
====== Description, History, and Copyrights ======


--- The History of Sangband ---

     Skills Angband, or Sangband for short, is the oldest variant of Angband
still active; many long-time players remember it with great fondness.  It was
among the first roguelikes anywhere to introduce skills, shapechanges, fully-
fledged natural and necromantic realms, and special character talents.  Whole
webpages have been devoted to its features, and many a game developer has been
influenced by them.

     Sangband grew out of Chris Petit's interest in developing a version of
Angband with a skills system rather than character classes.  It was first
released March the 3rd, 1994, using the Angband 2.5.x codebase as modified in
Bangband (another of his variants).  When Chris Petit graduated, development
stopped for about a year at version 0.8.5 (released April 29th, 1994).
     After that, Michael Gorse took over the project, re-releasing version
0.8.5, then taking the game up to 0.9.3 between 1995 and 1997.
     Julian Lighton happened to stumble across Sangband, and (aided by Greg
Wooledge) found himself fixing bugs as he found them.  First he made them
available on a website, then decided he had too much free time and took over
Sangband officially, releasing 0.9.4 in 1997 and 0.9.5 in 1998.  His work sorted
out the major game bugs and updated the code to Angband 2.8.3.
     In 2001, he passed the maintainership to Leon Marrick, who had played
Sangband almost since the beginning (first bug report in '95) and modeled parts
of his own variant on it.   Scott Yost released beta 15, making a number of
helpful changes and bug fixes.
     (more history between 2001 and the present will appear later)


--- The History of Angband ---

This file was last updated for Angband 3.0.1.

Make sure to read the Forum ("http://angband.oook.cz/forum/") for the most up to
date information about Angband.

Angband has an incredibly complex history, and is the result of a lot of work by
a lot of people, all of whom have contributed their time and energy for free,
rewarded only by the pleasure of keeping alive one of the best freeware games
available anywhere.

The version control files, if they existed, would span more than ten years time,
and more than six different primary developers.  Without such files, we must
rely on simpler methods, such as change logs, source file diffs, and word of
mouth.  Some of this information is summarized in this file.

Please be sure to read the copyright information at the end of this file.


Brief Version History:

First came "VMS Moria", by Robert Alan Koeneke (1985).

Then came "Umoria" (UNIX Moria), by James E. Wilson (1989).

Details about the history of the various flavors of "moria", the direct ancestor
to Angband, can be found elsewhere, and a note from Robert Alan Koeneke is
included in this file.  Note that "moria" has been ported to a variety of
platforms, and has its own newsgroup, and its own fans.

In 1990, Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand, with the help of other students at the
University of Warwick, created Angband 1.0, based on the existing code for
Umoria 5.2.1.  They wanted to expand the game, keeping or even strengthening the
grounding in Tolkien lore, while adding more monsters and items, including
unique monsters and artifact items, plus activation, pseudo-sensing, level
feelings, and special dungeon rooms.

Over time, Sean Marsh, Geoff Hill, Charles Teague, and others worked on the
source, releasing a copy known as "Angband 2.4.frog_knows" at some point, which
ran only on Unix systems, but which was ported by various people to various
other systems.  One of the most significant ports was the "PC Angband 1.4" port,
for old DOS machines, which added color and various other significant changes,
only some of which ever made it back into the official source.

Then Charles Swiger (cs4w+@andrew.cmu.edu) took over, sometime in late 1993,
cleaning up the code, fixing a lot of bugs, and bringing together various
patches from various people, resulting in several versions of Angband, starting
with Angband 2.5.1 (?), and leading up to the release of Angband 2.6.1 (and
Angband 2.6.2) in late 1994.  Some of the changes during this period were based
on suggestions from the "net", and from various related games, including "UMoria
5.5", "PC Angband 1.4", and "FAngband".

Angband 2.6.1 was primarily targetted towards Unix/NeXT machines, and it
required the use of the low level "curses" commands for all screen manipulation
and keypress interaction.  Each release had to be ported from scratch to any new
platforms, normally by creating visual display code that acted as a "curses"
emulator.  One such port was "Macintosh Angband 2.6.1", by Keith Randall, which
added support for color, and which formed the basis for the first release of
Angband 2.7.0.

In late 1994, Charles Swiger announced that he was starting a real job and would
no longer be able to be the Angband maintainer.  This induced some amount of
uproar in the Angband community (as represented by the Angband newsgroup), with
various people attempting to form "committees" to take over the maintenance of
Angband.  Since committees have never given us anything but trouble (think
"COBOL"), there was very little resistance when, on the first day of 1995, Ben
Harrison made his code available, calling it "Angband 2.7.0", and by default,
taking over as the new maintainer of Angband.

