Angband 4.2.5

[Nick]

Angband 4.2.5 is now available for Windows, macOS and as source. It can be downloaded from the official site.

There are two main thing to mention in this release:

• The return of the borg, thanks to excellent work by agoodman
• A huge amount of bugfixing, code improvement, project admin and general good work from backwardsEric

It's about 18 months since the release of 4.2.4, so a release was overdue and the borg inclusion gave me the necessary push to actually get it out. Thanks chiefly to backwardsEric (but also other people, even including me) the game is in a very good state. I don't think there's really been much discussion of what would be in a potential version 4.3 since the 4.2.4 release announcement, so I guess the comments there still apply.

Summary of changes:

• return of the borg
• fix problems caused by some necromancer spells
• hydras now bash rather than open doors
• clarification of symbols on the character sheet
• torch random artifacts can drop deeper in the dungeon
• improvements to stats and debug commands
• autobuild for NDS, DOS, msys2 and nmake
• too many areas of code improvement to mention individually

As always, thanks to everyone who has contributed in any way to Angband development.

[malcontent]

Thank you Nick, backwardsEric and agoodman!

[agoodman]

thank you Nick and backwardsEric. Without your support, we wouldn't have been able to get the borg working again.

and a side thanks to shelches who may or may not be on the forum but did a bunch of testing for me.

[smbhax]

Well done guys, thanks for all the hard work! : D

[tom]

Great work, everyone. The ghost of Ben Harrison will be pleased with the return of his beloved Borg.

[Gwarl]

Can we have some compilation flags for the borg? (or even better configuration switches like --disable-borg) like there used to be ALLOW_BORG, and there was some mechanism to prevent borg characters from showing up in the highscores (like wizard characters) are those implemented?

I'm thinking of disallowing the borg but also of having a permanent borg running in the background

[backwardsEric]

Can we have some compilation flags for the borg? (or even better configuration switches like --disable-borg) like there used to be ALLOW_BORG, and there was some mechanism to prevent borg characters from showing up in the highscores (like wizard characters) are those implemented?

The borg is only compiled in if the preprocessor macro, ALLOW_BORG, is set. There's currently no formal switch via configure or cmake to turn on or off compilation of the borg. Builds via configure, Makefile.nmake, and Makefile.osx all build the borg by default (remove the setting of ALLOW_BORG in src/Makefile, src/Makefile.nmake, or src/Makefile.osx to disable that).

If I'm reading the code correctly, borgs are only scored if the preprocessor macro, SCORE_BORGS is set. That macro is not set by default in any standard build.

[Estie]

How about flagging bots in highscores instead of banning them ?

[tom]

How about flagging bots in highscores instead of banning them ?

That's a good idea. Recording some other player setting in the highscores would be cool, too (like randarts, forced descent, etc). The scores.raw format, which I think hasn't changed in eternity, needs some new fields to do this though.

[Gwarl]

The borg is only compiled in if the preprocessor macro, ALLOW_BORG, is set. There's currently no formal switch via configure or cmake to turn on or off compilation of the borg. Builds via configure, Makefile.nmake, and Makefile.osx all build the borg by default (remove the setting of ALLOW_BORG in src/Makefile, src/Makefile.nmake, or src/Makefile.osx to disable that).

If I'm reading the code correctly, borgs are only scored if the preprocessor macro, SCORE_BORGS is set. That macro is not set by default in any standard build.

Okay thanks for clarifying

[smbhax]

Don't forget to let Pav know 4.2.5 is out so he can update the News page ( http://angband.oook.cz/index.php ). : )

[Magnate]

Congrats Nick, this is fantastic news. After several years absence, I have returned to have one final go at packaging 4.x for Debian (which is still using 3.5.1!). If I don't manage this I'm going to give up and orphan the package.

My biggest headache at the moment is the manual. Is the person who wrote the manual generation code still around and can someone please put me in touch?

[backwardsEric]

My biggest headache at the moment is the manual. Is the person who wrote the manual generation code still around and can someone please put me in touch?

According to the commit history, takkaria set up the docs directory in much of its current state. This procedure is what the release workflow uses in the top level of the Angband directory tree to build the HTML documentation on Ubuntu 22.04 (in the GitHub repository this is from https://github.com/angband/angband/b...s/release.yaml ):

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake gcc make sphinx-common git
use_python3=`python --version 2>&1 | awk "/^Python 3\\./ { print \"YES\" ; exit 0 ; } ; { print \"NO\" ; exit 0; }"`
if test X$use_python3 == XYES ; then
    sudo apt-get install python3-pip
else
    sudo apt-get install python-pip
fi
pip install sphinx-better-theme
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-no-install --with-sphinx
make manual

The generated HTML files then end up in docs/_build/html . In case you had not already seen it and found it less than helpful, there's a bit of information about how to build the documentation here, https://angband.readthedocs.io/en/la...#documentation , which skips using configure.

To change the theme used when building the documentation, you can either edit docs/conf.py (look for the section there called "Options for HTML output"), or if going through configure and want to use one of Sphinx's builtin themes, you can set the environment variable, DOC_HTML_THEME, to the name of the builtin theme when running configure, i.e.:

    ./configure DOC_HTML_THEME=name_of_theme_to_use --with-no-install --with-sphinx

[bio_hazard]

I'm probably missing something obvious, but how does one run the Borg? I'm on MacOS if it matters.

[backwardsEric]

I'm probably missing something obvious, but how does one run the Borg? I'm on MacOS if it matters.

Control-z (^z if you're using a frontend where Control-z gets intercepted) gets you to the prompt for the borg command. If you haven't used a borg command for that character yet, you'll first get a confirmation prompt for whether you really want to run a borg command. Once at the prompt for the borg command, entering z at that will have the borg run until it dies (to have it automatically respawn instead either set the standard option to cheat death before running the borg or from the borg command prompt use 'c' followed by 'd' to toggle its own option for cheating death) or is interrupted by a keystroke from you. There's other commands available, you can press ? at the prompt for a borg command to get a list of them with brief descriptions. The first time a borg command is issued, it will set up a borg.txt file in Angband's user directory (~/Documents/Angband with the macOS front end) which can be used to customize the borg's behavior.