This page contains information and recent news about the Angband Borg.
These pages are woefully incomplete. The actual source code is probably the best place to look for detailed information about the Borg for now.
The "Borg" is an automatic player of Angband. This means that, basically, it can actually "play" Angband for you, "looking" at the screen, analyzing the current situation, and sending appropriate "keypress" codes to the game engine, as if it was a person sitting at the keyboard.
There are many different "Borg" engines, much of the information on this page is general to all of them, but other information is directed towards the "Ben Borg", from which all known Borgs are derived. The Ben Borg is maintained by Ben Harrison along with the Angband game itself, so there is always a version which works with the most recent version of Angband.
Internally, the Borg functions by maintaining a list of "possible goals", which he evaluates in sequence until he finds one which appears viable. He then executes one step along that goal, and waits for a result from the world. This repeats forever. Some goals are simple, such as destroying any items in the pack which are worthless. Some are more complex, such as, given a set of items, determine the optimal set of equipment, and wear the most useful, currently unworn, item from this set. Others are interacting goals, such as flowing towards the closest monster, avoiding dangerous monsters and grids, and knowing that once the monster is close enough, other goals will activate, such as attacking the monster with a weapon or spells. A complete list of goals can be found in the source code, along with a lot of other information.
Angband 2.8.3 will include a new version of the Borg.
The Angband Borg now has its own web page.
The latest sounce for the "Ben Borg", which works with Angband 2.8.0, is available at the ftp site as "/angband/Borg/borg-ben.tar.gz". See the "Borg" page for more information. The Ben Borg is also available in special precompiled versions of Angband 2.8.0 for the Macintosh and Windows, but these versions are completely unsupported.
The Borg is distributed as a set of source files, which must be compiled and linked into the Angband executable by adding the Borg source files to the Makefile or Project file, and recompiling, with "ALLOW_BORG" defined.
It is very important that you obtain "Borg Code" which is compatible with your version of Angband. The easiest way to do this is to simply obtain the Ben Borg code at the same time you obtain the source code, since a new version of the Borg is uploaded whenever the source code changes, or to be more precise, soon after a new version of Angband is uploaded.
Currently the Borg is only included with a few of the official pre-compiled versions of Angband, and then only in a special compilation marked with the "-ben" suffix. Until recently, it was only distributed in source form, but a whole bunch of people requested a pre-compiled Borg for the Macintosh and Windows platforms. It is important to remember that, in its current form, the Borg is not very intelligent, and a pre-compiled Borg cannot be tweaked as needed to modify its behavior. Including the Ben Borg in a distribution increases the executable size by about 100K, and actually using it requires another 400K of memory.
There are several available "Borg commands", which are entered after the initial "^Z" keypress. A brief description of each command is given below for reference purposes, use the "?" borg-command when in doubt.
Go back to the Angband Borg Home Page
See also Ben Harrison's Home Page / Ben Harrison / benh@phial.com