Invasion from the Unknown (1.14.4) for Wesnoth 1.6 ONLY

[solsword]

Just starting this campaign, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it from what I've seen of the writing so far. In the intro text, there's an instance of 'sdo' where 'do' should be. It's in the [part] that goes "Recently the frequency and intensity of incursions has increased...": "Most people sdo not crave..." should be "Most people do not crave".

Is this a good place to report such spelling (and maybe grammar) errors as I find them, or should I do that somewhere else? In the future I'll try to wait until I spot a couple and post them all at once, but I wanted to know if there's a better place to report spelling errors.

[Iris]

Theron wins:

Typos:
Storytext scenario 1
- [...] My father has led led [...] (double "led")
- [...] Recently the frequency and intensity of incursions has incereased [...] (should be "increased")
- [...] We can detect no single hand behind them, but it is as as [...] (double "as")
- [...] Most people sdo [...] (should be "do")
...

Yes, this is the best place for reporting typos and grammar mistakes.

[solsword]

Good to know where to report these things. I'm coming up with a list as I go through the campaign, and I'll post it here when I finish. In the mean time, I've ran into a bug in either Wesnoth or the campaign that causes Wesnoth to crash. I'm playing scenario 5a, Crossfire, and when I kill the bandit leader, the dialogue gets as far as "Leader?" "He does not seem to be lying. What do you think, master Galas?" and then Wesnoth crashes when I try to go to the next message. I've posted a bug report on Gna! (#12970), but after trying some simple modifications to the scenario, (i.e. shortening the message lengths) I think that my intuitions about the root cause of the bug could be wrong. If you can offer any insights into what WML might trigger the bug, that would probably be helpful. A save file that should allow others to reproduce the bug is attached to the bug report. If you don't experience the issue, try running at 1024x768, which is the resolution I'm using.

[Iris]

Mordante/SkeletonCrew is aware of the issue and it is not specific to this campaign.

By the way, Version 1.10.5 has been published and is available at most of the usual locations - I am not able to upload it to my website for now, and in fact, the campaign server and SF.net packages were uploaded by Espreon.

Code: Select all

Version 1.10.5:
- Administration and maintenance:
    - Began to use inline formulas in WML to decrease code complexity. This
      means that this campaign will not work properly in Wesnoth 1.5.6 or
      earlier.
    - Saved games of the last boss fight and afterwards may no longer work.

- Graphics:
    - Updated baseframes: Elynia, Master of Darkness, Elvish Mystic,
                          Elvish Avatar, Shaxthal Protector Drone.
    - Updated portraits: Lédinor [D], King Asthorgar [D].

- Scenarios:
    - 8 (Errand of Hope):
        - Slight improvements to the initial custscene.
    - 8 - final cutscene (A Royal Meeting):
        - Fixed probably the most half-assed dialog sequence in this campaign's
          history. Damnit, there were even a few plot contradictions in it.
    - 10 (The Source of Light):
        - Removed the possibility of giving the draining potion to faerie
          beings and undead spirits (reported by TheJM).
    - 22A, 22B, 23A, 23B:
        - Fixed WML that invoked undefined behavior from the vconfig engine.
          This change means you've got to restart "Innuendo" or the last turn
          of The Heart to update your saves, since otherwise the recall list
          for the last scenarios will be unusable.
        - Prohibited plagued units (Walking Corpses, Soullesses, Ghouls) from
          being carried over to next scenarios.
    - 22A (Innuendo):
        - Removed one recall/recruitment hex for the player.
    - 22B (Gauntlet):
        - Major map revisions.

