Well... already 2 more month since my last development update... so let me give you a short look on the new stuff we implemented since than.

First of all: Chuck continued being creative and added a lot very great new animations. He is really doing a very good job there .

And on game feature site:

• We finally added a team play feature - teamed players can't attack each other and share the vision
• Defeated players will now become spectators in some game types - so they can go on spectating after being defeated.
• the basic opengl support was merged and improved at some places - if you feel like Widelands is too slow, you can now try the new opengl renderer
• Players on Windows are finally able to host games via our internet lobby
• The computer player was partly improved
• The forester got some more intelligence - finally he understands, that it is not a good idea, to rip out other small trees and as well cares about affinities of the trees (so will place a tree that best fits the place)
• A lot new translations were added.
• The map autogeneration feature is now able to place starting positions and was slightly improved to produce better playable maps.
• Players now get a message, if a new militarysite was occupied.
• In multiplayer games, the hosting player got some new commands to control the game (just type /help in the chat box)

And as alwasy - last but not least: we again fixed some nasty bugs

So although some of us disappeared in the "summer hole" , we still got a bit bigger list of new stuff for you in the last 2 months . Hope you like it !

For a list of all changes since build15, see the changelog. It should contain all major changes.

Let's look forward for a great Build16

A new elder of graphics

Development is rolling onwards, but the most advancements in the last few weeks were clearly on the graphics front: Chuckw finished all worker models for the atlanteans (after having finished all workers for the barbarians earlier) and is tackling the remaining tribe (the empire) charging forward in our struggle to remove concepts graphics from the game. I have seen Chuck learning all the gory concepts of blender, bzr, launchpad and widelands internals in a continuing strive to make things better in this last year and his persistence and dedication made me realize, that he is the one that can finally relieve Alexia Death from her elder duties.

So let it be heard: Alexia Death, our longest serving and historically most important elder (as she more or less got the graphics ball rolling for widelands) resigns. Actually she wanted to for a very, very long time as she is extremely busy and she only kept the job because no one was qualified to do it (oh yeah, and because I begged her to ). Alexia will stick around, but this is the definite time to say a huge thank you to her in the name of the team and the community for all she did so far for widelands! You so rock, Alexia.

Thanks go also to Chuck for taking over. As the new elder of graphics, he is the one you need to be talking to if you are unhappy with anything visually in widelands or want to contribute graphics in any kind of way. He will also monitor the graphics forum which is the one place to discuss graphic development. Also, he will be administrating the widelands-media project on launchpad. Chuck, welcome to the next level and thanks for taking over.

Here are his welcoming words to the community:

Graphics play a huge role in virtually every computer application nowadays, especially games, and Widelands is certainly no exception. A visually rich and entertaining environment has been under development for Widelands since its inception and there is much to show for the efforts made thus far, but as Widelands evolves there is still much that remains to be done.

I would like to add my personal thanks to Alexia, not only for all of the work she has done, but also for her tremendous help and encouragement in getting me on my feet with the project. (Believe me that was no small task. ) Alexia, you have made a great example to follow.

As your new Elder of Graphics, I'll be here to coordinate graphics development for Widelands and work with you. I'll serve as a contact point for requests and questions, and to receive any suggestions and finished works you may offer to contribute to the Widelands project.

I look forward to working (and playing) with you and want to see any samples or graphic contributions YOU may have to offer or point you to where we can use your help.

Together, let's make Widelands as graphically entertaining to the eye as it is to play.

Cheers!
Chuck Wilder (chuckw)

Okay, quite some time since the last news post - and that's definitely not because nothing happend - no! WIdelands development is actually quite active at the moment !

So where to start?

Well I think I will not describe all new features and changes that exact as I did the last time - simply because it's too much and I am too lazy

So let us start with some screenshots of new features:

Chuck is very actively working on the tribes's workers animations - so far the barbarians are already finished (yes you did not missunderstand - all workers do have their animations now! And the atlantean animations are already quite far as well .

