Variant writing.. quickstart guide? Also, Hengband variant suggestions?

[Djabanete]

I am glad to see people still enjoy Entroband.

Very much so. And yes Dave, good luck, and I am happy to contribute with my thoughts and ideas although I am too busy to play at the moment.

EDIT: That is to say, if there is anything specific you're looking for input on, I'm eager to help, but at the moment you seem to be DROWNING in ideas so I see no point in throwing random stuff out there =D

[Elrosk]

Great to hear someone might pick up the Hengband mantle... code changes just might make me pick it up again and take 'er for a whirl (and I thought I had managed to kick the Hengband habit, too...)

Best of luck further developing the variant; sounds like a bunch of other folks are looking forward to checking out the result as well!

[dzhang]

Hi guys, thanks for all the support. Just wanted to let people know that I am working on this (albeit rather slowly, since I'm drowning in RL work..)

Mostly, I've been separating the ideas into "Easy to implement" and "Bitch in implement" bins, and have working on implementing ones from the former (with the hope that all of the latter bin will eventually be implemented in some form or other).

In the mean time, don't be holding your breathes for a release any time in the near future..

[kzwix]

Hi,

I'm quite new on these forums, though I've known of *bands for a long time, now. I'm a huge fan of Hengband and it's large choice of races and classes, and I like ToME very much too, for it's skill and abilities system (at least, for it's idea of a skill & abilities system, even if it's system is underdevelopped, I think)

I've been interested in compiling Hengband (for a start) and looking at the code, in an effort to gather accurate spoiler information, and maybe implement ideas I had. To no avail, unfortunately.


I'm a computer science engineer (in my graduating year), and the code almost gave me a heart attack. Well, ok, I'm exagerating a bit, but it IS a huge mess, and lacks "good programming practices" a lot. For example, it lacks comments, explicit variable names, it lacks a lot of headers (which are useful for giving an overview of a file's contents, even if nobody ever includes it), and it most of all lacks modularity (you know, *small*, *human-readable* functions) and logical "storage" of the code. At least, for an outsider. Oh, and it lacks a tutorial file, describing where to find what, and the rough works of the game...


I know I'm being very critical, and I ask you to forgive me, but I had to let it out. Now, on a more constructive side (if the critics weren't constructive already), I wonder wether a code refactoring could be interesting, or would lose "experienced" *band devs more than it would help newcomers dive in the code ?

[Pete Mack]

Start by taking a look at one of the 'bands that have been updated a bit--angband and FAangband arguably have the most refactoring. The comments and variable names are still primitive, but function names and .h and .c files use better conventions.