News: Summing up latest changes

Summing up latest changes

Summer is over, the last release is already some months ago and still no development update was posted in the news? What a status...

So what happend in Widelands' development lately? Well pretty much, actually!

First of all our graphicians did (and still do) a very good job to improve and remodel nearly every possible graphic in the game :). I'll name just a few examples to proof I do not exaggerate:

• The terrain graphics of the desert world were improved.
• The animated water, swamp, ice shelf animations were improved.
• quite some immovable objects (like stones and rocks) were improved.
• Many buildings of the Empire got a new roof design and were further improved in the process.
• The remodelling of the barbarian buildings makes good progress
• building animations for the new states (see below)
• new street textures (see below)
• etc.

Second of all, the coders were active as well. Besides many "under the case" improvements and bug fixes, there are at least the following new features:

• We added new states and animations for unoccupied buildings and empty mines, to better indicate the current state of a building. This is not only a nice graphical addition to the game, but hopefully useful for faster and better determination of problems in the economy as well.
• We made the road textures world dependend and improved the style of the roads for each world. Before, the roads often looked displaced if the color of the road was in no way fitting to the world textures colors
• We added a new win condition "endless game (no fog)" with completely visible map from the beginning on. This is not just helpful for testing games (for new maps, etc.) but primarily provides a nice new game type.
• We added a multiplayer scenario "Island hopping" - it may still have some rough edges, that need to be shaped in the next weeks and months, but generally it is not just only fully playable, but very fun as well

We further improved the dedicated server functionality. An up to date dedicated server can now be set up to:

• save the game on the server via a chat command.
• be password protected and only grant those users access to the game settings, who previously send the correct password.
• display a custom message of the day (motd).

Further the complete dedicated server handling was improved - now the users can set up the server via their user interface (like as if they were the hosting player). Therefore the set up via chat commands was removed.

On side of bug fixes, the most popular ones are most likely the "miner/master miner mixed up after mine upgrade" that was refixed and a long resisting bug in server connection, that forced you to restart widelands completely, if you want to join another server (via metaserver) than the one you joined before.

Btw.: on September, 24th will be our next official play day - maybe we can set up some packages for Windows, Mac and Linux to extensively test some of these features.

Hope you join us!

Comments on this Post:

Nasenbaer	@jess: You most likely started "Island Hopping" without scenario elements. The whole map was created for only one type of game: Multiplayer scenario, all other gamye types (single player, "normal multiplayer") won't work - because of the design and shape of the islands So if you want to test it, either find someone to play in multiplayer or open widelands twice and play "against yourself"

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