Between then and 1999, Ben Harrison transformed Angband, becoming (in many
people's minds) the most important contributor to the game since Robert Koeneke.
The first and most important change he made was a massive code-level cleanup.
This, combined with the development of a generic, OS-independant interface,
allowed simple porting to many new and existing platforms (including X11, IBM
machines, OS2, Windows, Amiga, and Linux), and made possible the explosion of
variants that adds such vigor to the game today.

  Major changes made in this period include:
- macros and keymaps
- user preference files
- user-customizable template files for monsters, objects, ego-items,
  artifacts, vaults, and terrain features.
- more powerful and efficient line of sight, lighting, grid refresh,
  and spell projection code
- better string-handling
- new or rewritten inventory and equipment management, monster processing,
  object creation and effects, and a whole lot more.

After the release of Angband 2.8.3 Ben's free time was more and more occupied by
his work.  He released a beta version of Angband 2.8.5, introducing many new
features, but couldn't give as much attention to maintaining the game as he
wanted to.

So in March 2000, Robert Ruehlmann offered to take over Angband and started to
fix the remaining bugs in the Angband 2.8.5 beta.  The resulting version was to
be released as Angband 2.9.0.  Further bugfixes and a couple of new features -
including many in the realms of user-customizability, with greater control over
ego-items, player races and classes, monsters, items and artifacts - have led to
the current version.


Contributors (incomplete):

Peter Berger, "Prfnoff", Arcum Dagsson, Ed Cogburn, Matthias Kurzke, Ben
Harrison, Steven Fuerst, Julian Lighton, Andrew Hill, Werner Baer, Tom Morton,
"Cyric the Mad", Chris Kern, Tim Baker, Jurriaan Kalkman, Alexander Wilkins,
Mauro Scarpa, John I'anson-Holton, "facade", Dennis van Es, Kenneth A. Strom,
Wei-Hwa Huang, Nikodemus, Timo Pietilä, Greg Wooledge, Keldon Jones, Shayne
Steele, Dr. Andrew White, Musus Umbra, Jonathan Ellis


A Posting from the Original Author of Moria:

From: koeneke@ionet.net (Robert Alan Koeneke) Newsgroups:
rec.games.roguelike.angband,rec.games.roguelike.moria Subject: Early history of
Moria Date: Wed, 21 Feb 1996 04:20:51 GMT

I had some email show up asking about the origin of Moria, and its relation to
Rogue.  So I thought I would just post some text on the early days of Moria.

First of all, yes, I really am the Robert Koeneke who wrote the first Moria.  I
had a lot of mail accussing me of pulling their leg and such.  I just recently
connected to Internet (yes, I work for a company in the dark ages where Internet
is concerned) and was real surprised to find Moria in the news groups...
Angband was an even bigger surprise, since I have never seen it.  I probably
spoke to its originator though...  I have given permission to lots of people
through the years to enhance, modify, or whatever as long as they freely
distributed the results.  I have always been a proponent of sharing games, not
selling them.

Anyway...

Around 1980 or 81 I was enrolled in engineering courses at the University of
Oklahoma.  The engineering lab ran on a PDP 1170 under an early version of UNIX.
I was always good at computers, so it was natural for me to get to know the
system administrators.  They invited me one night to stay and play some games,
an early startrek game, The Colossal Cave Adventure (later just 'Adventure'),
and late one night, a new dungeon game called 'Rogue'.

So yes, I was exposed to Rogue before Moria was even a gleam in my eye.  In
fact, Rogue was directly responsible for millions of hours of play time wasted
on Moria and its descendents...

Soon after playing Rogue (and man, was I HOOKED), I got a job in a different
department as a student assistant in computers.  I worked on one of the early
VAX 11/780's running VMS, and no games were available for it at that time.  The
engineering lab got a real geek of an administrator who thought the only purpose
of a computer was WORK! Imagine...  Soooo, no more games, and no more rogue!

This was intolerable!  So I decided to write my own rogue game, Moria Beta 1.0.
I had three languages available on my VMS system.  Fortran IV, PASCAL V1.?, and
BASIC.  Since most of the game was string manipulation, I wrote the first
attempt at Moria in VMS BASIC, and it looked a LOT like Rogue, at least what I
could remember of it.  Then I began getting ideas of how to improve it, how it
should work differently, and I pretty much didn't touch it for about a year.

Around 1983, two things happened that caused Moria to be born in its
recognizable form.  I was engaged to be married, and the only cure for THAT is
to work so hard you can't think about it; and I was enrolled for fall to take an
operating systems class in PASCAL.

So, I investigated the new version of VMS PASCAL and found out it had a new
feature.  Variable length strings!  Wow...

That summer I finished Moria 1.0 in VMS PASCAL.  I learned more about data
structures, optimization, and just plain programming that summer then in all of
my years in school.  I soon drew a crowd of devoted Moria players...  All at OU.

