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

Re:New Music? Way too much already!!

[Anonymous Coward]

volume controls are available in the prefernces menu (ctrl + p)

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

Re:Offtopic

[Misanthrope]

Ah, you fail to know about the awesomeness of the Thrustmaster Hotas Cougar, it's an exact replica of the flight controls on the F-16
http://www.thrustmaster.com/product.aspx?ProductID=11&PlatformID=5

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!

server slow

[Eugenia Loli]

Their server is extremely slow right now that Slashdot's linking it. Here's some binaries:
Win: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a-win32.exe?download
OSX: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/Wesnoth_1.6a.dmg?download
and the source code:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a.tar.bz2?download
The Linux binaries page doesn't load right now to get more links, sorry.

Works on other platforms too

[cbhacking]

Battle for Wesnoth is a great game, not least of all because it actually has fairly original gameplay (it's not a clone of some other game), but one thing I'd like to take the time tpo mention in particular is that it compliles not only across different operating systems, but also different architectures. PowerPC, for example - not many games still under development on that platform (console aside). It's even available for the Nokia N800/810 (ARM) and probably other PDA/SMartPhone devices - and being turn-based with a very simple interface (mildly more complex than chess) it's quite playable on them too.

It's one of the great advantages of open-source development: anybody can port it to whatever they want!

Re:Works on other platforms too

[Tolaris]

Not true.

http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy

You've killed their servers!

[Kamamura]

An attention from Slashdot probably means more traffic they needed.

I'd go further than that

[Sycraft-fu]

It isn't just art, but basically non-programming related assets that OSS games tend to lack in. Not a surprise since they are usually done by coders. So not only does the artwork tend to be lacking, but sound, music, level design and so on. It seems that most of the people who are interested in working on that sort of thing, do it for a commercial engine. You'll find some pretty amazing community developed stuff for things like UT3.

Part of the reason is probably that the tools are better for those games. Take a look at the Unreal Editor or the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit some time. They are extremely solid tools, and have some good assets to start working with. Compare that to many OSS games which have NO tools. The designers would have to do everything on their own. Also it is easier to reach an audience that way. If you are a level designer and make a level for a popular game, you just release it and people can play. If you sign on with an OSS game, well first it has to actually reach a state people want to play, and then people have to discover it and try it.

I do think one thing that would help is for OSS games to have much better tools. Make it easy for people to add assets, build levels and so on. Maybe more people would be willing to do so.

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.

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.

Re:ROFL! looks like a 1989 amiga game

[ledow]

Ah, the age-old stupidity. Good graphics != good game. If you think so, you were probably brought up on XBoxes and Playstations, which means that dedicating an evening to one game is probably a struggle and that thinking or enjoying the game is second to "completing" it or showing it to your mates.

I still play Nethack, ffs, and the graphics on that were far too primitive when I started playing that years ago. Give me an emulator and crap graphics any day of the week - there's not many games that you can replay over and over again and still feel you got your moneys-worth every time you replay it.

Re:Down for the count

[neomunk]

That it's not backed by big corporations with money to throw at servers? Actually, I thought that that was almost implicit, but if you wanna be disappointed, go right ahead.

Or you could donate, possibly allowing them to upgrade their servers. Probably not as fun as making sweeping generalizations about projects YOU couldn't build, but hey, at least donating doesn't make you seem like an whiny douche to the rest of the room.

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:Needs an Easier mode

[Draek]

Umm, which campaign have you played? because, from actual experience as well as reading the forums, it seems like most campaigns' levels of difficulty vary a lot from what they actually mean, and while for one "Easy" is "you only need a funcioning brain", for another its "We won't torture you *that* much". A good example of the latter, for instance, is "Under the Burning Suns", excellent storyline and very fun levels, but when they say its aimed at "Expert" players, they weren't kidding.

Good campaigns for newbies at the game, IMHO, are "A Tale of Two Brothers" and of course, the classic "Heir To The Throne". Or you could play skirmishes against a handicapped AI, which in case you didn't know (it did take me a while to find it) is under Multiplayer - Local Game, then switch "Local Player" to "Computer Player", at least on 1.4.5 (the version currently available on Ubuntu).

Re:ROFL! looks like a 1989 amiga game

[skeeto]

I still play Nethack, ffs, and the graphics on that were far too primitive when I started playing that years ago.

"While NetHack's graphics may seem primitive by today's standards, today's gameplay seems primitive by NetHack standards."

(source)

Dwarf Fortress

[Bragador]

This is true. The thing that came to my mind when I read your post was Dwarf Fortress. The whole thing is a coding project. People play it for the game itself but the graphics are ASCII and there is no sound.

You can add some packages to get graphics like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graphic.jpg but it's really old school.

If there were artists ready to work long hours on the project, the game could get this http://spriteattack.cator.de//df/show/. A bit childish but still much better than ASCII.