Hey, it's me again!
Back in the depths of time I wrote a variant called Cthangband, and it seemed to be quite popular at the time.
However, I made a rather large mistake with Cthangband when I made a large-scale change to the game that removed the class/level system and switched it over to using a purely skill based system instead in Cthangband 4.0.0. Although I quickly released a patch to fix a few errors (4.0.1), after lots of play I came to realise that I didn't actually like the new mechanics. Given that other people seemed to like the skill system, I didn't want to simply take it back out, so I announced that I was up for passing Cthangband over to someone else to maintain, and I went off and made Hellband instead - which was far more "traditional", in that not only did it have the more usual class/level system, it also had the normal single-town-single-dungeon layout.
The person who took on Cthangband was someone called David Thornley.
Recently, I've been playing a bit of Vanilla and a bit of Yeekband (a quick tweak of the modern Angband codebase that I did, but it barely changes enough to be considered a variant) and it occurred to me that I really missed the gonzo everything-including-the-kitchen-sink feel of Zangband and Cthangband.
After some searching online, I've managed to track down the source code for Cthangband and Hellband (a corrupted back-up disk years ago trashed my own copy of the code) and I've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of weeks playing it again.
For my own personal use, I've now put together a "Cthangband 5.0.0" version. Basically, I've started with the Cthangband 3.1.2 codebase (the last version before I took out the class/level system) and then selectively re-added the best of other the 4.0.0 and Hellband changes; along with a few new tweaks.
So the question is, whatever happened to Cthangband?
From what I can see, David Thornley released one or maybe two more versions after taking it over, but then everything went quiet. There also seems to be something called "sCthangband" out there, but I don't know who did that or how its related to Cthangband. Most of the websites that show up in Cthangband searches seem to 404 these days (including my own old Cthangband and Hellband sites, to be fair), so I'm not sure what the current situation is.
Does anyone currently maintain Cthangband? And would anyone object if I "reclaimed" it and released a new version?
Back in the depths of time I wrote a variant called Cthangband, and it seemed to be quite popular at the time.
However, I made a rather large mistake with Cthangband when I made a large-scale change to the game that removed the class/level system and switched it over to using a purely skill based system instead in Cthangband 4.0.0. Although I quickly released a patch to fix a few errors (4.0.1), after lots of play I came to realise that I didn't actually like the new mechanics. Given that other people seemed to like the skill system, I didn't want to simply take it back out, so I announced that I was up for passing Cthangband over to someone else to maintain, and I went off and made Hellband instead - which was far more "traditional", in that not only did it have the more usual class/level system, it also had the normal single-town-single-dungeon layout.
The person who took on Cthangband was someone called David Thornley.
Recently, I've been playing a bit of Vanilla and a bit of Yeekband (a quick tweak of the modern Angband codebase that I did, but it barely changes enough to be considered a variant) and it occurred to me that I really missed the gonzo everything-including-the-kitchen-sink feel of Zangband and Cthangband.
After some searching online, I've managed to track down the source code for Cthangband and Hellband (a corrupted back-up disk years ago trashed my own copy of the code) and I've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of weeks playing it again.
For my own personal use, I've now put together a "Cthangband 5.0.0" version. Basically, I've started with the Cthangband 3.1.2 codebase (the last version before I took out the class/level system) and then selectively re-added the best of other the 4.0.0 and Hellband changes; along with a few new tweaks.
So the question is, whatever happened to Cthangband?
From what I can see, David Thornley released one or maybe two more versions after taking it over, but then everything went quiet. There also seems to be something called "sCthangband" out there, but I don't know who did that or how its related to Cthangband. Most of the websites that show up in Cthangband searches seem to 404 these days (including my own old Cthangband and Hellband sites, to be fair), so I'm not sure what the current situation is.
Does anyone currently maintain Cthangband? And would anyone object if I "reclaimed" it and released a new version?
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