We now offer a build candidate for the upcoming build15 release. The idea of build candidates is to test drive a release and see if it is good enough to become a stable release to the public. So download the version for your operating system and start playing:

https://launchpad.net/widelands/+download

The source package, a linux binary and a windows binary are already up. Mac intel binaries and Linux x86 binaries will follow later today.

We will test drive this candidate for approximately two weeks. If no bigger issues show up, we will release build15 then as a new stable release. Please report all bugs you encounter in this release candidate at our bug tracker:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands

And I want to remind you all of our semi official weekly games on saturdays. Just come into the chat and see if someone wants to play. We will play build15-rc1 while the testing lasts.

Edit: Sorry for the delay, but Linux 64 and Mac OS X 10.6 packages are now online.

News from development

Boy, the WiHack is over for a while now and still no build-15 out. And we have been quiet too. Let's clean this up. We have big news for you all.

Move away from sourceforge

The first one is that widelands is moving away from Sourceforge. Sourceforge has done some steps to ensure they comply with the ridicule american rules. Those steps mainly mean that they block access to some projects on their site for countries that the United States considers as dangerous or criminal. This basically means that developers from (for example) Iran can no longer access work they've done on (for example) widelands, because our hoster (Sourceforge) is an american company and has to block access. You can read our discussion forum thread about this topic here: clicky. Sourceforge's statements are (for example) here.

Since no one of the core widelands team is an american citizen we do not feel obliged to follow their rules and laws. The correct choice therefore was to move away from sourceforge to a hoster that is not resident in the US and that offers us the same (or better) service. So we did: The Widelands project is in progress to move to Launchpad. Our new Project site is:

http://www.launchpad.net/widelands

The homepage is not hosted by sourceforge and will therefore stay accessible under the current address.

Launchpad & Translations

Launchpad brings a few nice technical novelties for our development process. The most important for developers is easy branching/merging by using another source code management system then SVN. This directly translates in a lower entry barrier for new developers. See our wiki page for an introduction to the new process (BzrPrimer) or take the launchpad guided tour; read especially the section about code hosting which explains the new concepts.

The second big novelty is web based translations. Launchpad allows us to upload translations directly from the focus of current development into the Web. Everybody with a launchpad account can now help translating widelands with nothing but their web browser. Launchpad offers nice statistics like the one shown in this image.

Translations made on the web are then imported back into the widelands source code by the developers.

How you can help to translate widelands

So this basically means that you have no excuse not to help translating widelands anymore . If you speak english and another language, consider contributing (if every unique visitor to this site contributes 3 translations, widelands will be 100% translated in less then two months). You can have your first translation done in 5 minutes. To do this, do the following:

1. Get a launchpad account clicky.
2. Start translating widelands here: https://translations.launchpad.net/widelands

You can read a more in depth tutorial with links to further reading in the wiki: TranslatingWidelands.

This wraps this post up. We hope to see many new translations in many new languages.

Edit: Status

Since posting this we got off to a good start. The slovak translation got pushed by Kefir and Ike, the French saw some work from Jean-Pierre Gemble, NonSan and Immunoman and the Dutch translation were tackled by Pieter Ouwerkerk and Foppe Benedictus. Other translations have been touched. And the best thing: most of the editors are first time contributors to Widelands. Great people! Keep it up.

We're hard at work. I have lua scripting now in (my) version of the widelands code. Now I am looking for a good way to get this into scenarios and extend the possibilities of triggers and events. Peter has very close to finishing a version of savegame sending for multiplayer. Timow is still working on the donkeys. Andi has worked on message sending when a mine is empty (patch already in SVN). The other Timo is occasionally working on Seafaring, but most of the time he is just playing widelands. Erik is working on donkey breeding functionality. Hannes is still fighting the cmake fight and hell is he good at it or what?

Some people are also working on the homepage. Janus pushed at least two new features today. Tobias was investigating possibilities to make the forum easier to use, but got sidetracked on the way.

On a sidenote: We are working in fascinating ways here. There is a git repository cycling and some people work on the SVN repository. Git is working very well and might be a good candidate for switching vcs in the near future.

Update at 17:14

The Wihack is settling down. Peter left us tonight at around 5 am (he finished save game transfer for multiplayer before though), Timow decided to go too (but donkeys are not yet completly done). Currently the only remaining guys here are hannes, andi, tobias, erik (sigra) and myself (SirVer). Andi works hard at implementing better message sending for empty mines. Hannes is still hacking on the cmake stuff. I merged my git lua stuff into the svn, so you can all start playing with lua too.

