Development
Angband is currently maintained by Andi Sidwell, as head of a loose-knit bunch of coders and variant maintainers who have an interest in improving the game. Development is co-ordinated in the following ways:
- The development mailing list: discussion of planned features, coding issues or what have you.
- The Angband wiki: More detailed plans and notes (such as Feature Requests from users).
- The issue tracker: tracks features, bugs, and contains plans for forthcoming releases.
- The IRC channel: #angband-dev on irc.freenode.net.
If you're interested in contributing, please read the contributing guidelines and the coding guidelines.
Release cycle
Angband (tries to) uses a six-month release cycle, with a prelease version going out a weeks or two before the official release.
Regular releases enable better planning of what features to put in the next release and what to put off for now, and this planning should help avoid putting off releases for months because things aren't quite ready yet—and months can easily turn into years if unforseen troubles crop up. So regular relases provide both a motivational tool for the developers and a guarantee to everyone that a new release will see the light of day, and reasonably soon.
Shorter release cycles than every siz months would leave players constantly catching up, even if there were only minor changes between versions; longer cycles would provide far too much scope for overambition in planning the next version. If there is a change that takes more than six months to implement it can either be broken down into smaller pieces that can be completed or would likely never get finished anyway, so this forces scope in planning.
Some useful resources
- Browse the development code, on Trac.
- Download a nightly build of the latest development version (currently Windows only)
- To get a copy of the development code, install Subversion, and run
svn checkout svn://rephial.org/angband/trunk.