Is 4.x not the same as v4?

[tom]

I missed the Angband years 2000-2020. Reading about this 'v4' thing in the 'obsolete' forums, it doesn't sound like the same thing as became 4.0.0. v4 experimented with gameplay changes, while 4.0.0 had no (intentional) gameplay changes relative to 3.5? (?)

I would love someone to history lesson me.

[Nick]

The dev team at the time (early 2010s, IIRC) had a bunch of ideas - re-imagined combat and a generalised form of ego weapons are the big ones I remember. They were seen as too much change to put in straight away, and there wasn't enough general agreement about them, so the dev team spun off v4 as a kind of ideas variant where they could implement all this stuff and see how it worked.

I was only loosely involved with the dev team at the time (I was mostly maintaining FAangband and trying to start Beleriand), so I'm not sure exactly what happened, but at some point they kind of gave up on it and it never went mainstream. I don't know if there is even any code lying around for it. In hindsight, I probably should have grabbed it for the variant repository.

Which makes me think, tactical needs to go on that

[Magnate]

Nick, the v4 code is in the v4 repository on github!

Hi tom

I was one of the main coders of v4 (I rewrote the ego item code), the other being Derakon (combat) and fizzix (dungeons). Very happy to recount what happened - what are you particularly interested in?

[Nick]

Magnate is (of course) correct, it's here.