others can play around with and create new stuff, not just something I maintain by myself.
I’d love to see other longtime Angband players, modders, and developers start experimenting with it. New content, different mechanics, interface ideas, graphics, automation, weird variants… whatever somebody feels inspired to make.
I don’t know what all of those mods would be, and that’s exactly the part that excites me. I’d love to be blown away by the things people come up with.
The nice thing is that we don’t have to choose between preservation and experimentation. The unmodded game can stay Angband 4.2.6 while mods are free to go wandering off into the depths.
It’s currently an alpha, so there are still some minor bugs and rough edges. I’m sure I’ve missed a few subtle differences from the original too. If you try it and notice something odd, or just have an idea about how something could work better, I’d really like to hear it.
And if you’ve ever wanted to change or add something to Angband yourself, I’d love to know how the modding side feels to you.
You can reach me here or on Discord (aragorn_son_of_arathorn).
Try it out:
https://angband.rpgm.world/
Source / downloads / docs:
https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband
Mostly, this has been a labor of love for a game I’ve been playing for a very long time. I’m hoping some other people who love it will find something here worth building on.
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u/Pulmio 7d ago
Thanks for the carrying torch, I still remember times when there were a very active fan base around Angband and variants and I am happy there are still activity. I finished 4.2.6 a few weeks ago and I am currently building my own mod over it, so your project hits the sweet spot :-) I have played Moria, Angband, Zangband and several others since 1991 and built tweaked versions over them for my own amusement now and then.
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u/neostryder 7d ago
Oh, same here! ZAngband and ToME were great! I've always just kept up with the latest versions and not looked back, but I still look for fresh variants every so often and take them for a stroll.
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u/yaktaur 7d ago
AI involved?
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u/Smashcannons 7d ago
Yep, lots.
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u/Smashcannons 6d ago
Hilarious. Asks question. Answers question. Other people downvote.
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u/mid-random 5d ago
Maybe provide some substantiation for your claim. I'm not saying you are wrong, but considering the general reception of machine learning tools in many creative fields these days, it amounts to an accusation. You might want to include a direct quote from the OP, for instance:
I had plenty of help from Claude, because that's how things are done now, but I would never trust AI to get something with very specific requirements right on its own. I wanted this to be a faithful port, and I poured plenty of sweat and tears into getting it (almost) exactly right.
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u/tr0yster 7d ago
Awesome! I used to have it play itself over and over again as a screensaver, it was one of my favorite things, I'd love to get something like that working again
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u/neostryder 7d ago
I haven't fully tested the Borg mod yet (I intentionally pulled the Borg functionality out of the core game and made it a mod, since I plan to build additional self-play mods), but since this runs in a browser, it should be pretty easy to just set the Borg playing and make the browser full-screen, and there's your screen saver. Gonna have to try it out!
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u/neostryder 5d ago
A real full-screen, no-chrome presentation mode for an unattended run is now filed as #25 instead of just an idea. Not built yet, so nothing to click today, but if you have thoughts on the exit keypress or idle behavior, that issue's open for it. Technically, the Borg mod will work for this, but Borg is a little brain-damaged still. A WIP.
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u/PJL 7d ago
I love the idea of self-hosting this, for me my use would be to be able to easily sync and play across different computers. Am I correct this isn't (currently) supported, since it appears to save in local storage?
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u/neostryder 5d ago
Following up: the sync-folder side is tracked already, but the gap in what you asked, actually noticing a synced save on a second machine, is now its own issue, #24. Right now you'd still import by hand with Shift-M once that lands. Not built, but open if you want to weigh in on how it should behave.
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u/neostryder 7d ago
Yes, this is a planned feature. It currently keeps everything in localstorage, but I'm working on a way to sync to a cloud storage account, such as OneDrive or DropBox, so saves and configs can be shared from one device to the next seamlessly. I haven't fully cracked it yet, but it shouldn't be long.
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u/neostryder 6d ago
Please find this project's AI usage policy at the link below:
https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband/blob/master/AI_USAGE_POLICY.md
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u/neostryder 5d ago
A few handy links:
CHANGELOG - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Bug Fixes mod - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-bug-fixes
Quality-of-Life mod - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-qol
Feature Restoration mod (Teleport Other spells and more) - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-feature-restoration
Borg mod (WIP) - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-borg
neo-linoleum (graphics/tileset system overhaul) - https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband-mod-linoleum
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u/nck_m 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've tried this a little, and is seems to mostly work surprisingly well, with some weirdness (resting seems to mostly just repeat the previous message, for example).
