"Core" Angband?

[GSN]

I just hit upon an idea to make a "core" version of Vanilla.

It would be stripped of practically everything - items, monsters, spells, races, classes, dungeons features etc. Only 1 race and 1 class would remain in order to go through character generation smoothly. There would be no shops in the town, or the player would start right in an empty dungeon level. The player would have no skills. Attack code and AC mechanics would be removed etc. Code related to the interface should probably stay, unless too closely tied to mechanics (character screen).

This is to free variant makers from the constraints of "traditional" RPGs. If someone would want to make a KoL-inspired variant, or a collectible card roguelike (CCR), they would have to start from the scratch anyway.

It entails more than just code pruning, since some stuff is hardwired into the game and dependent on certain arrays (having no items and monsters will surely cause dungeon generation to hang, unless circumvented).

Which code parts do you think would have to be removed, and which ones must absolutely stay, if only of the trouble to rewrite them?

[pav]

Perhaps T-Engine will soon offer what you call for here?

[zaimoni]

#define CORE_ANGBAND 1

should be sufficient, if the #ifdef blocks are placed reasonably....

[Neil Stevens]

Originally Posted by pav

Perhaps T-Engine will soon offer what you call for here?

Yeah; take a look at the ODE module for T-Engine 3. The engine is ready for developers, and in fact is so far along we're now actually starting early ToME 3 playtesting. If you're removing all the niggly formulas and things that are Angband-specific, I don't see why not to go ODE here.