Would you like to chat with other angband players?

[Mark]

I don't play many games; I tend to play a small number of games each quite a lot. Angband is one of those.

Years ago, World of Warcraft was too. WoW forums were nice for sharing ideas; but it was also nice to share more moment-to-moment happenings through 'guild chat' - like 'ooh I found this sword' or 'would you use x or y for doing z?'.

Would Angband players like a sort of community game chat that could run in game, or could just as easily be a IM program running outside the game dedicated to sharing angband as it's played?

If it were in-game, it could auto-notify the Angband community upon dying, hitting lvl 50, killing Sauron, etc. (i.e. interesting but very limited things to avoid spam)

Love or hate it?

[Philip]

You might want to ask on the Tome4 forums or something, since Tome4 actually has that. I can't say how useful it is, since my firewall is hard to turn off and blocks that kind of thing. I have used the #tome IRC channel instead and it worked well. I think it would be easiest to just set up an #angband IRC channel.

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by Philip

You might want to ask on the Tome4 forums or something, since Tome4 actually has that. I can't say how useful it is, since my firewall is hard to turn off and blocks that kind of thing. I have used the #tome IRC channel instead and it worked well. I think it would be easiest to just set up an #angband IRC channel.

There already is one! On irc.freenode.net.

[Philip]

Oh, in that case, there isn't much of a problem, I guess. IRC clients are not hard to find, and angband does not prevent other programs from running normally.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by takkaria

There already is one! On irc.freenode.net.

I think the tome chat is great, and I think it'd be awesome to integrate an irc channel into the game. This is probably not too hard to do, right?

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by fizzix

I think the tome chat is great, and I think it'd be awesome to integrate an irc channel into the game. This is probably not too hard to do, right?

You'd have to find an IRC module and integrate it as a separate term window, and then you'd have to handle funneling input to that window when it has focus; I think that's it.

But personally, given that Angband doesn't totally take over your computer while it's running, I'm perfectly happy to use a separate IRC client. I guess bundling one in (and defaulting it to go to #angband) would get people who don't know about IRC into the community, though...

[debo]

I think a more interesting thing would be to have an angband server with persistent scoreboard, chardumps etc. and then have events on that server broadcasted to #angband. (Sort of like alt.nethack.org, crawl servers, etc.)

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by debo

I think a more interesting thing would be to have an angband server with persistent scoreboard, chardumps etc. and then have events on that server broadcasted to #angband. (Sort of like alt.nethack.org, crawl servers, etc.)

Yeah, the key thing is setting up everything automatically so that a new player doesn't have to jump through any hoops to get their character out there or to interact with other players. We could give an opt-in screen when the game is first booted, and and options menu to switch it off. Then the player would get chat functionality loaded in and we could also use it to auto-upload dumps everything a character save is made.

[Derakon]

I think it'd be sufficient to have an IRC window. When you enable it, by default it uses your character name as your nick, or it remembers the nick you used last.

Automatic leaderboards and the like would be fantastic of course, and would need to be opt-in IMO.

[krazyhades]

I'd enjoy the ability to chat with other *banders live while in or contemplating a game. Sometimes I'm in the angband and/or angband-dev channels, but at least yet not that often.