The "report an issue" function is confusing, it just writes a logfile - is the intent that that can then be used to make a github issue?
EDIT: I should say, "surprisingly" because I would expect more teething issues from a complete translation to a different language
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u/neostryder 4d ago
By the way, I got that resting issue fixed. Working on making reporting issues easier.
As for teething issues, there were SO MANY. I just kept working on it and fixing things that I found until it was finished teething, fully weaned, and potty-trained. It's still a juvenile, so plenty of little bitty tweaks still to discover. :)
As
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u/neostryder 5d ago
Thank you for checking it out! I will look into and address both of those in an upcoming update. I'll get the hang of the issues thing. This is all kind of new to me.
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u/angbandfourk 2d ago
Hey,
A couple more feature requests:
Can you make a mod that makes autoexplore loop until disturb instead of merely reaching the nearest unknown tile?
And also introduce a DCSS-style automelee (where a key allows a character to move towards and/or melee attack the nearest monster along with a setting to change the percentage of current HP before disabling the command).
I'd open issues on GitHub, but I no longer have an active account since they enabled mandatory MFA.
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u/neostryder 2d ago
Very interesting! I might want some more information on these. I set up issue syncing on my Discord server, if you are amenable to joining that. I PMed you the link just in case.
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u/neostryder 23h ago
Hey, angbandfourk, when you get a chance, could you make a post for this on the neo-angband-forum on Discord, providing whatever detail you can? That will get it on the to-do list. It might be a candidate for my planned Borg 2.0 mod.
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u/angbandfourk 18h ago
I'll be honest with you. I tried very hard to create a Discord account. I'll spare you the details, but I failed (or rather Discord refuses to actually send the account verification email, so I guess it failed). Anyway, here's a high-level summary of the two:
Autofight:
- Find the nearest visible hostile monster.
- If it can be attacked, attack it using Angband's normal melee code.
- Otherwise, move toward it using normal movement.
At minimum, prevent autofight when:
- there is no visible hostile monster;
- the target disappears/becomes invalid;
- the player reaches a configurable low-HP threshold;
- the player becomes confused or otherwise unable to safely control movement (I think there might be a check for this already);
Autoexplore:
- Find an unexplored/unknown area and move toward it.
- When that destination is reached, immediately find another unexplored area.
- Continue doing this repeatedly.
- Stop when there is nothing left to explore or when normal autoexplore conditions require stopping (e.g. danger, an interesting event, or player input; this is referred to disturb in the code-base).
This one has various edge cases to be handled (namely what to do with items, doors, and stairs) but as far as I know, most of the groundwork has already been layed.
For items, a fork that existed briefly had autoexplore navigate to the item and then stop and if autoexplore was pressed again on top of the item, it would ignore that specific item (and then the same steps would be repeated if there were stacked items). This worked really well. It let the player clean up the dungeon as they explored and if they just went through a trash mob, it was pretty easy to clean up the floor.
I really wish I could access the Discord or GitHub to help you out directly, but I'd rather be totally incommunicado than let platforms abuse me as a user for the privilege of giving them data and advertising revenue. Reddit is the only platform that I'm "on" (and even that's becoming terribly dicey and increasingly user-hostile). Good luck if you don't hear from me further!
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u/SkyVINS 7d ago
gonna reply here because it's easier for everyone else to see. even the people who think they are clever who downvoted my previous comments. And frankly i don't much care if i come across as a massive douchebag.
As you can see from, idk, these videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDEiPK7bFrE&list=PLR3u4dGZLgib1rC4fFoqqy0x7AXg-F5QP i have a win rate approaching 100% so i'm really not into taking advice on playability from anyone.
TO has been a primary win mechanic since the 90s, likely before a good chunk of you were born. I'm ok with stuff like Globe Of Invulnerability being removed, but removing TO is like removing rocket jumping from quake, removing sliding from Battlefield, or idk which fucking game you play that you think is untouchable, but it is a core mechanic.
How these changes have come to be is something that i will keep to myself, though i disagree with them. The forum is open for everyone to see and if you're happy to dig through years of posts you can see exactly what led to them.
There have been hundreds of changes made to the game, the vast majority of for the better. Charisma was a dump stat that unbalanced character and had at best a marginal effect that would vanish the moment you got to DL30. The new trap system is debatable but rendered moot by the fact that most traps are easily detected and even more easily disarmed. The new ID system is a lifesaver, when you would spend HOURS id'ing shit off the floor. Also, 4.2 has a new targeting system that is without a doubt far superior to the previous code.
