Battle For Wesnoth Version 1.6 Released

bomanbot writes "The team for the great turn-based, open-source strategy game Battle for Wesnoth has just released the new stable version 1.6 of their popular title. Some of the new version's highlights include a new campaign, new multiplayer scenarios, improved graphics and user interface, and new background music. The full release notes have been posted, and the source code and binary downloads for many different platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X are available as well."

Comments

Source

[Saija]

i just downloaded the source code and compile it in my ubuntu box, seems good and shiny and the option to download addons in the gui is great

Let me be the first to say...

[jonaskoelker]

Let me be the first to say that I for one welcome our weak, slow or dim goblin overlords.

It's interesting that you can log in to the official multiplayer server with your forum credentials. A future possibility might be a ranking system, and approximately even matches; that's one feature of Warcraft III that I like quite a bit.

We always say that the one thing holding back Open Source games is the lack of man-hours devoted to all the artwork. Let me quote http://www.wesnoth.org/start/1.6/ a little:

• Many mainline campaigns have improved storyline prose and new cutscenes or epilogs.
• More campaigns now include references to events in the overall history, adding depth and richness to the narration.
• Our composers have added five new original background tracks: [...]
• The game graphics have been improved with a whole new range of unit portraits. Many more units have full animations and team coloring.
• Forests get more variety with graphics for spring/summer, fall and winter deciduous forest terrains.

How impressive that really is... well, I guess the proof is in the pudding. But wesnoth has people working on things other than code.

I'm looking forward to playing this when I have the time :)

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[cbhacking]

Ranking system? I'd love to see this. I've gotten the occasional badly outmatched game (in either direction) online, although most of the time it's been good games all around. An experience system like Battle.Net would be fairly cool, although I wonder what it would take, implementation-wise.

One important question (relevant to the previous) is that you mention credentials; does the 1.6 multiplayer server require an actual login? I have an alias I typically use on the 1.4 server, but there's no actual authentication that I'm aware of. The last 1.5 build I tried flat-out didn't work in multiplayer, so I haven't been testing the new stuff.

Finally, kudos to the team; Wesnoth is a great game, good for casual play for a few minutes at a time (even on majorly underpowered hardware) or for a fun multiplayer match with friends over the 'net. I can't wait to try out the new version, and keep up the good work!

Wesnoth is cool

[JohnnyBGod]

Turn-based strategy really isn't my cup of tea, and Wesnoth is one of the two games I ever liked in the genre (the other being Civ 4). But what's really impressive is that it is the only open-source game I've ever played that actually looks like a finished product.

Re:Wesnoth is cool

[zebslash]

You can add Freeciv to that list.

Needs an Easier mode

[k8to]

This game is well loved by strategy enthusiasts, but could be equally fun for strategy wimps if it was more accessible. The game is unabashedly designed to be a struggle, and is so even on Easy if you haven't mastered all the strategy elements, while if you have, Medium is probably wehere you should be playing.

Essentially it needs a better scale-down in difficulty level. The best way to achieve this will probably be via AI tweaking.

Re:I'd go further than that

[lordtoran]

I find it amusing that many commercial games suffer from the opposite problem: Millions are thrown into state of the art content, but the gameplay is awkward or unbalanced, or the game crashes often.