Angband
April 13th, 2007
Guest blogger: Gollum (Smeagol)
Where isst it? So it iss back – so fissh, the fish, raw and wriggling, he hasst brought its back!
Angband, the Hells of Iron, yest, the ancient ASCII roguelike, child spawn of Moria and VMS, it iss here once more. We wants it!
You hasst not seen it, Angband? But perhapss you have seen one like it, the filthy, filthy NetHack, yess, full of such stupids and jokeses, and no Smeagol! We hates it for ever! But we loves Angband, yess, Angband has Smeagol and the fat hobbitses and yes, it has my preciouss! We loves it, Angband!
We hass thought it lost. When OS X was a little child and hungry for software, we knows how it calls to fissh. We knows how fissh missed Angband, dearly missed Smeagol, yes. And we knows how fissh stoles it, and worked his tricksy little magic, so he could go down into a Carbonized Angband on OS X. And we knows fissh did, and it was easy, Carbon madess it simple.
But fissh hasst brought it to Cocoa, now, all fresh and it glitterses so subpixel pretty with Quartz, and resizesss so smooth, and animates with pretty graphics! So precious to fissh.
And ssuch love for Angband so fissh made a borg screensaveres! So now you can visits Smeagol and wring the filthy little neck of Saruman and murderes the fat Morgoth in your sleep! The screensaveres, yes!
Goes there now, fat hobbitses! The game and the screensaveres and the source codess! Angband need you, yess!
Edit: fissh has fixed the problem with the screensaveres needing Angband to have been launched first. It should work no problems now.
The Internet!
π = 3.2860203432
Excellent!
There goes any free time I would have had 
Somehow I had never connected fish of carbon Angband with fish of this blog. π cheers for fish!
Simon
Oh my, frog knows how many hours of my teenaged life I spent playing Angband. I fear downloading this may turn out to be a rather bad idea. Thank you.
Having never played Angband before, this is the perfect way of getting me into a new, deadly addiction.
This is unquestionably the finest screensaver ever developed.
So cool. 
Strangely, though, while the screensaver works fine when I try to Test it in the screensaver preferences, it doesn’t seem to work automatically. It flickers up for a brief moment, then shows the username-password dialog.
Gary Patterson
Angband is without a shadow of a doubt the best game in the history of all games, anywhere.
Sure, the graphics might be lacking and the sound is non-existant, but the gameplay is great and non-repetitive. Well, not too repetitive at any rate. Actually some of the time you feel like you’re going through the motions, but that’s not *all* of the time.
The point stands – Angband is the crowning achievement of gaming. Everything before was just leading up to it, and everything after is just momentum, slowly dying down. How can anything be better than perfection?
Fish,
It’s been a while. I don’t have Mac OSX, so I will refrain from downloading it, but didn’t you aught to have a link to the angband from your main ridiculousfish.com page? You do for Hex fiend….
And try to post a bit more regularly.
James
Is there any chance that the screen saver will one day save state, starting where it left off the last time? I’m afraid to use my computer now, because it would kill the poor level 19 Human Ranger that the bot has been working on for hours and hours.
Argh! You evil, evil fisshy, pointing reminding me about Angband! That’s the sole reason I got such a poor degree mark! Umm, thank you.
GaryP
I’ll second Andre Arko’s message – is there any way to save the game when the screensaver is interrupted, and re-load it when the screensaver starts again? Maybe there could be an option to force a new character, just in case the game gets bogged down in the deeper levels of Angband.
There’s a new maintainer for Angband and all… (Andrew Sidwell).
Web forums are up on http://angband.oook.cz/forum for anyone interested.
Fish, did you port from the new Angband SVN repository?
When I run the Screensaver for some minutes to hours and then stopp it, the screen fades between my applications and black very fast for up to (about) 60 times.
Also If I stare at the screensaver for a longer time, it crashes.
Can I assist you in finding that bug? (I’m using the 32 bit graphics)
Hey, I have narrowed the error down further, the flash between black and the screen after the screensaver is disabled only happens if the option “pause after messages” is enabled.
The Crash however I couldn’t reliably reproduce.
There is a third problem though, that is, with no pause after messages and maximum speed for the borg after some time (~Â 10 to 20 minutes) the borg just stops and sits around. That is, it doesn’t crash, it just sits around doing nothing.
Other than that, keep up the great work!
cu Martin
p.s.: Oh and by the way: your Blog doesn’t handle international domain names for the website… thats why I had to put punicode this time…
GaryP
I’ve had issues with the screensaver on dual screens. Corruption, errors and needing to restart with another screensaver. That sort of thing.
Cool game, thanks for porting this!
Henrik
Cool. But I can’t get the screensaver to work, it complains about me not having a proper BORG.TXT. The file is present in the package, so I don’t know what’s wrong (my only guess is that it might have something to do with me using case-sensitive HFS+, but I’m stabbing in the dark here). Bummer.
Henrik
I figured it out (with a little help from GDB). It turns out that the case-sensitive HFS+ is the culprit. After renaming ~/Library/Application Support/Angband3/user/BORG.TXT to borg.txt things work!
breath
I am here to re-report two bugs that others have seen:
– With a second monitor, the screensaver never makes it past the title screen before crashing. It also seems to mess up the color temperature on my primary display (MBP screen), which is then cured by opening up the Displays control panel. Weird.
– I’ve also seen the “repeatedly flashing the screen about 60 times after coming out of screensaver mode” bug, but it wasn’t reproducible and wasn’t related to the amount of time the screensaver was running.
Top marks though overall, terrifically entertaining.
Jim
I think there is a problem with the screen saver not working on Snow Leopard. Thanks for the port!
