FAAngband MacOS Compiling Advice / Alternatives

[ItsRD]

I rediscovered Angband late last year after about 15 years away from the game (played Moria, Umoria, Angband, Sangband, Zangband, and Oangband in the 90s and early 2000s).

Tried FAAngband and loved the wilderness with multiple towns and dungeons and appreciated that the combat was built on [O], which had been my favorite back in the day. Unfortunately, a few weeks later I upgraded my old Mac (which was running MacOS 10.9.5) to a new machine (running 10.14.4) and I am now unable to get any of the pre-compiled versions of [FA] to launch.

So, I have two questions:

(1) How feasible is it for a novice to compile the game themselves for MacOS? I'm willing to struggle through it if there is a reasonable chance of success. I see instructions for compiling [V] at rephial.org but, from browsing through some other forum posts, it sounds like those instructions may not work for some/many/any variants. Additional Background: My coding experience has been limited to making some of the world's most basic pong and asteroids games in my high school computers class 20+ years ago and a pretty basic website with Austin Powers sound clips when the internet was young. I can likely follow clear written instructions, but have basically no personal knowledge or experience to help me through the process.

(2) Can you suggest any other variants that are similar to [FA] or otherwise worth trying and that are available pre-compiled and will work on an up-to-date version of MacOS? I have Sil and it works, but isn't quite Angband-y enough for me.

Thanks!

[EpicMan]

I don't know which variants are available on Macs but I can tell you FAAngband can be played on angband.live (website where you can play Angband games on and/or watch other play); it was created by Gwarl from these forums.


I don't know of any variant that has FAAngband's wilderness exactly but there is a line of variants from Zangband that have a world map with multiple dungeons and towns . The current variants are Composband and FrogComposband, which forked from PosChengband. Poschengband came through several variants from Hengband, which was my favorite 'band growing up.

Tome 2 (Troubles of MIddle Earth, not the newer Tales of Majeyal) also has a world map, towns and dungeons. It is also a lot of fun.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by ItsRD

(1) How feasible is it for a novice to compile the game themselves for MacOS? I'm willing to struggle through it if there is a reasonable chance of success. I see instructions for compiling [V] at rephial.org but, from browsing through some other forum posts, it sounds like those instructions may not work for some/many/any variants. !

FA should compile for MacOS just like Vanilla:

1. Make sure you have Xcode installed so you have a compiler
2. Open a terminal, and cd into the faangband/src directory
3. Type

   make -f Makefile.osx dist

This should result in you having an FAangband.App appbundle in the faangband directory, which you can then put wherever it suits you.

Have a go, and report back any problems you are having.