Further some new features were implemented, like the "second view mode of stock" - you can now see all available materials in your economy as well as all material that is stored at the moment, if you select the "stock" from statistics menu.

Another feature allows you to set, whether a ware should be prefered for storage in a warehouse or whether storing of that ware should be stopped or even be outsourced - just click on the ware in a warehouse or headquarters to set it's preference.

And not to forget the new user interface in military sites ...

Ahh and while we are at it - the symbols for soldiers and their health bar were reworked, to have a more unique and understandable mark for soldier levels.

Some more things were added or changed, that are not that easy to show in an image:

• The existing campaigns were modified to use lua as engine, this leads to a much more smoother and more intelligent campaign behaviour
• A " I will show you how to play Widelands" tutorial was added.
• New music was added !
• It is now possible to set a condition for when a game is won.

Besides the new features in our current development trunk, some work was done in seperate branches, like opengl implementation, the first atlantean campaign map, work on metaserver client information transport and some more interesting construction sites.

I created a small preview to give you some visualisation how the campaign might look like . Take a look here for that video.

... and as always: a lot of bugfixes and code improvements ...

Well I surely forget the half or even more...

Build 15 has been released! Let's sum up the important changes:

• Second carriers on busy roads: donkeys, oxen and horses.
• Scouts that can reveal a big area around their house
• Zoom inside the mini map
• A new scenario part to the "The green plateau"
• Statistics will now show the reason why a building is not producing anything
• Random maps will now contain resources, immovables and critters.
• Improvements to the messaging system
• new sounds
• new music
• new graphics

Head over to

https://launchpad.net/widelands/build15/build15

to download. You can also find the full changelog and release notes there. Happy playing and thanks for test playing the release candidates.

We are wrapping up the release of build 15 now. It was a long road, but we are confident that build 15 is the best widelands ever: less bugs, more features, more graphics, more sound, more fun.

The final release date is fixed for April 10, so a little more than a week remains to push translations forward. If you are able to translate widelands in another language, now is the time to do so. All new translations will be in build15.

Head over to

https://translations.launchpad.net/widelands

and start translating!

Edit: Unfortunately we won't make tomorrow. Some small stuff remains to be done, we hope to be not delayed by more than a week.

We are happy to announce, that Widelands will be present on Game Convention 2010!

It was a great suprise for all of us, wenn Rüdiger Meyer (known as Xylotuar on IRC) offered us a free booth at the fair. Although he is a well known user and many of you surely already played an online match against or with him, nobody knew about his employment.

But who could explain his decision better than he himself? So here comes his official statement :

Dear Widelands community,

in the past months I partly got addicted to your great game. Although it is no competition to commercial games from technical and graphical point of view, it's game design and the friendly community convinced me, that even game crashes during network games can be funny and just connects the players more together. This was a completely new but wonderful experience.

Because of this experience, I would like to give you a chance to promote your game for free on the Game Conventions fair.

I discussed this idea with my supervisor and after playing two matches with him, he supported my idea. He told me that we can see this as test run - if the Widelands booth is accepted and visited by many of our guests, we will think about an Open Source section of our fair in the next years.

So: Welcome on Games Convention!

Roughly ten days after build15-rc1 we offer a new release: build15-rc2. We fixed 23 bugs compared to the first release candidate which ranged from sever (scouts led to desyncs in network games, crashes in the text handler) to minor. We also decided to change some functionality to make the game more balanced, namely the scout runs a little longer and when defending, healthy soldiers will be preferred over wounded.

We also removed the functionality to register an account on our meta server. This is to handle future changes that we plan that would conflict with this functionality.

Please download this version and start playing:

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

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

Edit: Source packages, Windows builds and Mac OS X 10.6 (64 bit) are online. Linux binaries will follow shortly.

Edit: Due to slow internet over the weekend, I couldn't upload the remaining packages. They are online now: Linux 32 bit, Linux 64 bit and Mac OS X universal binary.

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.