News: Development Update

Development Update

It’s been six months since the release of Build 19, so the time has come to give everybody an update on the current state of our development. We have already finished some exciting new features that will go into Build 20:

• New “Barracks” (casern) building for recruiting soldiers. Solders are no longer created by warehouses.
• New sounds for many buildings and three new music tracks
• Maps can now be zoomed using the mouse wheel or keyboard keys: CTRL+, CTRL-, to in-/decrease, and CTRL+0 to reset. All map transitions like jumping in messages, in the building statistics ad on the minimap are now animated.
• Users can now select multiple entries in a table using Ctrl/Shift + Click (multiple/range selection) and Ctrl+A (select all)
• Implemented dropdown menus
• All editor/game tips from the loading screens are now accessible from the in-game/in-editor help
• Messages sent by buildings now have player color
• And last but not least, we have a new scenario for the Empire campaign!

We have also implemented many bug fixes and improvements. The highlights include:

• Improved ship exploration decisions for the AI
• Better balancing for production sites
• Shipwrights are now smarter about where they place their construction sites, so there is less of a chance that they will pick a tiny puddle instead of the open sea
• Buildings no longer close their window when the stop/start button is pressed or when the building is enhanced or dismantled
• Fullscreen switching now works properly with some of the menu screens. This is still a work in progress.
• For the Editor, we have reordered the items in the selection menus for critters, terrains and immovables, and also fixed an annoying bug where releasing the mouse button would not work properly when the mouse was moved underneath a window.
• Windows builds now have a unique app id for every build. This allows parallel installation of several Widelands versions.

On the translations front, we have started running automated glossary checks about once a month, which our translators can use to improve translation quality. The details are documented in the wiki.

Finally, another feature that we are looking forward to is a ship statistics window that will let the user see and access all their ships and what they’re currently doing. This feature will also definitely make it into Build 20!

Comments on this Post:

kaputtnik	Yeah I love to see the ship statistics window... this is some thing i really miss some times Thanks to all the developers for your hard work!

WorldSavior	Nice progress, great new features Thank you! I also see a bunch of new problems, but well, that's also a little bit amusing Nevertheless I'm satisfied that some of my ideas where helpful

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