Goodbye Angband/65, hello JBand

[PaulBlay]

For those of you keeping track, I've put Angband/65 on indefinite hold while switching attention to my latest project - JBand.

JBand's aim is to produce a Japanese language version of Angband 3.1.1, so it probably isn't of great interest to most reading this.

I've also moved to compiling in C++ mode and as a Unicode program. So far it compiles, but I have comprehensively broken it getting to that stage

[PaulBlay]

Oh yes, all the good(?) stuff about the project is on the wiki.

[Nolendil]

There were a few previous attempts at porting *bands to Japanese languages but almost all of them seem to be dead.
The only website still working that I found is for ZAngband in Japanese:

http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/9606/zg/index.html

Maybe some parts of the code can be reused or at least provide some inspiration, I don't know.
Maybe it doesn't even use unicode :-/

By the way, unicode could also help people who would want to translate Angband in other languages with non-latin alphabet such as russian, corean, etc. So your project could be interesting to more people than just japanese-speaking ones.


EDIT: I just noticed that you had a link to a Japanese version of Angband on your Wiki but that it's not under GPL. Maybe the Japanese ZAngband license would be more friendly?

[PaulBlay]

EDIT: I just noticed that you had a link to a Japanese version of Angband on your Wiki but that it's not under GPL. Maybe the Japanese ZAngband license would be more friendly?

(Pretty much?) all the Japanese *band variants are under the "Angband license" still. The Japanese equivalent of SourceForge has a few *band variants on it anyway, but I guess they aren't as fussy over there.

[Nolendil]

I guess you're right about the Angband license since the japanese *bands were done before the Open Source Initiative reached its goal.
However, you might be able to contact the Japanese ZAngband to see if he would release his code under a GPL compliant license. No high hopes here since the last update on the page is dated as 2002/05/10 but it's worth a try.
Anyway, the license might allow you to have a look at the code and see how it was done without actually copying it? I don't know...

[Pete Mack]

For those of you keeping track, I've put Angband/65 on indefinite hold while switching attention to my latest project - JBand.

JBand's aim is to produce a Japanese language version of Angband 3.1.1, so it probably isn't of great interest to most reading this.

I've also moved to compiling in C++ mode and as a Unicode program. So far it compiles, but I have comprehensively broken it getting to that stage

Thanks for this Paul. Both are worthy efforts. The Unicode fix will be worthwhile in all languages, including English. (You might want to look at the "special characters" patch, by Leon Marrick IIRC; it's available from NPP and elsewhere.) Unicode will allow for a whole lot of special characters, more than "extended Latin-1".

Just think of the ∞ ∑ of possibilities. ⍨

(Others have noted that the clubs symbol looks a lot like a tree...)

[PaulBlay]

Thanks for this Paul. Both are worthy efforts.

You might want to hold on the thanks till we see how far I can get.

At present my plan is to support Windows XP first and tackle Linux after it's working with that.