Draft: Wesnoth 1.2 Release Notes

[Viliam]

I took Wesnoth 1.0 release notes and edited it, removing most of old info, and including changes between 1.0 and 1.2. I am interested in your opinion whether there should be a (localized) announcement also for version 1.2. If yes, please someone native English speaker to improve the text.

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Battle for Wesnoth 1.2 Release Notes

Internet. September ?????, 2006. The Battle for Wesnoth team is proud to release version 1.2 of "The Battle for Wesnoth", a Free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme and roleplaying elements. The game is available for download now for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.

Battle for Wesnoth is one of very few successful Free/Open Source games. The version 1.2 brings a lot of new content along with significant technical improvements.

Single player game has a new tutorial and 3 new campaigns: Two Brothers, The South Guard, Under the Burning Suns. The first one is designed intentionally easy for beginning players. The last one is set to environment different from typical Wesnoth campaign, and includes a few changes to game rules. The existing campaigns include new scenarios, dialogs, items, and optional bonus victory objectives.

Multiplayer has new features making the internet or LAN game more pleasant experience. It allows setting turn time limit, sending private messages to allies, banning unwelcome users by IP address. The lobby user interface displays detailed information about existing games. A few new multiplayer maps were added.

Other changes in game content include new units, new terrain types, balancing unit stats and abilities. Units belonging to different teams show their team color on clothes and banners; their walking, swimming, dying, and special actions are animated. There are new portraits, improved terrain graphics, new attack buttons, and progress bar when loading game. The version 1.2 includes also new music and unit sounds. The in-game help was improved.

Developers can enjoy new WML (Wesnoth markup language) features, custom abilities, unit stat modification, more detailed events, and possibility to script a custom AI in Python.

Battle for Wesnoth now supports also left-to-right languages. There are new Polish and Norwegian translations, and many other incomplete ones. Together 35 translations are worked on; join us to help finish the incomplete translations for future releases.

The version 1.2 includes a gameplay feedback mechanism. Players can allow sending anonymous statistics of their games to statistic server. This allows campaign authors to balance their campaigns.

Battle for Wesnoth is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Source code is available from wesnoth.org where you will also find instructions for building from source on a range of different operating systems. Ready-to-go packages are also available for most popular operating systems.

* Source code (??? MB)
* Wesnoth for MS Windows (??? MB)
* Wesnoth for Mac OS X (??? MB)
* Debian Sid Sarge

You can get up to date information about downloads at the downloads page.

Please note that the savegames from the previous stable version are not compatible with version 1.2. You have to finish your single player campaign in the old version, or start playing it from the beginning. It is possible to have both versions installed on the same computer, in different directories.

* Wesnoth Official Website (English)
* Battle for Wesnoth 1.0 Release Notes

[torangan]

Units can have animations for walking and other situations but they're not done.
Left-to-right support is still incomplete.

[zookeeper]

their walking, swimming, dying, and special actions are animated

Well, not quite. Maybe just mention generally that many units have gotten improved graphics and animations - there are no walking animations now and probably way over half of the units don't have dying animations either, so it's not a good idea to suggest that "units have dying animations".

Mentioning that terrain graphics have improved pretty much across the board might be worthwhile too.

IMHO the most notable new WML capabilities (better make it clear that these are mostly just internal and not visible changes, and thus mostly interesting to content creators): almost limitless possibilities for writing custom abilities and a much more powerful animation syntax. Also a huge number of little additions to WML.

[xtifr]

Battle for Wesnoth is one of very few successful Free/Open Source games.

This line is pretty dubious. By some measurements, there are MANY successful FLOSS games; by others, Wesnoth is not yet a successful one. I think something a little more objective would be better here.

[freim]

Battle for Wesnoth is one of very few successful Free/Open Source games.

This line is pretty dubious. By some measurements, there are MANY successful FLOSS games; by others, Wesnoth is not yet a successful one. I think something a little more objective would be better here.

I would suggest removing it entirely. Sounds quite pretentious to me.

[Boucman]

The game is available for download now for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.

The game is officially available as Source only...

everything else is external contribution

this sentence should be reformulated

The game is available for download now as source code, and precompiled for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.

[Tomsik]

The game is available for download now as source code, and precompiled for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.

Are you trying to scare newbies?

Most people don't have idea what "precompiled" and "source code" mean, so better don't use such words.

[Boucman]

unfortunately, the game is only made available by the project as source code, so the current statement is incorrect

(you might want to reforumlate, though...)

[Tomsik]

unfortunately, the game is only made available by the project as source code, so the current statement is incorrect

Uh.. as long there are these binaries it is right, there's no need to be over-offical, is there?

[scott]

unfortunately, the game is only made available by the project as source code, so the current statement is incorrect

Uh.. as long there are these binaries it is right, there's no need to be over-offical, is there?

Yeah, and sometimes there's not binaries, and people get mad at the devs, who have since bent over backwards to emphasize the point. You have forgotten what happened for, say, 50% of the releases before we entered the 1.2 pipeline. Remember guy?

That said, binaries will be available for 1.2 just like they were for 1.0. It would probably suffice to just say the game is available for all those platforms and mention the source code in the next sentence.