- Units:
    - Balancing:
        - Increased Aragwaith Sorcerer's total movement from 5 to 6.
        - Increased Chaos Hound's HP from 21 to 22.
        - Increased Hellhound's HP from 44 to 47.
    - Fixed glitchy animations:
        - Bone Knight
    - Removed unused units:
        - Bear
        - Giant Boar
    - Renamed units:
        - Sylvan Faerie -> Sylvan Warden

[Theron]

IftU 1.10.5, part 1, medium difficulty / Wesnoth 1.5.9 / Mac OS X 10.5.6

I'm getting a crash in scenario 4 (Over the Sands).
To reproduce load the attached save and move the WC (bat) at 49,33 to 44,35. This triggers the pay-villagers-dialog which crashes Wesnoth reproducable (at least for me).
--
There is a typo in scenario 1:
I am here to tell you a history [...] wide green world world [...] (double "world")
--
I have a suggestion:
If yes/no choices are to be made a generic wesnoth icon is displayed. This could be replaced by a more appropriate icon, e.g.
Scenario 1: "Do you want to see a brief description of characters the first time you select them in the map?"
Icon: A question mark or some other form of a help icon.
Scenario x: "Does unit y want to pick up item z?"
Icon: Ring, bow, potion, ...

[solsword]

I downloaded your save file and I also experienced the crash. I'm running 1.5.9+svn (32687). The crash looks to me like the same thing that I reported above, just at a different point in the game. Shadow Master said that people are aware of this bug and that it's not IftU-specific, so I guess all we can do is wait for a fix...

[Iris]

Fixing that bug in Wesnoth 1.5.10 is our priority.

The only possible workaround is increasing the size of your Wesnoth window if that is even possible. At least the KDE window manager allows me to enlarge windows above the screen area size.

EDIT: fixed the typo in the story text for scenario 1 in SVN, thanks.

[solsword]

Latest Wesnoth svn now has a fix for that message dialog bug. Yay!

After getting that, I played quite a bit further through IftU, and I'm really enjoying it so far. The maps are great, scenarios are interesting, new units are fun to play with art is great, etc. Thanks for making such a great campaign.

I've also been collecting spelling/grammar corrections as I go, and I've tentatively packaged them into a zip file that for the most part mirrors the campaign's structure... read the included README.txt for details. I'd like to know what you think of this feedback, and how useful it is to present the corrections like this. Ideally, the corrections would be a patch file (or maybe just a translation of the campaign from "en" to "en-corrected"... ) but I haven't gotten around to organizing them as such yet. Also, any other changes to your files relative to the latest release might get in the way of patching... and I haven't worked with the translation system at all, so I'd need to learn that (but I could do that...). In any case, I'd like to know whether I should keep doing corrections like this or move to a different method, and I'd like to know what you think of my correction quality so far... I've tried to stay very literal as much as possible, but in a few places I sacrificed assumed literalness of translation to achieve less awkward English that is still semantically equivalent.

Edit: I forgot to mention three other issues that I ran into:

In "The Elf versus Goliath" I ran into a blood imp that was on the teal team that didn't move or attack, despite several turns in range of my units (including things like Elven Shydes). I looked at the scenario and didn't see a controller= declaration for that team, so that may be why.

The Dwarven steamwheels are really awesome, but as a unit, they really suck. With just one attack fighting in caves, they mostly did absolutely nothing and got killed almost immediately. If you can, I'd suggest giving them two attacks, each at slightly more than half the damage that their previous attack dealt, so that they don't suck quite as much. Basically, thunderers work because much of the time, their single attack, miss or hit, doesn't provoke a retaliation (or doesn't provoke a very dangerous retaliation). Steamwheels are the other extreme: fighting mainly melee units, they almost always provoke a retaliation, and they provoke it at double damage, which means having just one attack is pretty suicidal.

In "The Library", I noticed that the weak units (goblins, wolf riders) often chose not to attack me at all. This is perfectly rational of them, but it makes a somewhat silly situation in which my level three units go around mopping them up while they do nothing but run and hide. You should either set aggression to 1.0 for their teams to that they at least throw themselves on the player's units and make some progress, or give those two leaders a more powerful recruit set. Still, I like the way that in that mission you fight some beefy monsters plus some weak enemy leaders, so I'd prefer option #1.

[Iris]

Thanks for all the feedback.