Tonight, janus worked on the homepage some more and updated some stuff. I am away for a few hours now, but will continue my work later tonight.

Update at 23:02

The Wihack concludes. Erik will fly home to Sweden very soon tomorrow morning. I want to try to continue with the lua stuff because I feel this has a lot of potential for widelands. Peter is already working on the Network stuff again. Erik is fixing bugs. I have not heard of timow, I hope he arrive healthy at home.

I am very happy with how the Wihack turned out. All the widelands developers that hit the ground here were very motivated and nice people. It was great to see some developers again and to get to learn new ones. I am especially happy that I met Erik who became so very important for widelands well being and advancement. The feeling of seeing 7 or 8 people hacking on widelands away at the same time in the same room and having 2 or 3 others join in over the internet was amazing: Wow, has my little engine tryout from the year 2000 grown. I also enjoyed seeing that so many people from the Entropia e.V. actively joined into the development; first to mention is Hannes who worked very hard on the cmake stuff.

The only thing that we should somehow organize a little better the next time is a tournament. There were some people playing widelands here, but we didn't manage to find enough time and a common version to play widelands over the network together.

I had a great time and I am looking forward for some recovering the next days. I really hope this wasn't the last wihack! Thanks to all participants.

What do you others think, what did you like, what was bad? What did non participants think about the 'live coverage'?

Day two of the WiHack. We have some accomplishments already. There is a new SVN branch that contains a prototype CMake system which goes through heavy testing now. I just saw a scout going berserk on Nasenbaers laptop. The donkey code is compiling and linking but doesn't work properly yet. We fixed ~15 bugs on the homepage so far....

Update at 2:33 (Nasenbaer)

And they are scouting and scouting and scouting! Nice!

At the moment just Timo (timowi) and me (Peter = Nasenbaer) are left at the Entrophia. But I am sure the others will return early at morning again

Update at 4:36 (Nasenbaer and Timowi)

A picture says more than words - it's more than a proof of concept!

My much to late update at 16:30 (Nasenbaer)

Okay I was pushed to again update the blog. So what are we doing at the moment? Andi and Timowi are working to get the "donkey" feature work as it should, Erik is working on getting the Donkey "recruting" feature ("donkey breeder"...) working. In the meantime Holger works on a lua implementation for campaign scripting and tries to motivate Timo to implement Seafaring (unfortunally he's not really good in it ). Hannes improves cmake support on and on and already committed some test stuff to a seperate svn branch, Hanna translated a bunch of strings for German and French translation... and I? Well let's name it "checking the possible ways to transfer savegames via network"... but okay to be serious I am not really far yet.

That's it for now. Let's hope we have some more valueable stuff to post next time.

The WiHack has just begun! So far we are only three people: Peter (Nasenbaer), Erik (Sigra) and myself (Holger). But we are already hard at work: Nasenbaer started working on the Metaserver, Erik and I started to work on the homepage. I want to make it easier to access for new users. Later on, I will start to fix bugs and work on features. I'll also try to keep you update throughout the day.

Update at 14:21

The alpha homepage is now updated to the new website scheme. I will update the main page soon which will basically mean some downtime for the homepage. We are now already 5 people hacking away: Andi is working on the donkeys and Hannes is checking out cmake as an alternative build solution. Nasenbaer is working on some features for ggz to enhance the mulitplayer experience. Erik is currently eating pizza. And I'll grab a fast coffee right now!

Update at 18:20

In the meantime, Timo has joined us. He will work on a scout. Meanwhile, I crashed and rebooted the homepage and it's working again. Hopefully for you there shouldn't be any difference. Soeb and Janus joined the wihack remote and are working on the homepage with me. Erik is reviewing the latest battlecode by raul. We are rocking.

Update at 19:50

Soeb and Janus are hard at work: Janus reworked the profile editing on the homepage (already on line), Soeb reworked the streams and fixes bugs. I do the same. Meanwhile Timo (Timow) has arrived at the wi hack and joins andi in working on the donkeys. Still rocking.

Update at 22:18

Alright, some Photos this time:

From left to right, top to bottom you can see: Timo working on Scouts and Nasenbaer working on savegame transfer for the network code. Then we got Erik happily hacking on the battle code. Next image is Andi and Timow working together on donkeys (and advancing). Hannes is still hacking on CMake building; he was tracking an evil bug for the last three hours and happily found it now. The next image shows Tobias working on conformity and compatibility of the homepage layout. Next image is me taking a self shot. In the background and the last picture you can see our hacker cycle working hard. Okay, back to coding.

