Question : How does an UMC campaign become part of mainline campaigns?

[MarkoLeSerbe]

That's something that always intrigued me. As far as I can remember, the Delfador's campaign was first UMC and then later got "canonized".

What is the process to add UMC campaigns in mainline? Does it involve certain requirements?

[The_Gnat]

Well i would guess that it would first require significant popularity on the add-on server and active maintenance and development. Then I would say it probably would have to be unique or fill some gap, in story or gameplay, that the Dev's think would be important. Then it probably would just need a lot of playtesting.

It probably isn't that easy to get a campaign Mainlined because otherwise there would be many more, but I think that is a good thing because only the best campaigns should be included in the base game. Others are not really being rejected but just not considered part of core of the game.

Secret of the Ancients was recently Mainlined, perhaps you could look into that and see if there were any polls or forums that discussed it before it became part of the core game.

[Pentarctagon]

There's a whole bunch of details that I and others could probably get into, but really what it comes down to is communication. If you want your campaign (or faction, or really any other UMC) mainlined, you need to make it known that you're aiming for mainline, and also be willing to listen to feedback even if you don't like it. After that, as long as you stick around and are able to get it up mainline's quality standards, you'll have a pretty good shot.

[Iris]

While a campaign's popularity, prose and code quality are certainly decisive factors in getting content mainlined, ultimately it comes down to how much value the development team feels there is in adding a campaign to mainline, with all the maintenance cost implications this has in the long-term. In all cases it's important that your campaign garners the dev team's interest in some way.

I wasn't around when SotA was selected, but I imagine a good part of the reason it was chosen over other candidates is that mainline is suffering from an overpopulation of "good guys" campaigns (humans, elves, dwarves), while orcs and undead are getting the short end of the stick. I haven't had time to check out the campaign but from what I've read it also brings some gameplay elements of its own to the plate.

(Delfador's Memoirs and Legend of Wesmere are more complicated cases to say the least. They happened to have shared a queue with Invasion from the Unknown back in the day, and I was more heavily involved in the process for all three -- which obviously didn't come to pass for IftU. I could go into more details as to why but I feel like that'd be a subject worthy of an essay.)

[Flameslash]

Follow-up question: Is there a process for campaigns to be removed from mainline? Has one ever been removed?

[Iris]

Follow-up question: Is there a process for campaigns to be removed from mainline? Has one ever been removed?

The Dark Hordes and Son of the Black Eye were removed in 1.1.x because they were incomplete and no-one was actively working on completing them at the time. Eventually the latter got readded in 1.3.x after it was adopted and completed in UMC land.

Under the Burning Suns nearly got removed during 1.5.x due to several technical issues with it that necessitated a maintainer, which it didn’t have at the time.

Just like adding campaigns, there’s no formal process for this.

[MarkoLeSerbe]

I see. Well it's as complicated as I imagined it to be. The Dark Hordes? Never heard of that campaign... Somebody's willing to give me a brief synopsis?

Edit : I must have been unlucky with that campaign since I first played in 1.1.x and then I stopped playing several years before coming back with the 1.10.x

[octalot]

Thread about updating The Dark Hordes: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16576

The first post has a synopsis. Having read the comments on the last page (page 7 at the time of writing), it doesn't sound as if it's worth reanimating.

[gnombat]

I see. Well it's as complicated as I imagined it to be. The Dark Hordes? Never heard of that campaign... Somebody's willing to give me a brief synopsis?

Edit : I must have been unlucky with that campaign since I first played in 1.1.x and then I stopped playing several years before coming back with the 1.10.x

If you still have version 1.10 installed, you can find The Dark Hordes on the addons server. (It was never ported to 1.12.) It has 11 scenarios, but it was never actually completed.

[Iris]

Or download it from here:
http://files.wesnoth.org/addons/1.9/The ... es.tar.bz2

You will need a program that can read tarballs (for Windows there's 7-zip or Winrar or Winzip) in order to unpack the The_Dark_Hordes folder in it into your add-ons dir.

[SigurdFireDragon]

Secret of the Ancients was recently Mainlined, perhaps you could look into that and see if there were any polls or forums that discussed it before it became part of the core game.

I'm not aware of any polls, but I did notice that it seemed to be reasonably well received as a umc campaign in forum discussions.

wasn't around when SotA was selected, but I imagine a good part of the reason it was chosen over other candidates is that mainline is suffering from an overpopulation of "good guys" campaigns (humans, elves, dwarves), while orcs and undead are getting the short end of the stick.

That was part of it. Another part was that its style & writing fit mainline well, making the process easier.