[Announce] Cthangband 6.9 Release

[Dean Anderson]

In case it weren't already obvious from the title, I've released a new version of Cthangband. There's no real change in gameplay in this version, it's mostly about improving the front-end.

Previously I'd put in a kind of cross between a splash screen and a launcher, from which you could set the game options (window size, font, sound and music volume), and then the main menu was a bit of an archaic affair where you had a list of buttons to press to do various things.

I've improved that by ditching the splash screen completely and putting a proper menu on the main screen instead, with an options screen to change the settings.

I've also put a similar pop-up menu in the game itself, so now instead of asking if you want to quit when you press escape it pops up the menu which lets you quit back to the main menu or directly to the desktop, or lets you get to the options panel in the middle of a game without having to quit.

Changes:

• Fixed embarrassing grammatical error in Mystic's class description.
• Reorganised command summary page.
• Removed potentially triggering references to suicide.
• Mentalism powers now renamed to mentalism talents to avoid confusion with mutant or racial powers.
• When asking how many of an item you wish to purchase, the upper limit is now capped at how many you can afford.
• Removed level titles because most of them didn't make sense.
• Randomly generated names can no longer accidentally be longer than the max length for player-typed names.
• New, more intuitive, menu-based front end.
• Options (sound, font, etc.) can now be changed in-game.
• High score table can still be viewed even if there are no high scores.
• Additional savegame slot added.
• Added how mana works to the documentation.

The new version can be downloaded from Git here.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Question: Since you already have your variant on github, do you have any objections to Gwarl having this compiled and placed on his angband.live webserver. It will be easier to understand playthroughs and bug-finding this way. I don't recall if this was requested before

[Dean Anderson]

I have no objection, but I think it would take a lot of effort to do so.

Don't forget that Cthangband is written in C# rather than C, so it can't be simply dropped in as an alternate to other variants without some kind of interface layer.

Plus, while the gameplay is still the same as Angband, the program's architecture is completely different. For example, when I look at the angband.live FAQ it talks about preference files and terminals, neither of which are things that Cthangband has.

And as you can tell just from the changes listed in my announcement post, the front-end for Cthangband is very different to that of regular Angband.

So I don't mind, but I doubt it's doable unless someone is up for a fairly major challenge.