You can find all photos in big here

WiHack update

Update:

You can find my contact information for the duration of the WiHack here: http://wl.widelands.org/wiki/ContactSirVer/

The WiHack preparations are rolling. Today, I held a talk at the Entropia to brief them about what we plan. Some of them are also joining in now!

You can find the slides here:

http://www.widelands.org/~sirver/wihack2010/WiHack2010Talk.pdf

Even more interesting is the code swarm video I created for the talk. Find it here (Mp4):

http://www.widelands.org/~sirver/wihack2010/codeswarm.mp4

Enjoy and see you at the WiHack 2010!

People, we have some exiting news today:

Announcing the WiHack - Widelands International Hacking and Coding (in) Karlsruhe 2010

For the first time in its existence, the widelands community - that is players and developers - will meet in persona. The meeting is in Karlsruhe - in the middle of Germany - from the 2nd to the 5th of January 2010. The participation is free of charge and everybody is welcome to join in.

We will use those 4 days to play widelands together and hack on it to advance its development.

All information - from organisational issues to projects we want to tackle - can be found in the wiki at: WiHackTwentyTen.

These are exiting times indeed. I hope a lot of you consider joining; if you consider coming, please feel free to add yourself to the Wiki page. I hope that we get enough people to make a widelands tournament there: I will take the winner to lunch.

I am so looking forward to meet you and the whole crew I only knew by email so far face to face at the WiHack 2010!

It's time for an update on the latest developments !

Since Build14 a lot of things have been changed, fixed and added. And even some new faces joined our forces (I better do not name anyone, else I will surely forget one and will be tortourisly executed in a long Widelands session )

So let's go ahead for the changes in Widelands:

• Our musicians composed a bunch of very nice new songs!
• The automated map generation feature was improved a lot and resource generation, as well as object generation, was added.
• The sourcecode was cleaned up, memory leaks and other problems were fixed and many files were reordered. (surely not interesting for the gamers, but still even an improvement for them, as the game should run even more stable now.)
• The transportation system was improved - now there should be a lot less wares that are carried over the whole map.
• The message system was improved - now it shouldn't show doubled messages anymore, it plays a sounds once a message is arrived and will even inform you, if you are under attack.
• Fights were improved - now opposing militarysites will not burn down anymore but will be captured by your soldiers.

And many more things I forgot, a ton of bugfixes and not to forget the two or three new bugs we added ...

So all left to say is: Go and get yourself an up to date development version !

Addition:

There will be a Widelands Developers Conference after new year... more about that later on

I am happy to announce a fixed Widelands version for all of you, that are using an older Windows OS (Windows 2000 and older). The new version was compiled without internet gaming support (metaserver access), as that part of Widelands lead to the problems. However, if you want to play with your friends, you are still able to do it the "old way" with direct IP. If you've got any trouble with that, best meet us in IRC Chat.

You can get the fixed Build from here.

P.S.: All of you running newer Windows versions should stay with the old version.

The Widelands Development Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Build14 of Widelands. Widelands is a free, cross-platform strategy game in which players control the fate of a small tribe that can grow into a big empire, in a style of play that is unique in the open source world. Please visit our homepage, http://www.widelands.org/ , to learn more.

Some of the highlights of Build14 are:

* a user interface to set up target quantities for all wares, to allow a better regulation of your tribe's economy.
* basic internet gaming with lobby and chat (!!alpha state!!).
* improved userinterface (now supporting nearly all resolutions).
* full tree cycle (trees are now seeding, growing and dieing themselves).
* improved game setup (different start types and the possibility to switch start positions)..
* a basic autogeneration tool for random maps.
* a basic message system (currently only showing new warehouses and resources).
* an improved computer player (still not good enough to be called "AI"  ).
* some new sounds.
* some new songs.
* some new maps including a completely new scenario mission.
* many new graphics and animations.

As usual, there have been many more improvements to the usability and performance, as well as numerous gameplay improvements and bugfixes.

Widelands uses SDL as graphics and input library and is currently available for Linux/x86, Windows (32-bit) and in source code. Both binary and source packages are available from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40163

We still search for a Mac user, who can provide us with a MacOSX *.dmg file of Build14. If you would like to help out, please write on our mailinglist.

