Topic: Overall Plan for widelands

Ron_of_Nord
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Posted at: Yesterday 05:54

I've been reading some of the older posts about the economy,naval warefare and some of the good suggestions made by others, I was wondering what direction the developers plan to take widelands. Given it is BOTH an economic game and a RTS game, I am curious what the elders think and how they would like to go. Having some idea of this may inspire us lesser mortals to try new ideas and create add-ons for them. There are some awesome add-ons, but I don't use them all, but as I have stated elsewhere, I am working on a fantasy add-on. A better idea of the direction of this game would help in the design of my current goals.


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Nordfriese
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Posted at: Yesterday 09:57

Well, my opinion as frequently stated when shooting down suggestions is that Widelands is all about economy, with the military aspect purely a minor feature face-smile.png

You might be interested in the current big project that will arrive in v1.3: Trading, which is functional in a parallel development branch and will be merged into the main development version when the remaining missing features (tutorial, nicer UI etc) are done.

Naval Warfare is also still under consideration, especially its economic aspects such as the possibility to add refitting costs.

Generally, major changes that force players to change their accustomed gameplay strategies are discouraged, with exceptions for features that are very often requested and/or have been planned as must-haves for a long time – namely Naval Warfare and Trading. So don't expect any other major game-changers soon face-smile.png

Another important, big topic that has been open for a long time and is definitely wanted is 4K / UI scaling support.
You can also browse the bugtracker to see the backlog of what we would like to add or fix in the middle term.


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Ron_of_Nord
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Posted at: Yesterday 11:49

Well, for starters thanks for the link, I'll have a look later I agree that anything that changes the flavour of widelands to drastically should be avoided
Trading sounds interesting,I'll definately have a look at that, the possibilty of refitting costs for warships makes sense, refitting a ship to a war ship should have a cost attached, after all , the English learned that ages ago as did the Romans. So I think that option makes sense.Refitting a ship to a warship also add's depth, with no instant upgrade, player will have to plan thier shipping needs and economies for that eventuality. Whilst some of my ideas have been shot down, after reading the reasons, and your notes here, it makes a lot more sense. Thanks, as usual, for all the help I now have a better idea of which way I go with the add-ons I planned. This lesser mortal appreciates the effort.


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tothxa
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Posted at: Yesterday 17:10

Ron_of_Nord wrote:

Given it is BOTH an economic game and a RTS game

Well, there are many RTS games with minimal economy/logistics concerns, but Widelands is unique1 in its focus on the latter. So as far as I'm concerned, we don't need new RTS inspired features.

As for overall plan: we have so few active developers, that we can't afford the luxury of making plans. We couldn't even clean up the pull requests that accumulated during the v1.2 freeze.


  1. that is, original Settlers and Widelands are unique, but WL is still unique among actively maintained games and among Free Software (open source) games 


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Ron_of_Nord
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Posted at: Yesterday 21:39

tothxa wrote:

Ron_of_Nord wrote:

Given it is BOTH an economic game and a RTS game

Well, there are many RTS games with minimal economy/logistics concerns, but Widelands is unique1 in its focus on the latter. So as far as I'm concerned, we don't need new RTS inspired features.

As for overall plan: we have so few active developers, that we can't afford the luxury of making plans. We couldn't even clean up the pull requests that accumulated during the v1.2 freeze.

I agree that widelands is unique, that's why I enjoy it so much,as to more combat orientated features, I don't think that is really the way to go myself, Widelands should always be true to it's roots. I have played many RTS games, commercial , like the Warcraft and Starcraft series of games, Age of empires etc as well as quiet a few indie development games that focus more on thie economy aspects.
I find widelands to be more satisfying to my style of play, I asked the original question to get a feel for the future and which way I should plan my add-ons.Now as I am still learning the Lua scripting side, I havent't released an extentsion add-on yet but hopefully once I am satisfied that the ones I'm working on work out of the box, I'll publish them. I asked so that I could plan such add-ons with future compatiblity in mind.


  1. that is, original Settlers and Widelands are unique, but WL is still unique among actively maintained games and among Free Software (open source) games 


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: Yesterday 22:24

well for the addon development maybe another rule of widelands development might be of help to you:
we always try to be as backwards compatible as we could be. This means:
- maps of very old versions are still loadable.
- Savegames of at least the last version should be loadable
- lua interfaces are compatible for at least 2 conecutive versions.


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Ron_of_Nord
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Posted at: Yesterday 23:42

hessenfarmer wrote:

well for the addon development maybe another rule of widelands development might be of help to you:
we always try to be as backwards compatible as we could be. This means:
- maps of very old versions are still loadable.
- Savegames of at least the last version should be loadable
- lua interfaces are compatible for at least 2 conecutive versions.

I have found some old maps won't load but that's not really a problem as I would load them into the highest version that would load them , and saved them again using that version, that way my maps could be bumped until the latest version was happy. Having the Lua interface being compatible across 2 versions is very useful,and make any changes minimal.
Thanks for all the info, I can now make firmer plans for my add-ons


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