Roadmap for angband

[Antoine]

I say let the dev team make the best damn variant they can, and if something from it, something that works well and fits Angband well gets ported back to V, all the better.

I suspect it'll be the other way around to some extent - v4 will be the variant that most quickly adopts V interface improvements - where maintainers of other variants will take longer to catch up.

A.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Are you volunteering?

What would the dev team say if someone did step forward with intentions on maintaining angband? I think you understand that we are in uncharted waters here, angband maintainers have generally tried to pass the torch on to others that most closely shared their views on the game, now we have several different people, each a little different in his own way, v4 is an interesting variant but I don't see the need for it, your basically turning angband into a variant, there's already been a lot of changes that has significantly changed it from what it used to be

[fizzix]

What would the dev team say if someone did step forward with intentions on maintaining angband?

I can't speak for anyone but myself. I'd support that individual wholeheartedly.

[Storm-Sky]

Are you volunteering?

Well it was my understanding by reading the forums that takkira and the dev team didn't feel a need of a maintainer, i'm a long time player with minimum coding skills so im sure I wouldn't fill the shoes, as a player i have a genuine concern on the future of the game after takkira.

[nppangband]

Timo has a point. If v4 becomes too distant from Vanilla, then you stop being able to decide if a feature can transfer from v4 to Vanilla.

It's possible. That's why I started NPP many years ago. I got sick of people saying "xxx idea would never work in vanilla". I wanted to show ideas could work, and game balance could be easily restored with each change. It think it can be called successful, in both the number of people who have played it, and the number of ideas that have made thier way into Vanilla from NPP (even if the original idea didn't start in NPP). The differrence is, in NPP we work on only one idea at a time. And then we try our best to polish it and de-bug it before moving on to a new idea.

From the looks of it, V4 is going to move into 5 different directions at once, constantly change, and never stop to take a breath to figure out where it is or what it wants to be. So it will be hard to say what will improve vanilla and what won't. So V4 can't be some temporary staging ground where most or all of the ideas get included. There has to be some sort of filter, so that only the best and most widely respected ideas even get considered for addition into V, just like it would from any other variant.

And, I agree with Timo that sometime early in Angband 3.x it stopped being Angband. It's a variant, but it has the Angband brand name so it gets the most attention. It's doesn't sound like a bad variant, but it certainly isn't Angband either.

[nppangband]

I say let the dev team make the best damn variant they can, and if something from it, something that works well and fits Angband well gets ported back to V, all the better.

My favorite sentence in this whole thread.

[Timo Pietilä]

I can't speak for anyone but myself. I'd support that individual wholeheartedly.

Same here. I would otherwise volunteer myself, but I have not enough time for serious task like that. Real life and all that. I shouldn't be writing here just now.

In current vanilla environment maintainer doesn't need to be coder. Not anymore. He should be a person that does have some sort of sensible idea of what is angband and what can and cannot be done to without ruining the game feel. He does need to know the history of the game so that he can respect some of the traditions. A long time player that can win the game if he/she chooses to so that he knows what it takes to win the game.

I would actually prefer player over coder in that role. A person that doesn't care about game internal systems, someone that cares about what happens, not how it happens.

I think that if there is no individual to take that task, community needs to become an maintainer. That's entire community, not just coders and developers choosing whatever they think is cool new feature that just has to be incorporated into game no matter how much work it requires to balance and how many other things it changes in order to reach that balance.

Which brings up the original question: is there an roadmap or design plan anywhere? If not should we create one? As community? Post it here as sticky post as "todo" -list open to discussion.

If we create one I think there is two tasks above all others:

1) What is broken in current 3.3 vanilla?
2) how to fix it?

then as distant third comes:

3) what new should/could we incorporate into game without breaking the general feel.

For that 3 change for sake of change is not good, it would need to be improvement over current system. If 2) requires or is fixed using 3) then that is perfect situation for incorporating new features.

[Magnate]

I think a lot of people seem to have forgotten one of the basic tenets of open source development: you don't tell other people what to do with their volunteered time and effort (aka "the only person you can shout at is yourself"). Here's a FAQ I found the other day about another project which kind of sums it up nicely:

Q. I think feature X is top priority and you should do it ASAP instead of all your crap

A. Seems like you think that opensource is like commercial development, but with free resulting product. Well, you are wrong. We write what you get as a hobby, and we do implement what we feel like is interesting and fun. There is no fixed, approved and unchangeable roadmap, and, of course, there are no deadlines: we have enough pressures in the real life. So, if a feature is heavily worked on, that's because the one who develops it found it to be useful for him, or just decided that it'd be fun to implement it, but not because somebody ordered him to do that. So, as soon as someone with required skills is found who is interested in implementing the feature, it'd be worked on. Nevertheless, please suggest your ideas. If you request something that one of us finds interesting to implement, we will surely do it.

Now, with V, there is the non-trivial matter of its two decades of history and heritage, so actually we don't just do stuff because we think it will be fun to implement - we have a lot of discussion, here and with each other, about what the priorities are and what is and isn't acceptable. But one of the main reasons v4 was created was because that wasn't working well enough to satisfy the community here. As takkaria said, the community *is* having the final say: we've stopped making incautious changes to V and created v4 instead.

v4 is a variant, and nobody tells variant maintainers what they can and can't put in their variants. Suggestions are of course always welcome. As buzzkill brilliantly put it, we're trying to make the best variant we can, and if some stuff ends up being suitable for V, so much the better. And contrary to Jeff's perceptions, we do actually have some ideas about what we want to change and in what order. (It's harder to do that with a team than with a pair, but we do our best.)