Simply download the binary package for your operating system and run the widelands executable! If your operating system is not supported, download a source package and try to compile it for yourself. See the homepage for the libraries you need to have installed.

If you like what you see, please visit our homepage, http://www.widelands.org/ You may also want to check the forums and our IRC channel, #widelands on Freenode, to arrange multiplayer games with other players.

We especially welcome every helping hand, even if you just want to contribute by helping us find bugs. Also translators for all languages are always needed. If you want to get even more involved in the further development of Widelands, you can subscribe to widelands-public@lists.sf.net on http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/widelands-public to keep up with development on a daily basis.

The Widelands Development Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Build14RC of Widelands. Widelands is a free, cross-platform strategy game in which players control the fate of a small tribe that can grow into a big empire, in a style of play that is unique in the open source world. Please visit our homepage, http://www.widelands.org/ , to learn more.

Some of the highlights of Build14RC are:

* an user interface to set up target quantities for all wares, to allow a better regulation of your tribe's economy.
* basic internet gaming with lobby and chat. (!!alpha state!!)
* improved userinterface (now supporting nearly all resolutions).
* full tree cycle (trees are now seeding, growing and dieing themselves).
* improved game setup (different start types and the possibility to switch start positions).
* a basic autogeneration tool for random maps
* a basic message system (currently only showing new warehouses and resources)
* an improved computer player (still not good enough to be called "AI"  )
* some new sounds
* some new songs
* some new maps including a completely new scenario mission.
* many new graphics and animations

As usual, there have been many more improvements to the usability and performance, as well as numerous gameplay improvements and bugfixes.

Widelands uses SDL as graphics and input library and is currently available for Linux/x86, Windows (32-bit) and in source code. Both binary and source packages are available from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40163

Simply download the binary package for your operating system and run the widelands executable! If your operating system is not supported, download a source package and try to compile it for yourself. See the homepage for the libraries you need to have installed.

If you like what you see, please visit our homepage, http://www.widelands.org/ You may also want to check the forums and our IRC channel, #widelands on Freenode, to arrange multiplayer games with other players.

We especially welcome every helping hand, even if you just want to contribute by helping us find bugs. Also translators for all languages are always needed. If you want to get even more involved in the further development of Widelands, you can subscribe to widelands-public@lists.sf.net on http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/widelands-public to keep up with development on a daily basis.

As some people already asked and wondered, why the RC for Build14 is not yet released:

Unfortunally we found some bigger bugs in current source code, that might spoil your fun in playing Widelands. Well some people might say "it's just a RC" - but that is exactly the point: RC = "Release Candidat" means a version that perhaps could be released as finally version as it is - at the moment we are not that far.

Below is a list of bugs that are "blockers" for the RC. If you know C++ and want to support us - please join our forces to get the work done

• Spectators are able to send playercommands for other players (Bug #2820422) -> fixed
• Failed assertion in playercommand (Bug #2819029) -> fixed
• Mismatched free() / delete / delete [] in picture code (Bug #2818677) -> fixed
• Soldier production "ware distribution" broken (Bug #2820461) -> fixed

And a handful more bugs that should be fixed until release of Build14...

Feature freeze for Build14 takes effect today.

From now on, until after the final release no new features are accepted. This time frame is thought for bug fixes, translation updates and last graphic and sound additions.

If you want to help to translate Widelands to your mothertounge, please start as soon as possible.

The release candidate will be packed around 4th of july.

Finally we decided to release Build14 in next time.

Here are some citations that show in which direction the release plan and release date are going - but well just that, no 100% assured release date yet :

Dwarik:

the svn contains many new features, including ggz support. I think it might be a good idea to release a build14 so ggz can be released to all our users and distributions that support widelands.

In short, i would suggest a feature freeze Saturday June 20th with a first RC on the 4th of july. That should leave everyone who is still working on something with the opportunity to get their features in for the next release. If all goes well we would have a build 14 release before the end of july.

SirVer:

The time plan Victor proposes sounds reasonable to me; I would suggest
making a tournament with the RC: every participant must use RC14 and
play; all bugs must be reported. We will get valuable beta testing
this way. We'd also had a stronger community binding.

So far...

Time for some PR work..

Sourceforge.net is running a Community Choice again this year. This time, we want to participate. So please head over to the site and nominate widelands for "Best Project for Gamers". If we are under the top ten nominated, we'll be finalists and maybe take the cup!

The nomination period only runs for 4 more days; then you are needed again to vote for Widelands in the finals!

