Cleanup

Angband 2.7.0: Ben Harrison and his cleanup

In the last half of 1994, Ben Harrison had been playing with the Angband code, interested in writing a Borg for the game. To accomplish this, he started rewriting and cleaning up code.

Ben used a Mac, and so he naturally started with the Mac port of the game, which at the time was still at version 2.6.1. This port, by Keith Randall, added support for colour and multiple terminal windows, and so you can thank him for colour in Angband today.

Subsequently, he had altered the code substantially enough that he felt a release was warranted, and on the first day of 1995, Ben made his code available, under the name "Angband 2.7.0", meeting very little resistance and taking over the job of maintainership.

Angband 2.7.0 was virtually a rewrite; it was much cleaner (and proportionally buggier) than the versions which came before it, and amongst other things, allowed very simple porting to new platforms. By the time most of the bugs were cleaned up, by 2.7.2, there were ports to many new platforms, including X11 and various IBM machines, and by 2.7.4, there were also OS/2, Windows, Amiga and Linux available.

2.7.5 and 2.7.6 added important capabilities such as macros and user pref files, and continued to clean up the source. Angband 2.7.8 was released to the major ftp archives as the first "stable" version in a year or so, with new help and spoiler files, plus a variety of minor tweaks and some new features.

After Angband 2.7.8 was released, Ben created a web site to keep track of all the changes made in each version (though a few may have been missed), and started on the 2.7.9 series. These were numbered, misleadingly, as 2.7.9v1 through 2.7.9v6, but really each were rather major updates. The game returned to a more normal versioning scheme with the release of Angband 2.8.0.

After the release of Angband 2.8.3, Ben's free time was more and more occupied by his work. He released a beta version of Angband 2.8.5, which introduced many new features, but this was to be his last release.

An unofficial version of the game — 2.8.3h — by Robert Ruehlmann, incorporated three popular patches (the Easy Patch by Tim Baker, for opening doors and disarming traps without specifying the direction, Greg Wooledge's random artifacts patch, and Keldon Jones's monster AI improvements), and it was gaining popularity. So it came that in March 2000, Robert offered to take over Angband and started to fix the remaining bugs in the Angband 2.8.5 beta.