Battle For Wesnoth Version 1.6 Released 90
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."
New Music? Way too much already!! (Score:1)
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volume controls are available in the prefernces menu (ctrl + p)
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Do polar bears shit in igloos?
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After digesting the chewy center.
Source (Score:3, Interesting)
Offtopic (Score:1, Offtopic)
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I suspect that this is only "news" because of the game's license and not because the game is even remotely good.
It's news because it's something a substantial chunk of slashdotters are likely to be interested in reading about.
Ontopic: All open source games suck. I have played many of them and they are all horrible.
That's a personal judgment of likes and dislikes. It might be the case that most people will agree, but I conjecture that there's very little you can say which is objective (rather than merely consensual) and supports a claim that a game sucks.
(On topic) Actually, I really like it (Score:2)
Actually, as such things go, Wesnoth is probably the only open-source game I would pay real money (i.e. more than about $5) for, even if it were proprietary. It's fun, challenging, addicting, and much easier for me to play casually than chess (which fills roughly the same niche, though one advantage of Wesnoth is that I can play a team game with friends against another team online). It is certainly not what some people would call a great video game - it doesn't have Crysis-level shiny graphics, World of War
Some FOSS games suck; this one is great (Score:1)
Given the huge number of Free/Open-Source games out there, it's natural that many of them suck. (And that's not counting the ones that were never finished.) It's also natural that commercial games win on immersive 3D graphics and other things that require big development teams. But there are some FOSS games that are absolutely terrific, and Wesnoth is one of them.
Many of the good things about Wesnoth are fairly obvious: quality music, good graphics, good in-game tutorials etc. Others are not so obvious:
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It's going to likely cost $30. I have Wesnoth on both Linux and Windows.
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Actually, troll, you are wrong. Wesnoth & Frozen Bubble are two of the all time greats & I'd put them beside any similarly themed closed source game in a "taste-test"
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I'd add lbreakout2 to that list as well. I've been a fan of breakout/arkanoid type games since I was a kid, and lbreakout2 has many fun levels, interesting block types, fun powerups and multiplayer capability.
FreedroidRPG, while not what I would call "done" is coming along rather nicely, and will make a nice Diablo-type game when (if) it's finished up.
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Oddly enough, I was thinking about that one too, just couldn't remember the name. I was setting up a Kubuntu installation for a co-worker's kid & got stuck on that game for like 2 hours testing it out.
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Ontopic: All open source games suck. I have played many of them and they are all horrible. I suspect that this is only "news" because of the game's license and not because the game is even remotely good.
As an open source game programmer, I take offense to this. Heavy offense. As an open source gamer, I disagree. Open source games are great because if you find a problem, you can dig and and fix it. You're free to improve them.
Contrast this with, for example, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I love the concept, I love the gameplay, but what I don't love is the huge number of typos in the dialog. I can't do a thing about it. On the other hand, I was able to do a complete overhaul of the dialog in FreedroidRP
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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 [thrustmaster.com]
Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [wesnoth.org] 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 :)
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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 authen
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does the 1.6 multiplayer server require an actual login?
No, it doesn't.
(There was this link in my post, you see... :p)
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Sorry for replaying to myself, but after digging through the (long, even if you only look at 1.5.0 to 1.6) changelog, I fount the relevant info:
You *can* now password-protect an account, which means you can use your forum account and nobody else can (or you can create a protected non-forum account). However, you can still log in quickly using an unclaimed user name with no password.
I'd go further than that (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I believe Battle for Wesnoth includes at least a few tools for things like level editing and such. There are a considerable number of fan-made campaigns available for download, for example.
That said, Wesnoth does have some very nice non-code work in it, even in 1.4 (can't wait to see the new stuff). The music, for example, is superior to that of many commercial games (in my opinion). There were lots fo graphics but they werent' always very good; an update to those will help people take the game seriously, w
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It isn't just art, but basically non-programming [...] So not only does the artwork tend to be lacking, but sound, music, level design and so on.
I want to clarify what I meant, in case you meant to expand on it.
By "art" and "artwork", I mean something fairly close to the wikipedia definition: "Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions."
That covers at least
I'm as of yet undecided whether I want to call level des
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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.
Dwarf Fortress (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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/ [cator.de]. A bit childish but still much better than ASCII.
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They [wikiquote.org] say that one of the benefits, if not an outright goal [opensuse.org], of some Linux distributions is to be a great platform to develop software on.
At one time Linux looked downright competitive as a platform (if certainly not market,) so what happended since 2002 [linux.com]?
Well, games are not just software. The software is simply there to ma
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Perhaps it is time to admit that OpenGL [virtualdub.org] is a not the only kid on the block [slashdot.org] and start providing another popular API [wikipedia.org] that other developers want to use [beyond3d.com]?
I'm unsure as to whether your supporting opengl or bagging it, as all of the links actually say opengl is in many ways a superior standard, except the last one.
as for supporting directx in linux, except via wine wrapper it would be a cold day in hell before that happens, most likely.