Gogo, nominate!

Click here to go to the nomination page!

Time for an update!

Since last time I wrote, a lot of things changed in widelands source code or where added to it.

First of all a point that might be uninteresting for most players, but might be very interesting for all that would like to help out in Widelands' development:

The Widelands source code was completely reordered (moved into fitting subdirectories, files were renamed to more fitting names and some classes and structs were outsourced to new files.), thousands of style fixes were done and some new stylechecker tools added. All these changes followed the goal of a more readable source code with more visible connections between the different files and libraries.

I am quite sure, that this step will ease the work of many coders (current and future)!

Now something more interesting for the ones that just want to play:

A new developer joined us: dunkelbrauer is currently working on an "autogeneration of maps" feature that allows the players to generate completely new maps with just some clicks. The feature is not yet complete, but it already reached an very impressive status: At the moment you can already select the world type, the height and width of the map, the percent of water, normal land, mountains and wasteland that should the map have and whether the map should be in island or normal mode.

Features that are still missing are resource, bob, animal and player startposition placements, so at the moment those parts need to be manually added.

Another new feature currently under development is the new message system. At the moment the players already get a message, when a new warehouse was created and when the geologist finds a resource. The long term goal for this feature is, to support the player with all important informations like "you are under attack", "Player2 was defeated" or "a new ship was build".

The computer player got many improvements as well. The players are now able to select the type of computer player to play against (Aggressive (default), Normal, Defensive or None). Latter will just do nothing, while the others are now able to build up a basic infrastructure, to expand their borders, to hire new soldiers and workers, to train their soldiers qualities and to attack and even to defeat other players. The strength of such attacks depend on the type of the computer player - The aggressive one is the hardest attacker, the normal one the medium attacker and the defensive one does not attack at all.

And... not to forget all the bugfixes

That's it for now.

A last sentence: Testing current SVNBuilds is definitely worth the work to compile yourself!

We have a new eldest of graphics...

Or sorta kind of. Alexia Death (death) took over the job again. She was busy for a while (and always is!), but her dedication for widelands never completely disappeared. Since she was doing most of the job of an eldest anyway, she was willing to take over the rest of the responsibilities again.

If you want to work on graphics, she is the one to talk to. She knows what needs work and how this work should be done. The best way to reach her is either through our Chat or through a Private Message. You can also post in the Graphics development forum.

Welcome back, Alexia!

Again some news from development:

This time I can not write from very big new features in Widelands - I am sorry but noone worked on one... - but yet the changes are more than worse to be written down:

And agains some more functionalities were implemented:

• An editor tool to set a new origin in the map. This tool will make it possible to get an island properly centered, instead of divided in 4 corners when a minimap is generated with an external tool, such as the one used in the map download section.
• An advanced options menu holding some options for advanced users.
• Some new arguments you can give Widelands at start up that allow the configuration of the information that is shown about a building if hitting "c" and "s".

And some more changes - artwork changes:

• A new ingame song was added and it seems as if more music will follow in near future.
• A new campaign map was added (third barbarian campaign) and the existing campaigns were improved.
• Some new loading screens were added (winterland and barbarian campaign)

Some of these new features and artwork additions can be seen in our screenshot section.

And yes that is the point where I want to point to the new features and additions that were added to our homepage in last time but haven't been announced yet:

• We again have a screenshot section.
• The page now supports smilies in forums and even in our news
• The FAQ was restored, improved and added to the menu
• A searchbox was added so everyone can easier find the information (s)he is searching for

And of course I should not forget the biggest work that was done in Widelands and also on it's homepage: Bug fixes, bug fixes and even more bug fixes .

But even this long text is not holding all changes, so if you are interested in more information, you should take a look at the ChangeLog

Maps uploading done and going ...

With the first version of maps uploading deployed on the site, other topics get the interest they deserve. While I was working on the maps application, Soeb tuned the online help application as many will have noticed. This application will now gain even more focus as we join forces to push it further.

One of the things we want to have included are graphs of economic relationships. A sneaky peek of what you can expect in the future can be found here (click here for complete PDF:

Update: Check some of the stuff out by clicking the building names in the help. For example here

Widelands map database online...

For the first time ever, we have a sophisticated maps exchange platform available four our dearest community. This was a much requested feature for the page. Now you can upload and share your self made maps or comment on maps made by others. And most important: you can download any map in the database for your endless playing pleasure.

You can find the map database here or by going through Download menu.