Looking for something new?

[Minignu]

Heya!

Been playing zangband on and off for a loooong time and I thought I might try a new varient, since I haven't tried any others - nice to see there's still a community about. The catch is though, is that although I hear it's heretical in some circles, I absolutely cannot play without a tile set - I've tried ASCII but it just murders my brain (in fact I downloaded and attempted to play Sangband but I couldn't figure out how to set up a tileset, as I'm apparently computer illiterate). I'm looking for something that enables a good deal of customization and individually - any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[will_asher]

Some variants don't support playing with tiles at all, and others support tiles in the code but don't have an updated tileset. Maybe Sangband is one of those.

DaJAngband supports tiles. Both the original size tiles, and Buzzkill has made a (mostly complete I think) set of 32x32 tiles.

[buzzkill]

The only variant with a complete working 32x32 tileset is FAAngband (and of course Vanilla too).

Other variants that support tiles (more or less) and have tilesets (to some degree or another) are (in order of completeness) DaJ, RePos, NPP, Z+ and IronBand. I may be missing a few. If a tile set is not included with the 'official' download, which is likely, you can grab the latest tileset from the link in my signature.

Creating a tileset (for a variant that already has tile support built in) does NOT require any coding skill and only a moderate amount of INT and lots of time and patience. There are basically three files that are important. 32x32.bmp and mask32.bmp, both found in the lib/xtra/graf/ folder, and graf-dvg.prf, found in the lib/pref folder. Every entry in the .prf file corresponds to an item or monster in the game. Each tile in the .bmp has an "address" assigned to it (in hexadecimal format) in the .prf file. The tile in the upper-left hand corner is 0x80:0x80, the one directly to it's right is 0x80:0x81, and the one directly below it is 0x81:0x80 and so on, and so on.

If you download Vanilla and take a look at how it works, you'll see what I mean. If you have any questions, and you probably will, PM me or post them here. Good luck.

[Derakon]

Gameplay-wise I'd recommend starting again with Vanilla. It's not the Vanilla of the old days when ZAngband branched off; a lot has changed.

[Minignu]

Will take a look at Vanilla then DaJangband then. Is there much I need to know in regards to the differences between the varients? I've had a look around yon interwebs but I just seem to be getting a lot of dead links.

[will_asher]

The new DaJAngband version 1.3.0 will be released (hopefully) within the next few days, might as well wait till then to try it since it breaks savefiles from the previous version. When you get around to trying it, go to the help menu '?', then 'k' which brings you to the DaJAngband readme file which goes into details about a lot of the differences between V and DAJ. Just skim it then & maybe go back to it if you find something weird that you haven't seen in V or another variant. You can see the same readme file outside of the game in the /lib/help folder, DJA130.txt.

[Hudstone]

Sounds like me.
I've been playing Zangband also for a while, and was really interested to find an active community. Just started the NPPangband found here (level 4 Gnome Mage).
Not really worried about tilesets. Any thoughts? Should I dive into NPP, go try ol' vanilla or try DaJ? Pros/Cons for each would help.

TY