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Many mainline campaigns have improved storyline prose and new cutscenes or epilogs.
wait. does this mean that i have to play my campaigns again because now i have missed some cool new cinimatic or is it the same stuff just a diffrent window?
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Arrrgggggggg
The proof of the pudding, is in the eating!
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But then again, the cake is a lie, and math is either inconsistent or, translating poorly from a danish hash collision, unhealthy.
server slow (Score:5, Informative)
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 [sourceforge.net]
OSX: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/Wesnoth_1.6a.dmg?download [sourceforge.net]
and the source code:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.6a.tar.bz2?download [sourceforge.net]
The Linux binaries page doesn't load right now to get more links, sorry.
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You misspelled "thank you".
Works on other platforms too (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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[...] not least of all because it actually has fairly original gameplay (it's not a clone of some other game)
I like Wesnoth, and have wasted weeks at a time with it, but it was based on Master of Monsters [wikipedia.org].
Also, check this out: http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy [wesnoth.org]
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Ah, interesting. It does seem to have borrowed heavily - I'd never heard of the other game but from the Wikipedia article it sounds quite similar (and certainly predated Wesnoth). I'd be interested to play it, just for comparison.
Bleh. Clone or not, it's still a good game.
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It's also strongly based on Warsong [wikipedia.org]. It's been awhile since I've played Wesnoth, but one of the missions in the first campaign is very reminiscent of one of the missions in Warsong (the one with the basilisks, IIRC), I mentioned it in the IRC channel and the main developer confirmed that that wasn't an accident.
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Not true.
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy [wesnoth.org]
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I hav trouble believeing that; WC2 is a real-time game with no experience model, long-ranged attacks (all attacks in Wesnoth are against adjacent units), an economic base model (where resources are collected then spent to build things - in Wesnoth, your base is any castle your leader can get on, and your economy is essentially a matter of territory with no regard to the concept of harvesting).
You may be thinking of Glest, a completely different (from Wesnoth) game that has lots in common with WarCraft 2.
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And Warcraft 2 was a clone of Tetris!
You've killed their servers! (Score:2, Informative)
An attention from Slashdot probably means more traffic they needed.
Down for the count (Score:2)
It's 5:30 AM Eastern Time.
The story has drawn a humongous 20 posts - and their server is Slashdotted?
What does that tell you about open-source gaming?
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Re:Down for the count (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Wesnoth is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
You can add Freeciv to that list.
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& Frozen Bubble
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bash: syntax error near unexpected token `&'
Nope, haven't got that one. :(
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Turn-based strategy really isn't my cup of tea
They ARE my cup of tea, though I have a tendency to get bored with them after awhile. Turn-based strategy games are very cool while you're learning the game, but grinding turn-based games ... I'll give this one a shot and hope for the best.
A huge THANK YOU for all the people who did this.
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the graphics are just lol!
I guess you never played Dwarf Fortress... I wish DF's graphics were anywhere close to Wesnoth. (Doesn't stop me from playing it though.)
Re:ROFL! looks like a 1989 amiga game (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 [battlereports.com])
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Um, I cut my teeth on Infocom games and loved them. I then moved to Sierra and was marveled by the immersive graphical worlds they created. Kings Quest 1 (the original) still has better graphics than a lot of Linux games.
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Huh?
Shining Force for one is a terribly old Sega Genesis game and it's still very playable and interesting.
The quality of the graphics isn't all to some people. Gameplay comes to mind more to some gamers than graphics.
Those can get this game, and others can play Crysis or whatever game that demands a lot of processing power just to display some "shining" effects ;)
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I tried playing your game but couldn't find it.
Lovely game (Score:2)
I love this game. :)
I've played it for a while now, and yesterday my Ubuntu decided (by itself, merely asking me for a password) that it was time to upgrade Wesnoth :)
*clicks, waits, doubleclicks, smiles, plays all night*
I really enjoy the campaigns... and I have yet to try online gaming.
I only got over my Wesnoth addiction a few weeks ago, and now I've been thrown right back. ;)
Does open source also mean that they'll continue to improve it? Because my social life really doesn't need that
Needs an Easier mode (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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 n
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Heir to the Throne, the default campaign, is the one I've spent the most time with. It needs a less challenging mode.
At one point back in 0.9.x I hacked up the game to apply multipliers to the damage table to tilt it towards the human player, but it didn't feel right at all.
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I would actually agree with that.
Although some campaigns are indeed very simple, and give you a chance to screw up, I also found campaigns where even when playing "easy" some of the levels were quite hard, and unforgiving. It is not nice if within a campaign some levels are much, much harder than the rest. However, those were all in user made campaigns which I downloaded... and I guess that the game itself should not be blamed. The only suggestion I have to the guys making Wesnoth is to include a brief desc
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I could never get into the game. (Score:2)
There was too much micromanaging tactics right off the bat to hold my interest. If I had three spears attacking one guy I'd end up getting slaughtered in two rounds after two of his buddies showed up because I didn't keep my archer in exactly the right hex.