[Cthangband] Who (if anyone) is currently maintaining it?

[Dean Anderson]

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?

[getter77]

I can't imagine anybody would object to a "reclaiming" of this sort especially since you'd be going the direction of an alternate "What If?"---could just pick a different naming/numeration sense if it just came down to concerns about confusing the established progression, such that it is.

Reclaim the future from the tyranny of 404's!

[Nick]

So according to the Angband Variant Repository (which you may find useful) David Thornley took Cthangband as far as 3.1.0b, and Kieron Dunbar forked sCthangband from it at that point. Neither has been updated for a long time - I think you're in the clear

[Dean Anderson]

Originally Posted by getter77

I can't imagine anybody would object to a "reclaiming" of this sort especially since you'd be going the direction of an alternate "What If?"---could just pick a different naming/numeration sense if it just came down to concerns about confusing the established progression, such that it is.

Reclaim the future from the tyranny of 404's!

I thought I'd consider this a new major version, since it horribly breaks savegame compatibility; but I'd rather keep calling it Cthangband for thematic (unlike Hellband I've not changed the theme of the game), historical (Cthangband is known to people and I don't want four different named variants), and personal (Cthangband is the variant I've felt was "my baby" more than either of the others I've done) reasons.

Originally Posted by Nick

So according to the Angband Variant Repository (which you may find useful) David Thornley took Cthangband as far as 3.1.0b, and Kieron Dunbar forked sCthangband from it at that point. Neither has been updated for a long time - I think you're in the clear

From there, it looks like - according to his "Update.txt" file - David Thornley only ever released one version of Cthangband (4.1.0, not 3.1.0) after taking it over, and it was only a minor bugfix version.

I suppose I could try to contact him, but after fifteen (!) years it seems a bit rude to try to track him down and contact him out of the blue.

[Derakon]

I dimly recall that sCthangband was "skills Cthangband", so perhaps they decided back then to differentiate the skill- vs. class-based systems by changing the game names.