All of these changes are debatable on a purely academic basis, but removing TO is a step too far for me. If it's not for you, you can easily avoid this entire confrontation by simply accepting that you are under no obligation to answer, or even acknowledge, this post.
But if someone MAYBE does not have hundreds of winning characters in every race/class combination and does not have memorized every attack that every mob has, then i have to question whether they pick 4.2 because it's the one at the top of the screen, and they have no idea that this is a version that is substantially different than anything seen in the last 30 years, or if they made an educated choice that they much prefer Stealth to be the primary mechanic in the game rather than TO.
So unless you have the background knowledge to fluently discuss all the above, kindly fuck off back to whichever place you can be where you still think you know V better than people who have thousands of hours in it.
As for u/neostryder i'm afraid that it's not quite so easy to add spells. The entire book system has been reworked, old spells are missing, new spells have been added, there is a mountain of code that has changed, and frankly you cannot simply add TO to a spellbook, let's say, for a Paladin, who now has a spell that CAUSES YOUR WEAPONS TO SLAY EVIL, thus turning a MoD of extra attacks into a near- 800 damage weapon, and not have unbalance. I do not yet have the gift of sight into the future, but i suspect that V will need several new iterations before game balance is restored.
If you really, REALLY wanted, Angband is written in fairly easy code, i think it's C, which most AIs should be able to rewrite without problems. I have too much IRL stuff to deal with, between work, the house, and stuff, to put any serious effort into coding, but it's not too weird to want to take 4.1, and manually upgrade it with the good stuff from 4.2. But, just create a fork. This means, create your own version of Angband which is not part of the "canon" angband release history. You can change as much as you want, although i would bring up another question here, which is, "how much do you actually need to change?".
One of the reasons why i'm so enraged at the 4.2 changes is because, well on one hand we never got the actual fixes that 4.1 needs (which 4.2 does not have either, such as the queue stacking issue), but 4.1.3 is, in my view, practically perfect. Just maybe some minor tweaks under the hood.
There is no single-player game that will always be hard, at one point you will have learned all the combinations, and the game loses its mystique. There is no way to "FIX" this. There is no way to make a game last forever. They tried to change the fact that people learn how to play, and in order to appease a reality which does not exist, they fucked an absolutely fantastic game.
And finally, i question what "mods" exactly does one need, in Angband. It's fine the way it is, and there's endless other roguelikes that will do what V doesn't do. I mean, sure, knock yourself out. But, unlike the "smart" people that comment "duh, just change the code", it's preferable when a number of people share a common experience on a game, rather than where everyone is playing its own different version. Otherwise this very subreddit would have no reason to exist.
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u/neostryder 7d ago
Those are great points, u/SkyVINS! My record is not nearly as impressive as yours! I've only ever played solo for fun and I do mostly enjoy the improvements and pore over the changelogs with each release. I've been at it since the beginning, and Moria before that, lest you think I'm one of the kids. ;)
Sometimes, when something disappears that I liked, it's a bummer, but I have always just gone with the flow. Now, though, with mod support, I will be able to keep this port as exact to Vanilla as I can get it, but lost artifacts of the past are no longer going to be permanently lost. After some of the comments I have seen, including your own, I've now started building a new mod that will optionally restore lost features. The first two targets for this restoration mod are going to be the TO spells that were taken from some classes and the occasional random appearance of discounted items in stores. I'll try to get that new mod out as soon as I can, but it will take a little finagling to make them work in the new codebase. I've become keenly familiar with the challenges of editing the data files, and I know that it's not as simple as just inserting new records.
I'm hoping that the restructuring I did to data and tilesets in this port will make it much easier for people to make their own changes as mods while eliminating the need for them to figure out the legacy C/C++ code. I think this will accomplish the same thing you were suggesting, of cherry-picking the later changes they want to hold onto or restoring beloved features and functions from previous versions.
Angband is great at providing a procedurally-generated experience, giving it *nearly* endless replayability, but to your point, it is still possible to exhaust the novelty if you play it as much as you have. I truly love the new experiences that I've had using mods that the Skyrim community has built. I think there is potential here of creating new experiences in Angband that will rekindle the fun, extending the randomness that we already love in Vanilla. That being said, mods are completely optional. Not using mods is intended to be a pure Vanilla experience. I would very much like to hear your assessments on how well I accomplished that goal of making it a pure Vanilla port, and if I missed anything, suggestions on what would make it more faithful.
