That's what worries me. Angband has been developed enormous speed in last year or two and still that low number of votes. It should have more votes from people from here alone.

Maybe that "fast development" has actually driven people off the game, not the other way around. Also my perception about game development currently is that nothing is getting done for actual game, only to coders new playground the v4. At least I haven't heard that anything in it is even considered for actual game. That leads to perceived stagnation as you so accurately put it.

So: those that know what is happening don't vote because they do not like the current vanilla, and those that don't know what is happening perceive it as stagnate game.

I hope that is a wrong impression.

People can't have it both ways. v4 was created because there were lots of complaints that V was changing too fast. So V will be changing much more slowly in future - if that's perceived as "stagnation", that's too bad. It's actually what people asked for.

Those who have been paying attention will see that bugfixes are consistently ported from v4 back to V because nobody objects to bugs being fixed. Beyond that, neither V nor v4 has seen much activity in the last couple of months because devs are all busy with RL. Anyone who wants to make uncontroversial changes to V, or make changes to v4 which they want to demonstrate are so popular that they can get ported back to V, is very very welcome to do so. We still, as always, welcome pull requests from additional devs - anyone is welcome to join the devteam at any time.

I wouldn't read too much into the V vote. It would be higher if there was actually a get-out-the-vote campaign. Younger funkier games tend to do better in the Ascii Dreams poll anyway.

The level of activity here (especially chardumps) may be a better indicator.

A.

I found a bit unclear what do you mean by get-out-the-vote campaign :confused:

Agreed

On vote getting: For example, Dungeons of Dredmor and ToME 4 leverage social media/twitter followers/etc to let people know that the vote even exists and hopes their energized fanbase will head to the site and get counted.

Angband, thus far, lacks that "media" angle that can make some waves to get picked up by Rock, Paper, Shotgun or anywhere else that PC gaming folk a tad outside the mainsteam are apt to pay attention to and gain new bookmarks/twitters/etc to follow based on whatever interesting story.

Part of this is a long-standing perception issue of Angband = Grind same as Nethack = Complex, whereas the lack of updates to the latter, Nethack base at least, counts towards the mystique of it all yet that there HAS been updates to the former never seem to break past the "Grind" perceived aspect as it dwarfs the lot of it.

IMO this can be attributed to a lot of the new RL's having graphics/better graphics/animation. I know Angband has never been about graphics, but for a younger generation that never knew any less than 16-bit color, colorful things that move about the screen count for something, have you played ToME4? That and what getter77 said. I wouldn't pin this on recent development, not by a long shot.

Let's just see where the winners are in 20 or 30 years. Angband has nothing to prove.

A timely article arrives that also kind of lends to what buzzkill and myself have mentioned....and indirectly has a tiny, tiny chance of spawning an interesting sounding new Angband variant fork in the comments section somehow.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011...in-roguelikes/

Speaking of which, was Shockbolt's tileset incorporated into Angband? I saw when he finished it, but I wasn't sure what happened from there.

Last I knew he was assembling them into a tileset and was then never heard from again, but I'm not in the loop... assuming there is a loop.

This made me think of the scene from Monty Python "The horrendous Black Beast lunged forward! Escape for Arthur and his knights seemed hopeless... when suddenly, the animator suffered a fatal heart attack!"

I really hope that everything in the world of Shockbolt is A-OK.

You guys made me feel guilty, so I went back and changed my vote. I originally selected just Brogue. Went back to include all the games I had spent some time playing this year (Angband, Quickband, Brogue, and ToME 4).

I've downloaded FA but haven't played yet :( Also have been intrigued by Fay but wasn't sure about the OSX compatibility, so haven't tried that either.