# Angband -- News

This page contains information and recent news about Angband.

## Table of Contents

- General Information
- Recent News and Such

## General Information

The most interesting thing about Angband is perhaps its long and glorious history, dating back at least to 1985. Since its origin, Angband has been released as source code, and so every few years, a new person steps in and advances the game to a new version. My primary contributions have been to clean up the source code, add a huge number of features, and facilitate the porting of the game to a multitude of different platforms, including Macintosh, Windows, DOS-386, Amiga, Unix/Curses, Unix/X11, and others.

For more information about the historical background behind Angband, see the "version.txt" online help file.

## Recent News

Source code for Angband 2.8.3 is now available. The 1998-02-11 archive includes fixes for the (several) bugs reported in the 1998-02-09 archive.

In Angband 2.8.3 (Windows, Macintosh, and Amiga versions only), changing your character name will no longer change the name of your savefile (except when you first create a brand new character). One side effect of this is that you can no longer change your name and save the game to create a back up savefile, and another is that you can safely move your savefiles around.

Angband 2.8.3 features brand new field of view code.

Angband 2.8.3 includes a new "allow_quantities" option for everyone who was disappointed to see it removed.

The Official Angband Home Page has moved to a new location.

The Angband Borg now has its own sub-page.

Complete source code for Angband 2.8.2 is now available. Pre-compiled versions of Angband 2.8.2 are available for Macintosh, Windows (32 bit), DOS-386, DOS-286.

Complete source code for Angband 2.8.1 is still available. Pre-compiled versions of Angband 2.8.1 are available for Macintosh.

Complete source code for Angband 2.8.0 is still available. Pre-compiled versions of Angband 2.8.0 are available for Macintosh, Windows (32 bit), OS2-386, DOS-386, DOS-286.

Complete source code for Angband 2.7.9v6 is still available. Pre-compiled versions of Angband 2.7.9v6 are available for many platforms.

Complete source code for Angband 2.7.8 is still available. Pre-compiled versions of Angband 2.7.8 are available for many platforms.

Angband 2.8.2 requires the use of the "0" key before a command to allow the selection of more than one object at a time, for example, use "0" + "s" + "a" in a store to sell all items in the first inventory slot.

Angband 2.8.1 includes support for multiple items per cave grid and for monsters carrying objects, using new "testing" options. Note that these options still have a few minor bugs.

Angband 2.8.1 allows the "+" command (and control+direction) as a generic "alter adjacent grid" command, performing whatever command is "appropriate" to the given destination grid, such as attack, tunnel, bash, open, close, or disarm.

New "Help-Help" and "Help-Info" directories at the ftp sites contain the latest help files and spoiler files, respectively.

The latest sounce for the "Ben Borg", which works with Angband 2.8.0, is available at the ftp site as "/angband/Borg/borg-ben.tar.gz". See the "Borg" page for more information. The Ben Borg is also available in special precompiled versions of Angband 2.8.0 for the Macintosh and Windows, but these versions are completely unsupported.

The new terrain features are now saved in the savefile.

The random number generator state is now saved in the savefile.

Angband 2.8.0 now parses savefiles from all known versions of Angband including "MacAngband 1.0", "MacAngband 2.0.3", "PC Angband 1.4", etc.

There is finally a working version of Angband 2.8.0 for the Macintosh running System 6. Maybe.

There is finally a working version of Angband 2.8.0 for Windows.

There is a special version of Angband for use with ancient DOS-286 computers, and another for ancient Macintosh computers, and another for 16-bit Windows.

Angband 2.8.0 includes support for up to seven "sub-windows", each having the ability to display a variety of interesting things, such as the current inventory, a description of the current character, descriptions of recently encountered monsters, etc. There is a new sub-page of the "options" screen to modify the window display flags.

Angband 2.8.0 includes support for interactive modification of the color palette, plus modification of the symbols used to display all terrain features, objects, and monsters. These abilities are also available via "user pref files". Remember to use the "redraw" command (^R) after changing any options or other settings which should affect the visual display.

Chuck Swiger has pointed out that to allow proper use of Angband on a Unix system with multiple users, you must make the angband executable owned and setuid to games, using "chown games _path_to_angband_" and "chmod u+s _path_to_angband_". Joseph DeVincentis has suggested also doing "chown -R games /path/lib/save" and "chmod 755 /path/lib/save" and "chmod 644 /path/lib/save/*".

Several monsters have changed name, description, symbol, and/or color in recent versions of Angband, especially from Angband 2.7.8 to 2.8.0. This primarily affects "elemental" monsters (dragons, hounds, vortexes, elementals, etc), "people" (mages, priests, etc), "ghosts", "mummies", "zombies", "snakes", and "hydras". See "lib/edit/r_info.txt".

Go back to the Official Angband Home Page