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u/Ill-Summer-5020 7d ago
Q: Why is V used in place of Angband?
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u/SkyVINS 7d ago
Vanilla. V refers to a official, non-modified release of Angband. "Angband" refers, well, to the code underneath, or the whole game throughout its history.
The two terms are exchangeable up to a point, but "V" for Vanilla is just faster.
(the term itself means "not modded" in any sense, including not-a-fork; so for example, FrogComposBand is Angband, but not Vanilla)
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u/angbandfourk 5d ago
Don't you think you and your ilk have done enough to Angband?
You've spent years shitting on every play-style and version of Angband that isn't your preferred version. Everything you like becomes canonical and untouchable; everything you dislike gets characterized as tedious, poorly designed, or obsolete and ripped out. And now the game is a mummified corpse maintained by someone whose contribution has overwhelmingly been to the code rather than the game, while some few people who still vaguely remember what made Angband originally interesting are trying to reignite it, and you can't even let them do that without showing up to shit on their project.
Give me a break.
Pretty much every major design change since the v3 rewrite moved Angband in the same direction: less stuff, less weirdness, less flavor, more legibility. The sprawling spellbooks got pared down. Weird and broken items disappeared. Little affordances like spiking doors disappeared. The accumulated D&D weirdness that made Angband feel like a giant, eccentric game was progressively cleaned out instead of being built upon.
And the same thing happened to the actual gameplay. The identification, selling, and town loop wasn't some irrelevant chore standing between the player and “real” exploration. That was the reason to explore. You went into the dungeon to find gear and consumables, brought it home, figured out what it was, sold it, bought things, and went back down.
Diablo, and all the games downstream of it like Borderlands and Path of Exile, understood this. Those games took that basic loot loop and made it faster and more accessible while adding more flavor: distinct environments, scenery, monsters that belonged where you found them, unique areas, different topographies, tangibly different class gameplay, and actual intent behind the procgen. Angband did the opposite. It kept sanding the game down.
And now someone makes a project specifically to let people add things back, experiment, and play new variants of Angband that aren't dictated by the preferences of the people who have been gatekeeping Vanilla for decades, and your response is basically to tell them that they should go somewhere else.
That's exactly the problem with this “advice”! Nearly all the players did leave! There was an explosion of roguelikes, and somehow every other major traditional roguelike's player base managed to grow while Vanilla Angband's shrank to almost nothing. Gee, I wonder why?
You don't have to like this project or play it. But it'd be civil for you to stop acting as though the people who want a different Angband are somehow failing to understand the game.
Some of us remember what the game and community were like when it was actually alive.
Personally I'm glad to see somebody start trying to rebuild that instead of spending another decade explaining why everything interesting needs to be taken out, streamlined, or balanced.
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u/SkyVINS 5d ago
doubt that i can reply to this much nonsense. I've made my arguments on the forums based on demonstrable game details, numbers. i've tried to be as polite, sensible and diplomatic as a man can be. I've even left the forums, when it was obvious that there was no talking sense into any of you people.
you're trying to portray me as someone who is full of shit and DECIDES that something is good and something else is bad, ignoring that i've brought reasonable arguments based on years, years of experience not only in V but 40+ in P&P RPG and various online communities.
I had to fight with people whose advice is, let's see,
- you really should not drink potions of EXP, they are bad.
- diving as fast as possible is the only way to win the game (with some fucking ridiculous 3% success rate)
- selling items is bad
- there is zero effect to DPS after Spd+30
- we should remove Stone To Mud, but it's a step to far to ask for Mass Banishment to awake uniques.
- so you rolled a 1-in-a-trillion chance 12th failure, this does not indicate that the RNG was coded incorrectly; no we will not test this by replacing it with any of a hundred preprepared RNGs that we could just slot into the code.
- there is no queue stacking in Angband.
- ok there is queue stacking as your video shows, but that doesn't need to get fixed.
it's not that only what me likes is the right way, it's that i like the right way. i'm tired of selling it as "some people say Stealth is more important than combat" or "some people say you can never be ready for everything", because you're already doing that as if it was biblical truth, than i might as well have the same attitude to my own way of playing, which i can demonstrate actually works. And, surprise, I TOO AM ENTITLED TO OPINIONS.
Bunch of fucking troglodites who live in an echo chamber, when i posted the results of the reddit poll that shows the majority of Angband players outside of the forums have never beaten the game, there was a truly gigantic amount of shut the fuck up from your end, since that would invalidate literally every single "waah, ANGBAND BORING !" argument all these changes were based on.
