A brief introduction to Tangband:

Team Angband takes the vanilla angband we all know and love and sends it
into a new and exciting direction, that of the adventuring "party"
crawling through dungeons instead of individual heroes.  While controlling
a single character in the Pits of Angband is certainly fun, controlling
multiple characters will greatly add to the gaming experience.

Tangband 0.4.0 is fairly stable, although I would not be surprised if
there were awful bugs floating around in it somewhere.  Savefiles are
now implemented, so significant exploration in the dungeon is now
possible, if difficult due to the lack of decent team-control functions.

Using Tangband 0.4.0 is fairly simple.  Firstly, download it, stick it
in a directory, and compile it.  Note that no libraries are included;
you should edit config.h to point to whatever libraries you normally
use.  It shouldn't do anything to mangle them, but backing them up
might not be a bad idea anyway.  Backing up your savefile is required;
tangband will not yet read a standard angband savefile.

When you start without a savefile, you'll be prompted to make
4 characters.  You can either make them by hand the old fashioned way,
or you can choose "quick-start" which will roll up four random
characters for you.  I recommend the quick start, simply for the
challenge of playing with Half-troll mages and Gnome Warriors :)

Now you're in the game.  You'll notice that your control cycles from
player to player.  This can get annoying; an effective solution when
you want to focus on just one character is to tell the others to go
to sleep.  Just "R1000" on the other three.  When your fourth character
is done with his business, hit KTRL-D; this will 'D'isturb all of the
other characters, waking them up and allowing you to get back to
business.

Now go down into the dungeon, and have some fun ganging up on poor
helpless monsters.  Beware, though; the death of any one character
will terminate the game.  (Don't worry; *real* versions of Tangband
won't do this to you :)  Note that the monsters are somewhat smart:
they will go after the character nearest them, rather than doing
something stupid like always chasing character #1.  However,
flow_by_smell is disabled, so don't expect any brilliance from the
monsters... at least, not yet ;->

Anyway, give it a whirl, see what sorts of bugs you can find, and let
me know what you think.  You can email me at u1006057@warwick.net ;
krpeters@warwick.net might work too :)

Oh, right, I wanted to let you all know what the future for Tangband
holds:

1) An adventurer's guild, where new characters can be hired to replace
	dead or retired (sucky) characters
2) 'L'eader and 'N'ap functions, which massively improve the team handling
	interface:  In 'L'eader mode, the other characters will turn into
	docile pets that can be lead around easily until danger arrives;
	in 'N'ap mode, the other characters will go to sleep while the
	focus character takes care of some business.
3) Improved monster intelligence, capable of hunting out weaker players,
	teaming up to avoid getting slaughtered, and other nastiness
4) Improved mage and priest spellcasting, allowing spellcasters to cast
	defensive and other helpful magics upon the other team members:
	Yes, that means Warriors walking around with Globe of
	Invulnerability ;->
5) Difficulty levels:  Obviously, having four characters instead of one
	makes the game a lot easier.  Future versions will allow you
	to choose how to counter this imbalance, such as through greatly
	increasing the number of monsters per level, increasing their HP's
	and other stats, or decreasing the depth which nasty buggers
	appear.
6) Active and inactive characters:  Why limit yourself to four characters?
	Instead, you'll be able to have 24 or so stashed away in an inn,
	which you can pick and choose among to outfit any particular
	exploration into the dungeon.  I may even implement a method
	to allow players to email their teammembers to one another,
	allowing you to give or trade characters to/with one another.
7) Increased class differentiation:  Since mages will no longer have to
	march into hand-to-hand combat, there's no reason to give them
	nastier magic attacks, while simultaneously crippling their
	physical combat abilities even further...

And that's just the ideas I've come up with so far :)

	Karl
		<marX>