News: Introducing the Frisians

Introducing the Frisians

It’s been a year since the last development post, so it’s high time for a summary of what we’ve been up to. Along diverse bug fixes, these are some of the new features:

Graphics and Music

• New improved field selector graphics
• New music track 'Running out of Coal' by Stuart Marshall
• Diverse refactorings to the graphics engine
• New font renderer is ready for complex markup

Tutorials, Campaigns and Scripting

• We have added two new missions for the Empire campaign, with advanced economy gameplay
• Scenarios can now have animated revealing/hiding of fields and add custom buildings
• Allow resetting of teams via Lua during a game
• Added 2 new functions to Lua interface: list_directory and is_directory

Networking

• Opening a router port is no longer necessary. This means no more fiddling with router settings for hosting a game.
• We have also added support for IPv6
• Increased password security by no longer storing and transmitting it in plain text

AI

• The AI now uses a genetic algorithm. The genetic parameters are trained and then kept in .wai files. If you wish to help with training, please let us know.
• Multiple changes and improvements to the building logic and to the AI hints
• Prohibit seafaring buildings for AI on non-seafaring maps
• When scouting with a ship, the AI nows considers whether a possible sea direction leads to unknown territories

Gameplay

• New “Village” starting condition.
• Diverse balancing tweaks
• The worker program plant no longer takes tribe: as a parameter; immovables are now identified via their attributes only, and both world and tribe immovables are searched. As a side effect, tribe immovables can now have terrain affinity.
• Forester/Ranger now prefers good soil, and is thus more efficient
• Scouts are aware of nearby military sites. The scout now switches between random walking and doing an excursion to enemy military sites.
• Started implementing new “Market” building with a Barbarian prototype. Not functional yet.

User Interface

• Converted all texts to the new font renderer. Formatting functions for the new renderer live in data/scripting/richtext.lua.
• Wider use of dropdown menus
• New commandline option animate_map_panning
• Refactored load- and savegame screens
• Improvements to campaign message boxes, keyboard navigation and UI focusing
• Added feature to update all ware priorities of a building when CTRL is pressed while clicking
• The “Options” screen now saves to file immediately so that the changes will be remembered even if Widelands crashes afterwards

Internationalization

• Implemented glossary generation for the Transifex glossary with help from the Translate Toolkit
• Show translation statistics next to the language selection menu and invite translators if a translation is incomplete

Help and Documentation

• Added immovables to in-game help
• More cross-linking between map object classes and their description objects in the scripting documentation
• Added/Improved scripting documentation for animations, worker programs, worker help texts, AI hints, World units and the Richtext system

Editor

• Display of bobs, immovables and resources can now be toggled individually

Build System

• Added support for gcc7.
• Let Travis build each commit on MacOS in addition to our Linux builds
• Allow compiling with AddressSanitizer, and choosing between gcc and clang on the first compile. AddressSanitizer has enabled us to get rid of a number of crashes and memory leaks – we highly recommend it.

Frisian Tribe

Last but not least, we have added a fourth tribe: the Frisians. It is still in an experimental stage and will need more work with balancing and model texturing. There are already two campaign missions available to introduce players to the tribe’s unique features. The Frisians are discussed in this thread.

Comments on this Post:

WorldSavior	That's an amazing amount of good changes It would be very interesting if the easy match hosting for everyone will lead to more multiplayer matches...

kaputtnik	Wow, an impressive list Beside the other stuff especially the Network improvements would satisfy a new release, imho.

Reply to Original:

Log in to post comments!