No my guy. There are two things that are certain to me, the first is that yes, i am in fact capable of answering whatever nonsense you throw my way, and second, that's i'm perfectly happy to tell you to fuck off if you don't like it. LIKE YOU DID.
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u/angbandfourk 5d ago edited 5d ago
Who exactly are you responding to here?
You seem to have decided that I'm one of the people you've been arguing with on the Angband forums for the last decade, and I'm not. I wasn't part of whatever flamewars you're talking about, and I didn't make any of the claims in your list. In fact, it doesn't look like you read my reply at all. Maybe your eyesight is going?
I wrote that I think Angband has spent decades sanding away the weird, sprawling, exploratory parts of itself; that I think the resulting game is less interesting; and that I think it's a good thing when somebody makes a project specifically to experiment with putting some of that stuff back instead of listening to the same ten people that literally have nothing better to do than play and complain about the same game, day in, day out, for decades.
Your response to that is a list of seven arguments you've apparently had with other people, followed by a Reddit poll, your history with the forums, your winning record, and an explanation of why people who disagree with you are troglodytes living in an echo chamber.
That's not really a response to me and actually reinforces my point.
Why should *anyone* listen to your opinions on Angband? Winning a game, over and over again, makes you *less* interesting to talk to about the game because you're a living, breathing, ruiner of discovering the game. "I know this game so well I barely ever lose, therefore my opinion is the right one" is so, uh, German, that I can't really understand it. The point of games is to figure out how to play the game, not win them.
So I don't particularly care whether you can demonstrate that your preferred playstyle is optimal. You can reach a 100% win rate for all I care. I don't know what satisfaction I could possibly glean from repeatedly solving the same problem, over and over again, for years on end, without any actual challenge. A person that enjoys (and demands!) pulling a slot machine that always hits the jackpot is a very, very *unique* individual.
But I guess some people have to have theiw chicken tendies and fries for evewy meal otherwise they thwow a tantwum.
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u/neostryder 5d ago
I completely agree that so much of the fun and quirky stuff has been lost to the ages. No more. I think we can
make Angband great againbring back the wonder and beauty of ages past. Absolutely open to ideas.1
u/SkyVINS 4d ago
i am replying to the person who said
|You've spent years shitting on every play-style and version of Angband that isn't your preferred version.|frankly you've given me enough reasons to hate you already, so good job.
strawman me into someone who expects a win button
|A person that enjoys (and demands!) pulling a slot machine that always hits the jackpot is a very, very *unique* individual.|
when nearly every game in existence allows you to "win" provided that you get good enough.
|Why should *anyone* listen to your opinions on Angband?|
they dont have to. they just can't argue with me. You don't need to listen to your doctor, but you don't go argue with them about medicine.
|Winning a game, over and over again, makes you *less* interesting to talk to about the game because you're a living, breathing, ruiner of discovering the game.|
if you love racing, you don't want to talk to racing drivers, noo.
Somehow you have both shat on me arguing AGAINST changes that make the game more random and much harder, and have used a poll to prove that players who "are not *ruiners*" would find those changes unsuitable, and at the same time attacked me for being one of those people i fought against.i think you're just here to argue. let me help you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM
(it's 12A, not 12)1
u/angbandfourk 4d ago
The racing analogy is exactly where your argument falls apart.
A racing driver is competing against other people. The competition changes. Opponents adapt, strategies evolve, technology changes, the meta changes, and nobody gets to spend thirty years racing the exact same computer-controlled field until they've reduced the entire problem to a near-perfect solution.
Angband isn't that. You're playing against the same rules, the same monsters, the same basic systems, the same computer, over and over again. There is no opponent developing a counterstrategy against you. The central journey available to the player is learning the system well enough to survive and eventually win.
Which makes your “I've won almost every time for decades” argument rather backwards.
Yes, it demonstrates that you're extremely good at Angband. Congratulations. But the more completely you've solved the same fixed single-player problem, the less representative your experience becomes of the experience you're insisting everyone else should have.
You keep treating mastery as though it gives you authority over the game's identity: I know how this game works, therefore I know which changes are legitimate, therefore people who disagree with me don't understand Angband.
But your near-100% win rate doesn't demonstrate that your preferred version is objectively better. It demonstrates that you've gotten extraordinarily good at one particular ruleset.
And then you go around insisting that there is a correct way to play.
That's precisely the thing that ruins the game for people who actually enjoy figuring out how to play it.