I asked Jimmey Todd, a good friend of mine, to write a better character
generator for the game, and so the skills and history were born.  Jimmey helped
out on many of the functions in the game as well.  This would have been about
Moria 2.0

In the following two years, I listened a lot to my players and kept making
enhancements to the game to fix problems, to challenge them, and to keep them
going.  If anyone managed to win, I immediately found out how, and 'enhanced'
the game to make it harder.  I once vowed it was 'unbeatable', and a week later
a friend of mine beat it!  His character, 'Iggy', was placed into the game as
'The Evil Iggy', and immortalized...  And of course, I went in and plugged up
the trick he used to win...

Around 1985 I started sending out source to other universities.  Just before a
OU / Texas football clash, I was asked to send a copy to the Univeristy of
Texas...  I couldn't resist...  I modified it so that the begger on the town
level was 'An OU football fan' and they moved at maximum rate.  They also
multiplied at maximum rate...  So the first step you took and woke one up, it
crossed the floor increasing to hundreds of them and pounded you into
oblivion...  I soon received a call and provided instructions on how to 'de-
enhance' the game!

Around 1986 - 87 I released Moria 4.7, my last official release.  I was working
on a Moria 5.0 when I left OU to go to work for American Airlines (and yes, I
still work there).  Moria 5.0 was a complete rewrite, and contained many neat
enhancements, features, you name it.  It had water, streams, lakes, pools, with
water monsters.  It had 'mysterious orbs' which could be carried like torches
for light but also gave off magical aura's (like protection from fire, or
aggrivate monster...).  It had new weapons and treasures...  I left it with the
student assistants at OU to be finished, but I guess it soon died on the vine.
As far as I know, that source was lost...

I gave permission to anyone who asked to work on the game.  Several people asked
if they could convert it to 'C', and I said fine as long as a complete credit
history was maintained, and that it could NEVER be sold, only given.  So I guess
one or more of them succeeded in their efforts to rewrite it in 'C'.

I have since received thousands of letters from all over the world from players
telling about their exploits, and from administrators cursing the day I was
born...  I received mail from behind the iron curtain (while it was still
standing) talking about the game on VAX's (which supposedly couldn't be there
due to export laws).  I used to have a map with pins for every letter I
received, but I gave up on that!

I am very happy to learn my creation keeps on going...  I plan to download it
and Angband and play them...  Maybe something has been added that will surprise
me!  That would be nice...  I never got to play Moria and be surprised...

Robert Alan Koeneke koeneke@ionet.net


Posted by Geoff Hill on the Angband newsgroup on 2004-10-31:

Well, Alex and Andy are the true fathers of Angband. And probably
Andy most of all. He's a talented coder, and I *think* (I could ask
him, perhaps!) that Angband was partly driven by him looking for a
challenge. By this, that he found Nethack a little easy, so wanted a
beefed up hack type variant, and (U)Moria seemed a good base.

And he (and I to a lesser intent) were heavily involved in Warwick LP
Mud and it was a creative time in the games world - the internet was
still fairly fresh - we were using the Joint Academic Network (JANET)
and it is a wonder that anyone ever completed their education!

Andy, to the best of my knowledge, has not ever completed Angband,
although I have heard he has been playing Z (its been a while since I
asked).

When Andy and Alex graduated it was left playable and about 2/3 of the
release it became. Sean and I picked it up from then. I think Sean
was more of a driving force, because he wanted to move it forward to
release. In my case I was just keen to tinker the game balance (I was
the completion specialist, I guess) and add and amend some things.

So we added about 1/3 of the artifacts, monsters, vault types. Added
high resists (up until then we only had the elements). Added new
breathe types. Tweaked game balance. Tweaked player races and added
race special abilities. The most time consuming part was rewriting (or
in some cases writing from scratch) the monster descriptions. It took
me forever! And it is difficult to be creative at 4am after a night
in the bar. Qllqllzuup is witness to that (drunk when that one was
done!).

Some of the artifacts from that time are remarkably untested at
release. I still think of that '1/3' as being 'new' ones and not the
true artifacts, I guess because I had a hand in writing them. So,
ones like Deathwreaker, Tulkas, Bladeturner etc are relatively untried
before release.

One area that Sean and I had a difference in opinion was in the
'Tolkien' element. I felt that it should stay more true to the
Angband theme, and he was less bothered about that. I disagreed with
him putting in Gabriel, Azriel etc as frankly I felt they had no part
in a Tolkien based world. But, no matter, Azriel has made a point of
killing me ever since to put me straight ;-).

Sean and I released it to the wider world (with the help of Charles
Teague? I am not sure when he became involved, I would perhaps have to
ask Sean for more background asI am still in touch with him). Charles
may have become involved after release, or before, I am not certain.

