=== Version Information ===

Halls of Mist has an incredibly complex history, and is the result of a lot of
work by a lot of people, all of whom have contributed their time and energy
for free, being rewarded only by the pleasure they incur from it.

The version control files, if they existed, would span more than ten years
time, and more than six different primary developers.  Without such files,
we must rely on simpler methods, such as change logs, source file diffs, and
word of mouth.  Some of this information is summarized in this file.

Halls of Mist home page is at
(http://www.mikkolehtinen.net/mist).

The best place to discuss Halls of Mist with other players, including the
maintainer of the game, in probably on the the Variants forum of
(http://angband.oook.cz).

If you want to know more about EyAngband, the variant Halls of Mist is based
on, visit the EyAngband home page (http://eyangband.sourceforge.net).

Angband home page can be found at (http://rephial.org/).

Please be sure to read the copyright information at the end of this file.


=== A Brief History of EyAngband and FayAngband===

First came "VMS Moria", by Robert Alan Koeneke (1985).

Then came "Umoria" (Unix Moria), by James E. Wilson (1989).

Details about the history of the various flavors of "Moria", the direct 
ancestor to Angband, can be found elsewhere.  Note that "Moria" is still played
on its own account, having been ported to a variety of platforms, and has its 
own newsgroup, and its own fans.

In 1990, Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand, with the help of other students at the 
University of Warwick, created Angband 1.0, based on the existing code for 
Umoria 5.2.1.  They wanted to expand the game, keeping or even strengthening 
the grounding in Tolkien lore, while adding more monsters and items, including
unique monsters and artifact items, plus activation, pseudo-sensing, level 
feelings, and special dungeon rooms.

Over time, Sean Marsh, Geoff Hill, Charles Teague, and others, worked on the 
source, releasing a copy known as "Angband 2.4.frog_knows" at some point, 
which ran only on Unix systems, but which was ported by various people to 
various other systems.  One of the most significant ports was the "PC Angband 
1.4" port, for old DOS machines, which added color and various other 
significant changes, only some of which ever made it back into the official 
source.

Then Charles Swiger (cs4w+@andrew.cmu.edu) took over, sometime in late 1993, 
cleaning up the code, fixing a lot of bugs, and bringing together various 
patches from various people, resulting in several versions of Angband, starting
with Angband 2.5.1 (?), and leading up to the release of Angband 2.6.1 (and 
Angband 2.6.2) in late 1994.  Some of the changes during this period were based
on suggestions from the "net", and from various related games, including 
"UMoria 5.5", "PC Angband 1.4", and "FAngband".

Angband 2.6.1 was primarily targetted towards Unix/NeXT machines, and it 
required the use of the low level "curses" commands for all screen manipulation
and keypress interaction.  Each release had to be ported from scratch to any 
new platforms, normally by creating visual display code that acted as a 
"curses" emulator.  One such port was "Macintosh Angband 2.6.1", by Keith 
Randall, which added support for color, and which formed the basis for the 
first release of Angband 2.7.0.

During the last half of 1994, Ben Harrison had been playing with the Angband 
source, primarily to investigate the possibility of making some kind of 
automatic player for Angband, like the old "rogue-o-matic" program for the game
"rogue".  The difficulty of compiling a version for the Macintosh, and the 
complexity of the code, prevented this, and so he began cleaning up the code in 
various ways for his own personal use.

In late 1994, Charles Swiger announced that he was starting a real job and 
would no longer be able to be the Angband maintainer.  This induced some amount
of uproar in the Angband community (as represented by the Angband newsgroup), 
with various people attempting to form "committees" to take over the 
maintenance of Angband.  Since committees have never given us anything but 
trouble (think "COBOL"), there was very little resistance when, on the first 
day of 1995, Ben made his code available, calling it "Angband 2.7.0", and by 
default, taking over as the new maintainer of Angband.

Angband 2.7.0 was a very clean (but very buggy) rewrite that, among other 
things, allowed extremely simple porting to multiple platforms, starting with 
Unix and Macintosh, and by the time most of the bugs were cleaned up, in 
Angband 2.7.2, including X11, and various IBM machines.  Angband 2.7.4 was 
released to the "ftp.cis.ksu.edu" site, and quickly gained acceptance, perhaps
helped by the OS2 and Windows and Amiga and Linux ports.  Angband 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 files"
and "spoiler files" for the "online help", 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 
acquired the use of a new develoepement ftp server to supplement the official 
"mirror" server.  This web site is now permanently located at 
http://www.phial.com/).  Unfortunately, the next six versions were numbered 
Angband 2.7.9v1 to Angband 2.7.9v6, but really each were rather major updates.
Angband 2.8.0 and 2.8.1 were released using a more normal version scheme.  
Angband 2.8.2 and 2.8.3 added a few random features, cleaned up some code, and
provided graphics support and such for a few more platforms.

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, introducing many new
features, but couldn't give as much attention to maintaining the game as he 
wanted to.

So in March 2000, Robert Ruehlmann offered to take over Angband and started to 
fix the remaining bugs in the Angband 2.8.5 beta.  The resulting version has 
now been released as Angband 2.9.0, which was soon followed by Angband 2.9.1. 

Around that time, Eytan Zweig, having just finished teaching himself some
basic C skills, decided that the best way to improve them while doing something
productive was to develop his own variant.  Since then, EyAngband has been slowly
evolving, growing from a version of Angband with some slight differences to 
having major re-thinking of some basic gameplay mechanics.  Through it, Eytan
tried to keep true to what I believed are the basic principles of Angband design, 
namely a single, totally random dungeon, where everyone you meet is an enemy. 

As further Angband versions were released, EyAngband strove to keep up with the
changes, incoporating most of the bug fixes and technology updates included in
Angbands 2.9.2-3.0.1, with the major exception of Lua scripting.  During this
period, it has also borrowed code and ideas, to various degrees, from other
variants, especially Oangband, but also ToME (PernAngband) and DrAngband.

In October 2010, Mikko Lehtinen decided to make a little fork of EyAngbang. His
changes didn't require much coding, but they changed the gameplay significantly.
Mikko decided to call the variant FayAngband. Mikko's design goals were to make
FayAngband a more challenging game, while reducing unnecessary tedium.

For a more detailed account of Angband's history, check the "version.txt" file
that accompanies Angband.


=== Copyright Information ===

Copyright (c) 1997 Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke

This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research,
and not for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement
are included in all such copies.  Other copyrights may also apply.

All changes made by Ben Harrison and Robert Ruehlmann are also available
under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.  Note that this doesn't influence
the current distribution, since parts of the source are still only
available under the old Moria/Angband license.  Until all parts of
Angband are distributed under the GPL the only valid license remains
the original Moria/Angband license.

All changes made by Eytan Zweig are public domain, and may be used freely by 
all users insofar as the above licenses are respected for accompanying code.

All changes made by Mikko Lehtinen are public domain, and may be used freely by 
all users insofar as the above licenses are respected for accompanying code.
