News: Time flies when you’re having fun ...

Time flies when you’re having fun ...

Dear community,

It has been a while since our last development report. A lot has happened since Build 18, both on screen and under the hood. As a player or map creator, you will mostly notice the following changes:

• There are now four tutorials instead of just one: Basic Control, Military, Seafaring, and Economy. As a result, the first two Barbarian campaign scenarios have been consolidated into one.
• Some of the full screen menus have been overhauled. You will find the most noticeable changes when starting a new game or loading a game/replay.
• The four worlds have been consolidated into one, allowing for more terrain variety on the same map.
• Numerous improvements on the AI.
• The help for buildings has been automated, so that every building now has a help button.
• Trainers now need the same weapons as a basic soldier.
• The production site status strings now sound more like natural language.
• More space for localized strings.
• Normal games now show their win conditions as an objective.
• Unified layout for campaign objectives.

As a translator, you will have noticed that all strings have been pulled apart, proofread and put together again. Thank you all for bearing with us and working on getting your coverage back up.

On the technological side, we have ported the code to SDL2, boost::signals2 and Eris (for Lua persistence) and removed the software renderer. Widelands now requires OpenGL 2.1 to work. As a result, rendering is now much faster, and the quality has improved. This is also the first step towards a possible mobile version. Another thing that is now faster is our build system, which has been reworked. Furthermore, the code has become easier to read and hopefully a bit more stable due to the use of new C++11 features and many internal cleanups – this is still a work in progress though. And, as usual, many bugs have been fixed - and a regression test suite has been added to make sure that more of them stay fixed

We are now working on some final projects that we would like to get into Build 19, before we will slowly go into feature freeze and release mode. Our current plans are to have Build 19 released sometime during the first half of 2015.

And as always: If you don’t want to wait for the official release, or wish to help us with testing or translating, you can download and install one of the unofficial builds or build Widelands yourself.

Comments on this Post:

Slaventus	This is great news! Waiting for and will participate in the testing. Thank you for a great game.

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