Already 10 months have past since our last release - Widelands Build 17.

Time for a new release?

Well, not yet. Anyways our current development version holds quite a lot of improvements and new features. So what has been changed since the release of Build 17? Here comes the list:

• We added a mouse hover text for the costs of the buildings. The same feature was added for the resources that can be gained through dismantling a building.
• We added a button to productionsites, which finally gives the ability to evict workers - want to kick a master miner out of one of your mines? Here you go!
• We improved the start up time of Widelands games through "on demand" loading of graphics - in Build17 starting a game might take some minutes under some circumstances. The same circumstances will lead to just a few seconds of loading time in our current develpment version.
• We improved Widelands' rich text rendering engine (the part of the program that takes care about text formating) a lot and improved all kind of text in different places of the game to look more appealing. E.g. the productivity of buildings is now coloured to ease the analysis of the economy's state.
• We improved the OpenGL rendering which leads to a huge speed up of Widelands.
• We added a new win condition "Territorial time". It is similar to the "Territorial lord" win condition, but is limited to an in game time of 4 hours - if no one is able to gain half of the maps teritory in 4 hours, the player with the biggest terrain after 4 hours will win.
• We improved the old stock charts in the statistics menu and added some new ones.
• We improved many existing graphics and animations everywhere around the game.
• We improved the graphics used in the road building mode to indicate the steepness of the terrain.
• We improved the multiplayer scenario "Smugglers".
• As decided in the community poll, we changed the Empire Inn to be backward compatible.
• We added some new game tips to introduce some "nice to know" features to our players.
• We added support for a "message of the day" to Widelands and the Widelands' dedicated server - if you logged into the lobby in the last months, you most likely have already read the motd.
• We improved Widelands' translations and added some new ones.
• We fixed quite a bunch of memory leaks - which basically means, that Widelands uses less RAM now.
• And we fixed many more or less nasty bugs.

For a more detailed list of changes, take a look at our Changelog

Has your "favourite" bug already been fixed? What about the feature you wish the most to be implemented? Let us know and of course feel cordially welcome to join our team .

Hello Community,

did you use the dedicated server "FreeForAll" in the last months? Or did you at least notice it?

No? Well okay, in that case never mind and ignore this post, if you like.

Anyways, FreeForAll was my dedicated server running on a small local server over here in my (old) home. It was supposed to ease playing multiplayer games over the internet for those players that don't want or don't know how to set up their network connection for opening their own servers.

And indeed the server was used quite regulary. In average about two games were played each day and during these games the server helped to track down some nasty bugs in Widelands and it's network code. Most of those bugs were unknown before and as noone of the participating players reported them, they would still be unknown without the dedicated server...

Anyways as I move some hundred kilometers to a new flat in a new town with a new job, the dedicated server will be offline for a yet unknown time period. If you used FreeForAll as solution to play online, I hope you find a good way to continue playing online (maybe the InternetGaming Wiki page can help you). If not, stay tuned, I hope to get the server online again as soon as possible.

For all the other brave ones out there: If you want to do some gamers a favor: Maybe you are willing to open your dedicated server for them? If yes, take a look at the DedicatedServer page in the wiki. And if you've got problems, I would be glad to even provide some personal e-Mail Support .

Btw.: Widelands development is a bit slow at the moment, but I hope to increase it's speed in the near future again.

Stay tuned...

Widelands on Tomdotios Channel

Tomdotio is a well known Let's-player on YouTube. That is, he showcases and plays games, comments on them and gives his impressions and opinions. He is very good at what he does and has therefore gained himself a loyal community watching his work.

Very recently, he invited me to sit down for a game of Widelands. We shared a kingdom and chatted about the game, the Widelands community and the development process. The final video was very skillful edited by him and turned out to be quite entertaining. But do not take my word for it, see for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RicOFDrV-0s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqfS9wOE3bA

Disclaimer: Tomdotio is producing in German only - the videos are German as well. If some English speaking YouTuber is interested in doing the same in English, I am all for it!