I can't speak for anyone but myself. I'd support that individual wholeheartedly.

Speaking for myself, It will probably reassure everybody to know that I intend to focus on v4. I've found working on V to be a largely thankless task, and I'd be very happy for someone to step up and attempt to maintain it (or "repair it", for those of you who consider it broken). I argued in favour of a new maintainer - but I have said I'm happy to operate by consensus. I have not made any changes to V since v4 was created, except to fix bugs. I can see that being the case for the foreseeable future.

[Gorbad]

I've found working on V to be a largely thankless task, and I'd be very happy for someone to step up and attempt to maintain it (or "repair it", for those of you who consider it broken).

Can I give a stern look to some of the more vocal people here and mention that THIS is why very few people want to maintain Angband (or any Open Source project for that matter).

Any change you make, anywhere, will get you comments. If you're lucky they won't be flames, but you can rest assured that not many people will thank you. Until you step down that is.

[sethos]

My two bits - that sucks. alot.
If angband changes a lot, ANYONE can still grab the older version. having not played since 2.9.3? I LOVED the new V (3.3)

and if it changes more, so be it. someone here doesn't like it? become the new "Official" angband maintainer and start over, see how long it takes YOU to crack.

Best of luck dev team - while Ignoring flames may be extreme... might as well go with "water off a duck's back" at least.

Damn but I love being a cheerleader. born the wrong gender, I would look really bad in a miniskirt. *BLARG*

[Nick]

In current vanilla environment maintainer doesn't need to be coder. Not anymore. He should be a person that does have some sort of sensible idea of what is angband and what can and cannot be done to without ruining the game feel. He does need to know the history of the game so that he can respect some of the traditions. A long time player that can win the game if he/she chooses to so that he knows what it takes to win the game.

I would actually prefer player over coder in that role. A person that doesn't care about game internal systems, someone that cares about what happens, not how it happens.

I cannot find the words to disagree with this strongly enough.

The maintainer of Angband, or any variant, or any amateur game, needs to maintain the game. This means fixing bugs, keeping up with platform changes, and making improvements. What you are talking about is not a maintainer, but a manager, and amateur games don't have those. Amateur games are developed and maintained by those who are interested in their spare time. You want to have a say in that? Then contribute. And I do not consider endless pining for the good old days contributing.

Clearly any amateur game maintainer/developer needs to have people to play their game, and if they want it to thrive they need to understand a player's perspective and take notice of what people say about the game. But no individual player's opinion is preferred over any other - all players from veterans to brand new players have useful things to say.

One of the great things about Angband is that there is the option of playing any version. Currently half the voters think the current version is the best ever. This is a consequence of a devteam who put an extraordinary amount of time and thought into how to progress every aspect of the game, and I thank them for it.

[Antoine]

I cannot find the words to disagree with this strongly enough.

I think Timo's post should be taken as an expression of frustration rather than a plausible course of action.

Also, he does contribute (see e.g. traps thread, I believe he also recently did a big revamp of the artifacts file).

A.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Angband is different from what it used to be, I've played most versions, Frog-knows has a very good feel to it, but v 3.3.2 also has a very good feel to it. The truth is if you go back and read all the changelists, from the begining each maintainer has changed the game somewhat to reflect his vision if you will, so basically angband is a variant of itself, it's always changing, tweaked, adjusted, balanced, and I suspect will continue to do so, i think the game is still fun, but if it's not for you then pick the version you like best and run with it. Timo, Derakon and others have valuable input on the game and how to not make it easy, and in some ways they are right, it's easy to get a character all the way to level 30 and higher before they die. Now on the other hand Magnate, Fizzix all have some interesting gameplay changes that can make the game fun as well, But it's a work in progress and I'm not going to judge till they say they have done what they think they can do for the game

[Nick]

I think Timo's post should be taken as an expression of frustration rather than a plausible course of action.

OK, but it's a bit too recurrent a theme for my liking.

Also, he does contribute (see e.g. traps thread, I believe he also recently did a big revamp of the artifacts file).

Quite right! My advice was so awesome he took it before I even gave it

[Timo Pietilä]

I think Timo's post should be taken as an expression of frustration rather than a plausible course of action.

It was serious comment. Currently there is dev-team, which means that whoever would be the maintainer does not need to know how to code. He just needs to choose what goes in the game and assign tasks in to do -list for code.

What he needs is to play the game, know what makes it tick (the rules of the game) and how it could be improved IN PLAYER POINT OF VIEW.

It is the gameplay that needs to be improved and maintained, not coding standards, source management or even source code that is used. Those are just tools to keep maintaining gameplay easy.

In my opinion no matter how good coder you are you have no business changing any aspect in gameplay unless you are also a player.

Also, he does contribute (see e.g. traps thread, I believe he also recently did a big revamp of the artifacts file).

My most visible (accepted) changes have been some balance tweaks in edit-files and current monster coloring. Tiny bit of bug-hunting.