[zol]

[There are] very few successful Free/Open Source games.

Not sure why you would want to say this, but in any case, it is external to the project itself.
i.e. Not actually the information sought here.

[Yogibear]

"The replay functionality has been improved to show single turns at a time, navigate through the replay and remove/set fog at will."

Or something like that .

[Jetrel]

The game is available for download now as source code, and precompiled for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.

Are you trying to scare newbies?

Most people don't have idea what "precompiled" and "source code" mean, so better don't use such words.

Tomsik hit the nail on the head. Most people don't even know what GNU/Linux is, let alone what "binary/source/etc." mean. To them, it's just "all manner of jive." It doesn't matter if it's technically slightly inaccurate - it matters that a crucial statement like this can be parsed by the average person.

They want it to be unambiguous to them; so let's say the exact same thing, but snip out some of the words that would confuse them:

The game is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux distributions (and as source code, of course).

Not "available as preconfbulated whamachalits" for the platform they're looking for - just "available". Having the mention of source code at the end, and in parentheses preceded by an "and", signals to them that it's something they don't need to be concerned with if they don't know what it is. It's like commenting out javascript for browsers too old to understand it. Only a minority knows what source code even is.

The beauty of forming the sentence this way is that we don't say that it is available now - we just say it's available. Because for those three platforms, we can guarantee availability soon enough.

[Eyal]

Units can have animations for walking and other situations but they're not done.
Left-to-right support is still incomplete.

You probably mean right-to-left support, since I assume Wesnoth has always had left-to-right support.

[Jetrel]

I took Wesnoth 1.0 release notes and edited it, removing most of old info, and including changes between 1.0 and 1.2. I am interested in your opinion whether there should be a (localized) announcement also for version 1.2. If yes, please someone native English speaker to improve the text.

Aye; I've done that, and merged in the suggested changes below:

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Battle for Wesnoth 1.2 Release Notes

Internet. SDecember ?????, 2006. The Battle for Wesnoth team is proud to release version 1.2 of "The Battle for Wesnoth", a Free, turn-based, strategy game with a fantasy theme and roleplaying elements. The game is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions (and as source code, of course). Version 1.2 brings a lot of new content, along with significant technical improvements.

The single player mode has a new tutorial, and 3 new campaigns: Two Brothers, The South Guard, and Under the Burning Suns. The first one was intentionally designed to be easy for beginning players. The last one is set in an environment quite different from that of the typical Wesnoth campaign, and includes a few changes to game rules. The existing campaigns include new scenarios, dialogue, items, and optional bonus victory objectives. Replay of saved games has been improved considerably, allowing one to show single turns at a time, navigate through the replay, and toggle "fog-of-war" at will.

Multiplayer has new features, making the internet or LAN mode a more pleasant experience. It allows setting a per-turn time limit, sending private messages to allies, and banning unwelcome users by IP address. The multiplayer "lobby" interface now displays detailed information about existing games. A few new multiplayer maps were also added.


Other changes in game content include new units, new terrain types, and further balancing of unit stats and abilities. We have added progress bars to major "loading" points in the game. We have also added some great new music, and a host of new sound effects. There have also been some rearrangements and improvements to the in-game help.

One major change is that we have undertaken a heavy revision of our sprite imagery; affecting almost all units except the drakes, mermen, and naga, intended to bring most of the units into consistent style and correct size. A result of this is that units (which we've revised) that belong to different teams, now show their team color on clothes and banners. We have also completely replaced the icons representing the attacks of units. There are a few new portraits and story pictures, some major improvements to terrain graphics (especially the new mountains, cave, castles/encampments, swamp, canyons, and tropical forests, not to mention a few others).

Developers and Modders can enjoy new WML (Wesnoth markup language) features, including custom abilities, unit stat modification, more detailed events, and the ability to script a custom AI in Python. Additionally, we have added basic code support for the animation of walking, swimming, dying, and other special actions; in doing so we've done a major cleanup of the WML that describes said animations, making it much more consistent.

Battle for Wesnoth now supports also right-to-left languages. There are new Polish and Norwegian translations, and many other incomplete ones. In total, there are 35 translations being worked on; please join us to help finish the incomplete translations for future releases.

Version 1.2 includes a gameplay feedback mechanism. Players can allow the program to send anonymous statistics of their performance in single-player campaigns to our server - this gives campaign authors the information they need to balance the difficulty of their campaigns.


Battle for Wesnoth is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The source code is available from wesnoth.org, where you will also find instructions for building from source on a range of different operating systems. Ready-to-go packages are also available for most popular operating systems.

* Source code (??? MB)
* Wesnoth for MS Windows (??? MB)
* Wesnoth for Mac OS X (??? MB)
* Debian Sid Sarge

You can get up to date information about downloads at the downloads page.

Please note that the savegames from the previous stable version are not compatible with version 1.2. You will have to finish your single player campaign in the old version, or start playing it from the beginning in the new version. It is possible to have both versions installed on the same computer, in different directories.

* Wesnoth Official Website (English)
* Battle for Wesnoth 1.0 Release Notes