NPPAngband/NPPMoria QT port

[nppangband]

You go Jeff!!! A maintainer that speaks of maintainence. Incredibly rare 'round here. No offence intended to the fledgling, just a babe really, Vanilla maintainer, whom also seem to have some maintainer blood coursing through his veins. This could be the start of a Golden Era.

Yes, I look forward to seeing what he does with it. He has used plenty of NPP ideas in the past, so he clearly has impeccable taste.

Oh, and Buzzkill, I should have mentioned that when I get around to tiles I will probably break up the tileset into hundreds of individual 32x32 files and load them at startup with a pre-set naming convention. That should make it easy to edit tiles and free us of all the mapping difficulties.

[nppangband]

I thought the problem with this was memory management? (i.e. making sure that all memory is freed between restarts) Is that solved?

It will be. Since I am starting with a blank slate and adding bits of NPP code at a time, it is just something I will have to manage. Whenever I add one of the global variables or arrays from Angband I will just make sure it is either freed or zeroed out in between games. This is more important in NPP because the player needs to be able to switch between NPPAngband and NPPMoria because there are a completely different edit files for each game.

Fortunately, memory management is a little easier in C++ than in C, and QT Creator (the QT editor) includes Valgrind, so it seems achievable.

You should get together with that Nick McConnell chappie, I hear he's doing something similar ...

Nick and I have borrowed a lot of code from each other over the years. I don't think this will stop any time soon. Also, AnonymousHero is working on a QT port for a version of TOME. I am sure some of his work will make it into my codebase as well. @AnonymousHero - please feel free to hijack this thread occasionally to talk about what you are working on.

[buzzkill]

... my goal is to build a modern port of NPP using <snip> modern menus and dialog boxes that should be easily used by Angband and other variants.

Angband is a great game that basically runs off of a 25 year old custom-built game engine and game library designed for computers with the capabilities of 6-7 generations ago. I am trying to bring it up-to-date, give it a modern UI...

You go Jeff!!! A maintainer that speaks of maintainence. Incredibly rare 'round here. No offence intended to the fledgling, just a babe really, Vanilla maintainer, whom also seem to have some maintainer blood coursing through his veins. This could be the start of a Golden Era.

[Magnate]

One major change so far: This port will give the player the ability to save and close a character, then open a new one without having to exit and re-start the game.

I thought the problem with this was memory management? (i.e. making sure that all memory is freed between restarts) Is that solved?

Angband is a great game that basically runs off of a 25 year old custom-built game engine and game library designed for computers with the capabilities of 6-7 generations ago. I am trying to bring it up-to-date, give it a modern UI, and reduce the learning curve for new players, and eventually make a version playable on tablets. I think more than half of the source code will be eliminated and/or replaced before I am done.

You should get together with that Nick McConnell chappie, I hear he's doing something similar ...

[nppangband]

The NPP Angband QT port now has a gihub page for its extremely modest start. There is not much to see so far. It just opens a basic window, makes a top menu, and a file menu for starting new games, opening, closing and saving game files, including a 5 most recently played characters section. The classic Angband start screen with the author and copyright information now appears in a dialog box under the "about" section. The open and save-as commands use the standard load/save widget that would found in any modern program, even though right now it just opens and closes simple .txt files.

https://github.com/nppangband/NPPAngband_QT

One major change so far: This port will give the player the ability to save and close a character, then open a new one without having to exit and re-start the game.

As stated in other threads, my goal is to build a modern port of NPP using QT and C++ with modern menus and dialog boxes that should be easily used by Angband and other variants.

Angband is a great game that basically runs off of a 25 year old custom-built game engine and game library designed for computers with the capabilities of 6-7 generations ago. I am trying to bring it up-to-date, give it a modern UI, and reduce the learning curve for new players, and eventually make a version playable on tablets. I think more than half of the source code will be eliminated and/or replaced before I am done.