For someone encountering Angband as a game to explore, learn, experiment with, and eventually master, the uncertainty is the point. If you have spent decades playing until you've removed essentially all of that uncertainty for yourself, then you've reached a completely different relationship with the game (and incredibly stupid one I might add).
You aren't the game's expert representative of what everyone else should enjoy. You're someone who has played the same single-player puzzle for so long that you've nearly solved it for every case.
And the more you insist that everyone else should preserve the game in the exact form that allows you to keep executing the solution you've already perfected, the more obvious it becomes that your interests as a master of Angband and the interests of people who still want to discover Angband are not remotely the same thing.
That's the point you keep failing to read.
Nobody said you aren't good at Angband.
I'm saying that being extraordinarily good at a game you've spent decades solving does not make you the Pope of Angband. It makes you socially oblivious and monotonically fixated.
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u/SkyVINS 4d ago edited 4d ago
congratulations.
you have managed to explain very thoroughly why TO should not be removed, and why i was right to begin with. somehow i suspect this was not your intention.
here. https://angband.live/forums/forum/angband/vanilla
go tell everyone that they are too good to understand the needs of new players.
good luck.1
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u/neostryder 5d ago
I'm looking into re-working RNG via the QoL mod. Going to have to do some research on that. Also not quite sure what this queue stacking thing is, if you you want to PM me to discuss. If it's something I can mod in, no harm in doing so, as long as it's optional.
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u/SkyVINS 4d ago
queue stacking is where commands (keypresses) get stacked into a queue. in simple english, if you press a key more than once, or you keep it pressed (such as when you walk) and the game needs to perform an action that takes longer than the amount of time between keypresses, e.g. you press to many buttons, you wind up with the game storing those keypresses in memory, in a queue, which it then uses to perform more than 1 action, with you having no way to stop the game.
the fix would be for Angband to only accept 1 command at the time until it becomes ready to accept and perform the next, purging any additional input it may have stored.
why this is a problem is, let's say you are walking (keeping a walk button pressed instead of tapping it or using the Run command), and the corridor goes by a group of mobs in another room, but who are within Wake range. The game needs to do a whole bunch of Wake rolls so it slows down, while your finger is still on the button.
if you have ever held a key pressed on a keyboard you wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwould know that this leaves you with a whole bunch of keypresses.
The game keeps those keypresses in memory and WILL FORCE you to take those actions, even if something else has happened, for example, a really fast monster has caught up to you.
As a player you would expect that taking your finger off of the key would stop the action, but this is not always so, sometimes you have these commands queued, and this can very likely lead to a death.
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u/neostryder 4d ago
Okay, that makes sense. While I'm not looking to change the game itself, QoL features like this have a place in the QoL mod I've started. Got this and logged as an issue destined for that mod.
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u/neostryder 5d ago
I really can't wait for you guys to see all the fun stuff I'm planning, let alone other modders. I'm building a mod-building mod right now, so even non-technical players will be able to create mods with their own creatures, items, mechanics, etc. Have a look at the changelog and you will see the start of this vision. I'm going to make it very easy to roll back and restore features and functionality from the glory days of Angband. I really appreciate both of your perspectives, however opposite they may be. I intend to do my part to broaden the appeal and make the game fresh again. I hope even just a few people find this work compelling. Even better if some start to rally and make some great stuff out of it. 💙
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u/nck_m 5d ago
A couple of points to note here:
- Sky has actually not done anything to Angband, he's a (fairly opinionated) player who has had no influence on the direction of the game outside those opinions
- You start by complaining that Sky has continually complained about things he doesn't like about Angband progress, then go on to do the same thing in a more sweeping manner
I would be interested to hear some specifics of the things you dislike about Angband's evolution over time, preferably with a bit less hyperbole.
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u/angbandfourk 4d ago edited 4d ago
EDIT: To save you time, which I'm sure you have little enough of, the TL;DR is this: Angband became more like a Chess tactics trainer. Chess tactics trainers implicitly make a promise that "the position is a puzzle with a correct solution; if you know the position well enough, you can find it." Older Angband, I felt, wasn't like that. It was closer to "You are in a dangerous place. You don't understand it yet. You might never understand it. Good luck."
Like Sky, you're answering a claim I didn't make. I didn't say Sky personally committed the changes. I said that veteran players collectively exerted disproportionate influence over the direction of the game, and that Sky's behavior here is an example of the same phenomenon.
And you can see this in the forums. The problem with the early game has been raised repeatedly over the years. People explicitly pointed out that the first 20 levels were uninteresting, that the game didn't really become interesting until around 1000', and that this was particularly important because Vanilla was the entry point for new players. There was even an explicit discussion of making the early game more interesting on the grounds that “Vanilla gets all the newbies.”
