FroxComposband

Disclaimer

FroxComposband may ruin your social life, work productivity, or daily exercise routine. You play the game at your own risk; in no event shall the FroxComposband authors owe you a new keyboard, or be liable to you for any other direct, indirect, punitive, magical, or other injuries or damages of any nature whatsoever.

What is FroxComposband?

FroxComposband is a single-player roguelike dungeon-crawler descended from Angband and Moria, and much more recently from the excellent FrogComposband. It keeps Frog's impressive class, race, monster, dungeon, and item variety, while incorporating over 50 fixes and dozens of quality-of-life updates and UI improvements, along with compatibility with and import of saves from older FrogComposband versions.

Downloads

Platform	Package	Size	Alternate	Size
	Windows ZIP	8.17 MB
	macOS Intel DMG	5.94 MB	macOS Apple Silicon DMG	5.75 MB
	Linux .deb package	4.84 MB	Linux standalone tar.gz	7.36 MB

How to install manually

Linux

Instructions originally by Chris Kousky, lightly edited.

Download and unpack the source archive, or clone the git repository:

git clone https://github.com/gliktch/froxcomposband.git

Make sure you have the appropriate development packages installed. For example, on Ubuntu or Mint:

sudo apt-get install autoconf gcc libc6-dev libncurses-dev libx11-dev

If that does not work on your distro, try libncursesw6-dev instead.

From the root of the source archive:

sh autogen.sh
./configure
make clean
make

To install, you may need to elevate your credentials:

sudo make install

or:

su
make install
exit

Then run FroxComposband as desired:

froxcomposband -- -n<number of windows>

for normal ASCII graphics, or:

froxcomposband -g -- -n<# of windows>

for 8x8 tile graphics.

You can override user and save paths without moving the full lib tree:

froxcomposband -du=~/Documents/Frox -ds=~/Documents/Frox/save -- -n1

Some users have reported installation problems when compiling under Linux and macOS. Running ./configure --with-no-install will bypass this issue by building an executable to run in place.

You can change game windows' font, location, and size with environment variables, for example:

ANGBAND_X11_FONT='-*-*-medium-r-normal--24-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1' \
froxcomposband -- -n

You can set ANGBAND_X11_FONT_n for a specific window n. Window locations are ANGBAND_X11_AT_X_n and ANGBAND_X11_AT_Y_n. Window sizes are ANGBAND_X11_COLS_n and ANGBAND_X11_ROWS_n.

Thanks to Nick McConnell for implementing and improving building under Linux/macOS.

Linux development with AddressSanitizer

For development, doing an install is often undesirable. Try:

sudo apt-get install clang-3.5 llvm-3.5
sh autogen.sh
./configure SANITIZE_FLAGS=-fsanitize=address --with-no-install CC=clang-3.5
make clean
make -j4
ASAN_SYMBOLIZER_PATH=/usr/bin/llvm-symbolizer-3.5 ./froxcomposband -g -u<Savefile> -- -n1

Never pass sanitizer flags through CFLAGS, as sanitizing configure causes it to fail. Instead, configure appends SANITIZE_FLAGS to CFLAGS and LDFLAGS once it has finished generating test programs. See configure.ac.

The build now places the game binary in the repository root automatically.

I like to develop with the address sanitizer enabled at all times. This works best with clang rather than gcc. Of course, 3.5 should be replaced with whatever current version of clang you have available.

Fonts on Linux: My experience with Linux has been that the fonts are often just plain awful. Here I document how I managed to install better fonts and use them in FroxComposband. I spent nearly a day on this, so I am hoping this might prove useful to somebody else. But mostly, it is here to remind me how I did so I do not stumble so much next time.

1. Install some better fonts, for example:

   sudo apt-get install fonts-liberation

2. See what fonts are on your system that FroxComposband can use:

   xlsfonts

   Notice that the new fonts are not there.

3. Find where the new fonts were installed, for example:

   fc-list | grep liberation

4. Bang head on wall in frustration.

5. Tell the X server about the fonts:

   cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation/
   su
   mkfontscale
   mkfontdir
   exit
   cat fonts.dir
   xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation
   xset fp rehash
   xlsfonts | grep liberation

6. Now try to find a font you like. For example:

   cd [path to froxcomposband]
   ANGBAND_X11_FONT='-misc-liberation mono-medium-r-normal--20-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1' ./froxcomposband -mx11

   You can play with the point size since these are vector fonts. I chose 20pt because my eyes suck.

7. Smile. Grab a beer to recover from step 4.

Curses

Curses is for Linux, of course, so everything said above also applies here. To run with a single big terminal:

./froxcomposband -mgcu -uCrusher

To add additional terminal windows, you need to specify sub-options. You can configure, from the command line, a strip of terminals on the right-hand side of the screen, on the bottom of the screen, or both.

For example:

./froxcomposband -mgcu -uCrusher -- -right 57x26,*

This specifies that the right-hand strip will be 57 columns wide and will contain two additional terminals. The first one, on top, will be 57x26 while the second terminal will be 57x(LINES-26). These terminals will be numbered 1 and 2 respectively.

Another example:

./froxcomposband -mgcu -uCrusher -- -bottom -bottom *x10

This adds a bottom strip 10 rows high, containing a single additional terminal window numbered as Term-1.

You can combine -right and -bottom in either order. For example:

./froxcomposband -mgcu -uCrusher -- -right 57x26,* -bottom *x10

Here, Term-1 and Term-2 are on the right strip, while Term-3 is on the bottom strip. Term-0, the main terminal, is in the top left and uses the remaining space. The map terminal will always use as much room as possible.

The order of -right and -bottom is significant, since it affects both the child terminal numbering and the overlap region in the bottom-right corner.

For example:

./froxcomposband -mgcu -uCrusher -- -bottom *x10 -right 57x26,*

You cannot specify more than seven child terminals.

Windows

Download the binary archive for Windows, unzip it anywhere you have full permissions, and launch froxcomposband to play.

To compile the source code in MinGW:

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-win
make

MinGW sometimes randomly chokes on one of these steps, in which case you will need to redo that step.

Basics

The in-game documentation covers a great deal of the game. Press ? to activate the help system, then select your favorite topic; for example, press a twice for General Information, a followed by b for an introduction to the help files and how best to read them, or a followed by j for the Newbie Guide. If you get lost in the depths of the help system, press ! to return to the help system's main page.

Help files can also be generated as HTML files for viewing outside the game in your favorite browser.

If you are still stuck, you can usually find friendly people at angband.live who will try to help you out.

Commands

Again, please refer to the in-game help: press ? for help and then c for Commands. Choose the section that interests you. Command Descriptions is a separate, lengthy file that explains all commands in detail.

Most of this file was inherited from PosChengband and later adapted through FrogComposband into FroxComposband.