I've also been collecting spelling/grammar corrections as I go, and I've tentatively packaged them into a zip file that for the most part mirrors the campaign's structure... read the included README.txt for details. I'd like to know what you think of this feedback, and how useful it is to present the corrections like this. Ideally, the corrections would be a patch file (or maybe just a translation of the campaign from "en" to "en-corrected"... ) but I haven't gotten around to organizing them as such yet.

Since you already use SVN trunk for the mainline engine, I thought I may make it known (as in the 1.4 thread) that Invasion from the Unknown is hosted in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev project's repository, and has a 1.4 branch (since revision 1, yay) and the trunk tree, which is where all work for 1.5.x/1.6.x is being done until mainline 1.6.0 is released.

The SVN URI is <https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/Invasion_from_the_Unknown>.

The Web Interface to SVN is <http://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge. ... e_Unknown/>.

Its current state is "unstable", because I'm doing some breaking changes for 1.11.0.

Although I will use your files this time, in the future I'd prefer that you made the changes in a versioned tree and used the 'svn diff' command to obtain a neat diff that I can apply in a more straight-forward fashion in my tree. And the translation system would be... awkward, at least for me.

In "The Elf versus Goliath" I ran into a blood imp that was on the teal team that didn't move or attack, despite several turns in range of my units (including things like Elven Shydes). I looked at the scenario and didn't see a controller= declaration for that team, so that may be why.

The default for the controller= attribute is 'ai', so it shouldn't affect.

The Dwarven steamwheels are really awesome, but as a unit, they really suck. With just one attack fighting in caves, they mostly did absolutely nothing and got killed almost immediately. If you can, I'd suggest giving them two attacks, each at slightly more than half the damage that their previous attack dealt, so that they don't suck quite as much. Basically, thunderers work because much of the time, their single attack, miss or hit, doesn't provoke a retaliation (or doesn't provoke a very dangerous retaliation).

I have seen AIs sending kamikaze thunderers in many occasions, though.

The steamwheel unit is actually one of many things I regret adding to IftU and that should be removed very soon, along with most of the Aragwaith faction.

[solsword]

I'm happy to work with svn, and if you want I can apply the changes that I attached to an svn copy of the campaign... it's silly to make updates in my own crazy notation and then ask you to implement them...

Also, I'll miss the steamwheels... to me they represented advances in dwarven technology over the eons... it seems like given that much time, the dwarves ought to have come up with *something* new (heck, they built the Goliath, so that's one thing that shows their skill), and the steamwheel is a great unit that says "look at what the dwarves can invent, given enough time". I was just sad that they were so pathetic in combat.

[Iris]

Yes, using svn diff for the patch would be probably more effective at the moment. Specially since I have moved some stuff around.

[solsword]

Alright, all of my comments so far have been added to a checkout from this morning. The svn diff output is attached. There are a couple places where I have comments on continuity or other things, they start with # solsword: . There's at least one that you should definitely read and adjudicate. I look forward to playing through more of IftU soon.

[Jozrael]

I may just be a newb at using the search function: apologies if this is the case.

Are there any plans on making IftU mainline, and if so, on what approximate timeline?

[esr]

Are there any plans on making IftU mainline, and if so, on what approximate timeline?

I'm answering because I pushed our last seven additions into mainline. (Not a trivial job -- it can involve not just playtesting but prose and story editing, too.)

It's a possibility at this point, but a rather distant one. 1.6 is late because of bugs and I'm concentrating on that. Afterwards, Delfador's Memoirs is ahead of IftU in the queue, and after DM I'm thinking about writing a Saurian-centered campaign for mainline -- working title "The Night March". I don't expect I'll be able to make any serious effort at mainlining IftU until May 2009 at the earliest.

[The Black Sword]

Thanks for the great campaign Shadow Master!
I've played it before one the 1.4 branch but the changes have made it a lot better I think, especially the last few scenarios and their dialogue which were the only bad point on my first playthrough. Now though they're challenging and I love Ledinors possession.

I was playing on an old version since I didn't want to restart every time you released a new one, most of the bugs I found seem to have been reported but for some reason wesnoth always seemed to crash a few moves after I activated glamour for Elyna. Sorry if that's already been fixed.