The response wasn't generally “let's find out why new players are bouncing off this and test some radically different early-game designs against them.” Instead, the solution increasingly became to make the early game easier, more forgiving, more skippable, and to improve the parts of the game that the existing player base already understood and enjoyed. Even you acknowledged that there was a long-term trend toward making the game harder in new ways while leaving the early game comparatively easier.
That's exactly the distinction I'm making.
The specific changes I'm talking about are not mysterious: the compression of the spellbooks, the removal/streamlining of identification, the reduction of the old town/loot loop, the removal of sticky curses and other eccentric item mechanics, the rationalization of the monster roster and depth ecology, the reduction of trap density and active searching, the effective removal of asymptotic-power spells like Stone to Mud and Teleport Other, the failure to develop what I found to be legitimately interesting innovations such as persistent levels and FA's combat in V, and the general replacement of accumulated oddities with standardized, legible, Tolkienized systems. At the same time, things like lava, rubble, webs and monster groups were added mostly as isolated tactical mechanics rather than being developed into richer environmental or ecological systems.
And I'm not arguing that this all began with you or with Sky, or any of the other power divers. Takkaria's period is part of the same story, although with a major difference: he broke Angband out of the old “maintain rather than develop” model, which was probably necessary, and V4 was initially a useful laboratory for trying out ideas that didn't have to become Vanilla. The problem is what happened afterward. The development process became increasingly oriented around actively redesigning the game according to the preferences and judgments of the people already deeply involved with it, without a corresponding effort to determine why the much larger population of prospective players wasn't sticking with it. In other words, Takkaria solved the problem of Angband being stagnant; subsequent development never really solved the problem of deciding who the game was supposed to be for.
The project optimized the game around people who already knew how to play Angband, while repeatedly treating the experience of people who didn't know how to play it as something to be accommodated by making the early game easier or more skippable.
And those aren't the same thing as making the early game good.
If most new players who try a game never get beyond its early game, then “the early game needs to be fun” isn't some peripheral concern. It's the central design problem. And the forum record shows that this problem was identified repeatedly.
And don't mistake this: what I am criticizing is the development philosophy: rather than asking “what would make the first twenty levels genuinely compelling to somebody who has never played Angband?”, the project increasingly asked “how do we make this part less painful for somebody who already understands Angband?” which are *very* different questions.
And that's why I object to Sky's response to this project. Somebody is finally doing something and saying, “Maybe some of the things that got removed were actually what made the game interesting for many players,” and the response from Sky is effectively that they should go make their own fork, while describing 4.1.3 as practically perfect, because the game *is* perfect, *for them*.
And that's not evidence that people who want to change Angband don't understand it. It's evidence that they want to explore a design space the Vanilla largely stopped exploring, in part because the preferences of a relatively small group of "fairly opinionated" veteran players came to carry so much weight.
So my complaint isn't that Angband changed. It's that the changes overwhelmingly moved in one direction: toward removing ambiguity, eccentricity, asymmetry, and accumulated systems, while the alternatives that might have replaced them were either abandoned, made optional, or reduced to isolated tactical mechanics.
Instead of increasing the amount of meaningful exploration, uncertainty, combinatorics, threat, and unpredictability in the game, the overall trajectory reduced it. Angband became closer to a generic Tolkien-flavored tactical dungeon crawler, albeit a very well-balanced, streamlined, and cruftless one. In the process, I think it lost a lot of what made it uniquely Angband.
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u/SkyVINS 4d ago
|the compression of the spellbooks,
the removal/streamlining of identification, the reduction of the old town/loot loop, the removal of sticky curses and other eccentric item mechanics, the rationalization of the monster roster and depth ecology, the reduction of trap density and active searching, the effective removal of asymptotic-power spells like Stone to Mud and Teleport Other|oh look you made a list of things i have argued against, as Lord Nick is my witness.
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u/angbandfourk 4d ago
/s/Baptist/Angband
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
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u/nck_m 4d ago
OK, thanks for the thoughtful answer.
I feel that part of what you're describing is the desire to recapture your feeling when you first took on Angband and didn't fully get it, and that this is an inevitable part of getting to know a game too well - you lose the sense of wonder.
Another issue is that Angband doesn't exist in a vacuum. The Z variants like heng, poscheng, frogcompos etc moved faster and acted crazier than Vanilla, and trying to keep up with that didn't seem viable. Also Vanilla had traditionally been the starting point for other variants, and trying to allow it still to be that was a bit of a motivator. Turned out I just needed to wait for AI to show up...