Chip ships Widelands again

We have been featured in the press before and once again we are featured in a Computer magazine. The German magazine Chip ships Widelands on the DVD on their current issue (9/2012). The theme is Fantasy and Science Fiction. Sadly, we didn't get any coverage in the print version besides the listing in the contents of the DVD, but at least we are on board.

Some personal news

I have great news: I am done with my last job and I have free time till September to do whatever I want! Isn't that awesome? And because I do not know how much I will be able to invest into Widelands when I start my next job, I want to spent some time working on it in these months: I plan to invest at least two hours a day, six days a week into Widelands for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of ideas and projects floating in my head currently: better text rendering, better help system, stackable animations, seafaring, atlantean scenario number 2, editor improvements, helping shevonar with the new site.... But I will start out by tackling the text rendering and the help system. This basically goes hand in hand.

I will be writing a kind of progress report/diary on my personal blog sirver.net around once or twice a week. I put this on my personal blog because I feel that the stuff is too technical for this news feed. Everybody is invited to to join me there!

Backwards compatible Empire Inn

Do you still remember the first community poll? It has quite a history already. We first did a run - then we needed a rerun because the options of choices were suboptimal. But even this rerun is long over - and we haven't discussed the results yet. First due to time constraints from my site, then due to build 17 shipping soon. We did not want to risk a big non-backwards compatible change so soon before release. Build 17 has been out of the door for some time now as well - but I was back being time constrained again. But now the stars align....

The result is quite plain: 50% of people wish the empire inn to be changed to be backwards compatible, 40% want to keep it as is and 10% hit the I don't care button. That is all fairly close - however since we went through the trouble and did ask the question, I feel that we must now also run with the answer.

Therefore, the empire inn will be made to also continue to produce rations if the economy has requests for them. If you want to provide a patch, feel free to do so.

Update: Andreas kindly provided a patch! This is now merged into the development version of widelands in r6393.

Build 17 is out of the doors

That's it people! We've done it. Another release of Widelands is out to the public. I won't repeat release notes and Changelog here again -- read the rc1 news post for that.

We needed 2 release candidates this time, nevertheless I was very pleased with the whole process. Congratulations to all for another successful round in the live cycle of Widelands!

You can download build 17 here:
https://launchpad.net/widelands/+download

Finals Tonight!

Ladies and Gentlemen: The finals of the 2012 widelands tournament are tonight. ivh and ixprefect are battling it out - both will play Atlanteans. I suggest you hang around in our chat, maybe you get a chance to observe the game. Otherwise - I'll keep you posted and review the game as soon as I find a minute.

Update

The finals has been played and was quite nice: ixprefect got off to a good start while ivh had some trouble managing his wood economy at the beginning. ixprefect used this weakness and attacked very early backed by his stronger economy. ivh had no chance to come back. Congratulations to ixprefect for winning the second widelands tournament. As always, you can find the replays in the Wiki.

This concludes the tournament. Thanks goes out to Fopper for having the idea and organizing it. And thanks to all the players for the interesting games!

And another round

The first week of rc1 revealed a critical bug and some more in the seafaring. We fixed the critical and one of the bigger in seafaring - others are nuisances but non critical. However, the critical bug means that we need to go another round. So here it is: rc2

https://launchpad.net/widelands/build17/build17-rc2

Please give this another spin. We missed the Ubuntu deadline (again - this is a kind of tradition with widelands) therefore we are no longer under time pressure. Consequently, we will test this one for two full weeks and then release b17 out in the wild. Or rc3 if another critical issue shows up.

Tournament Update

All the light is taken by the ongoing work towards build 17. But stalking in the background we still have a tournament going on - and we have reached the finals. And what a finals it will be - programmer vs reigning champion. The winner of the last tournament ivh is fighting to keep his crown against ixprefect - who earned his place in the finals by defeating Kristin in a real nailbiter game with just a slightly better economy (a must see replay).

The date of the finals is not yet fixed - both players are a little time constraint right now. But we will keep you posted!