At that point it was only set up to make on a SunOS system, so I
suspect that many people who are better coders than me then went mad
converting it to their own systems.

I suppose if one wanted to tweak the background paragraph with any of
the above, you could, but it is largely correct as it stands. Perhaps
for completness at Sean and I's involvement it could say

'Sean Marsh and Geoff Hill took Angband over when Alex and Andy
graduated from the University of Warwick. They updated Angband with
some much needed depth, and worked remotely with Charles Teague to
release it to the community. ' and then as before about frog-knows.
Charles was not at the Uni, of course. I forget his location, as we
only ever emailed him.
The existing paragraph somewhat suggests that Sean and I released a
'copy' known as frog-knows. I suppose in some respects it was the
first variant of Angband but as it was the only version release it
became vanilla?
If so, that is ironic really, given comments earlier in this thread...



====== Copyrights ======

                          VMS Moria Version 4.8
Version 0.1  : 03/25/83
Version 1.0  : 05/01/84
Version 2.0  : 07/10/84
Version 3.0  : 11/20/84
Version 4.0  : 01/20/85

Modules :
     V1.0  Dungeon Generator      - RAK
           Character Generator    - RAK & JWT
           Moria Module           - RAK
           Miscellaneous          - RAK & JWT
     V2.0  Town Level & Misc      - RAK
     V3.0  Internal Help & Misc   - RAK
     V4.0  Source Release Version - RAK

Robert Alan Koeneke               Jimmey Wayne Todd Jr.
Student/University of Oklahoma    Student/University of Oklahoma





                        Umoria Version 5.2 (formerly UNIX Moria)
Version 4.83 :  5/14/87
Version 4.85 : 10/26/87
Version 4.87 :  5/27/88
Version 5.0  :  11/2/89
Version 5.2  :   5/9/90

James E. Wilson, U.C. Berkeley
                 wilson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU
                 ...!ucbvax!ucbernie!wilson

Other contributors:
D. G. Kneller         - MSDOS Moria port
Christopher J. Stuart - recall, options, inventory, and running code
Curtis McCauley       - Macintosh Moria port
Stephen A. Jacobs     - Atari ST Moria port
William Setzer        - object naming code
David J. Grabiner     - numerous bug reports, and consistency checking
Dan Bernstein         - UNIX hangup signal fix, many bug fixes
and many others...




Copyright (c) 1989 James E. Wilson, Robert A. Keoneke
  This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research, and
  not for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement are
  included in all such copies.

Umoria Version 5.2, patch level 1

Angband Version 2.0   Alex Cutler, Andy Astrand, Sean Marsh, Geoff Hill,
                      Charles Teague.

Angband Version 2.4   : 05/09/1993

Angband Version 2.5   : 12/05/1993 Charles Swiger

Angband Version 2.6   : 09/04/1994 Charles Swiger

Angband Version 2.7   : 01/01/1995 Ben Harrison

Angband Version 2.8   : 01/01/1997 Ben Harrison

Angband Version 2.9   : 10th April 2000 Robert Ruehlmann



Copyright (c) 1997 Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke

This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research, and not
for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement are included in
all such copies.  Other copyrights may also apply.


--- The Sangband copyright ---

Sangband   0.1 - 0.8.5  : Jun 28, 1994  Chris Petit

Sangband 0.8.5 - 0.9.3  : Apr 04, 1997  Michael Gorse (mgorse@wpi.edu)

Sangband 0.9.4 - 0.9.5  : Jul 14, 1998  Julian Lighton (jl8e@fragment.com)

Sangband 1.0.0          : May 26, 2007  Leon Marrick

Copyright (c) 2007
Leon Marrick, Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.  Parts may also be
available under the terms of the Moria license.  For more details, see
"/docs/copying.txt".


--- The Sangband Manual Copyright ---

The Sangband Manual is copyright (c) 2007 Leon Marrick (-LM-) and others.

     This work, or any portions thereof, may be freely adopted, revised,
translated, or converted into other formats, with or without explicit
permission, as long as this copyright is retained on major portions and credit
given otherwise.  Other arrangements may be made by application.


Informal Bibliography
     This work draws upon the following sources:

The Umoria 5.5.2 documentation
     Probable authors:  Robert Alan Koeneke and/or James E. Wilson

The Angband 2.0 documentation
     Probable authors and revisors:  Alexander Cutler and/or Andy Astrand

The Angband 3.0.3 documentation
     Authors and revisors:  Ben Harrison, Robert Ruehlmann, and others.

The Oangband 0.5.2 documentation
     Authors and revisors:  Leon Marrick, Bahman Rabii.

The Angband Macro FAQ
     Author:  Jim Lyon

The Angband FAQ, parts 1 and 2
     Authors and revisors:  Jason Holtzapple, Ben Harrison, James Andrewartha

