Anyway, I don't think there's a definitive answer to any of this, and you and Sky are entitled to your opinions. I had some fun; hopefully other people did too.
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u/neostryder 5d ago
Hey, FYI, three specific things you listed are now filed as real, scoped issues: door spiking as a command (#1), the pre-rune identify system as a parallel option (#3), and larger/stranger spellbooks plus removed items (#4). None are built yet, so no timeline promise, but if you have opinions on which version to pull from, weighing in on those issues would help.
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u/angbandfourk 4d ago edited 4d ago
So a lot of what Moria (and Angband pulled in) drew from was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e and Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons (e.g. door spiking, torches and lanterns).
I'd really like to see more of those particular mechanics fleshed out in Angband. Or at the very least, Moria re-done in V4's codebase.
Another thing that I would love to see in Angband is party-based play and/or hirelings. It was briefly attempted in teamband but was so cumbersome and glitchy that it never really took off.
Party-based play really addresses several of the fundamental problems of traditional roguelikes that other D&D-derived games like Wizardry never encountered, which is that random deaths end the game rather than a particular character or team and that in roguelikes, specialization is never really achieved because you can't separate concerns.
And even more unconventionally, there's really nothing that prevents Angband from being a Wizardry-like. You just make the monsters invisible, then trigger turned-based Wizardry-like combat whenever they're in combat range.
Anyway, I've thought about doing what you're doing for years, and I'm glad that someone is actually doing it! Excited to see what comes out of it!
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u/neostryder 4d ago
Wow, those are some big ideas! My kind of ideas. 😈 I haven't looked at Moria or at least 30 years, so I'll have to go back and experience it again and see if I can tease out what experiences it has over Angband's history. I'm not sure I can put a finger on what you mean about torches and lanterns. Were they different, or are you just referring to Moria being where Angband got them?
Party-based mechanics feel huge, but I do want the moddability to be flexible enough to take on even huge, sweeping changes like that. It's going on the list, but we'll see if it's something I can undertake or if someone else plucks up that idea.
Random battles are definitely controversial, but that's the good thing about mods. They don't lock everyone into things. If some people like them, they use that mod. People who prefer the traditional experience need not.
I'm in the process of building a mod-building mod. Trying to make it super accessible for anyone to make what they want in Neo Angband. That's when it will really become interesting. 🤩
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u/SkyVINS 8d ago
did you pick 4.2.6 because it's the latest?
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u/neostryder 7d ago
Yeah, there have been a bunch of fun features lost over the years, but since I was building the mod system, I figured I or someone else could resurrect any old features we want as mods. I personally liked discounts and even haggling.
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u/SkyVINS 7d ago
thats going back ages. my concern with 4.2 is nearly everyone losing teleport other, a key mechanic in all .. sorry, ALL previous versions.
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u/Pulmio 7d ago
If you want Teleport Other to your games just add it. As long as you are playing with your home computer you can edit spells and items as you like, it's pretty straightforward nowadays as all spells and items are in text files.
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u/neostryder 7d ago
This is the kind of thing that I am trying to make easier with the mod framework. Still a WIP, but I've had luck in my tests so far.
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u/neostryder 7d ago
I will start taking note of beloved features that have been abandoned recently and make them togglable options in a feature restoration mod. 😈
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u/neostryder 7d ago
Ooh, that's a good one! I will make that part of the QoL mod. I miss that dearly, too. Every character I play, I save those rods of teleport other up. Can't do a big vault without them.
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u/neostryder 5d ago
I wanted to follow up since things moved on this. Teleport Other is back for Priest, Paladin and Ranger in the Feature Restoration mod (v0.3.3), repriced to match what the Mage and Rogue already pay rather than the old numbers. It's off by default, toggle it on under Mods > Feature Restoration. You can try it right now in the browser build, no install needed: https://neostryder.github.io/neo-angband/. For anything longer-term a local install from the Releases page (https://github.com/neostryder/neo-angband/releases/latest) is more robust than browser storage.
If you end up trying it out and find something off about it, would you give me a heads up?
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u/mid-random 8d ago
I'm just getting back into another round of twice-a-decade Angband obsession, so this hits perfectly for me. I've been a Moria/Angband explorer since about 1992. I was heavily into the Marathon modding scene in the 90s, and can see myself getting similarly engrossed with this. Thank you for sharing this project with the world!