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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."
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:
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 :)
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.
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!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
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.