Wesnoth 1.11.19 (1.12 Release Candidate 3)

[Iris]

Wesnoth 1.11.19 (1.12 Release Candidate 3) is out!

We did say that we hoped we would not need a third release candidate. But sometimes, to get important bugs fixed, you need to get your hands dirty and replace old code. It is not easy to make decisions like this, but in light of several long-standing issues on Windows, it simply had to be done, or our player-base would be stuck for another stable series with a game that doesn’t work correctly out of the box.

Now we are absolutely certain that we will not need a fourth RC. Report all bugs you find so that there is a chance for us to assess their severity and fix them before 1.12.0! It does not matter whether they are regular gameplay or WML/Lua development issues — every properly-filed bug report is useful to us, no matter how trivial or obvious the issue may seem to be.

• Players should continue to test this version and all the various new features and units added since 1.10.x.
• Content authors should port their content to this version and test it now to ensure first-time players of version 1.12.0 — or Wesnoth in general — have a chance to play with their favorite add-ons when the time comes.
• Translators should work on translating mainline Wesnoth and try to aim for 100% completion before 1.12.0. Everyone with the required language skills can help — all the instructions to join and contribute to the mainline translation teams are on the wiki.
• Typos in the English text of the game should be reported in the wiki.

Here is a list of the most important changes since the last development release:

[ Expand all ]

Greatly improved cross-platform Unicode support»

Previous versions of Wesnoth relied on certain platform environment provisions that were not satisfied on all operating systems. This resulted in various filesystem access issues when non-ASCII characters were involved, ranging from the inability to save games with certain names, to rendering the entire game unusable when installed on a path including such characters.

From this release onwards, the following features should now work properly regardless of platform and characters involved:

• Loading and saving WML files, including saved games and replays
• Loading Lua scripts
• Loading images, sounds, music, and fonts
• Loading translations and translated images
• Parsing of command line arguments
• Copying and pasting text from clipboard

In particular, on Windows, the game should now work correctly even when installed to a path containing non-ASCII characters.

See also bugs #5529 [Gna.org], #13926 [Gna.org], #16293 [Gna.org], #20089 [Gna.org], #22265 [Gna.org], this forum topic, and possibly many, many others.

[i]Legend of Wesmere[/i]: Bug fixes»

All remaining known issues affecting the Legend of Wesmere campaign on single-player mode have been fixed:

• “Ka’lian under attack”: fixed more issues due to new map size.
• “Ka’lian under attack”: fixed two issues with fog. This fixes bug #22880 [Gna.org].
• “Elves’ Last Stand”: fixed not all elvish leaders being able to recruit; fixed bugs related to Olurf and his party’s arrival.
• “Bounty Hunters”: fixed several coordinate issues due to new map size.
• “Cliffs of Thoria”: fixed so that yetis can be seen moving in hole in fog.
• Fixed player team name in several scenarios.
• Fixed player side carryover in several scenarios.

Lua 5.2.3»

The Lua interpreter library bundled with the game’s source has been upgraded from version 5.2.0 to 5.2.3 in this release. See the upstream bugs page for more information on the bugs solved by this change:

• Version 5.2.3
• Version 5.2.2
• Version 5.2.1

Build-time dependency changes»

For the aforementioned Unicode support fixes, it was necessary to introduce new library dependencies. By default, the game now requires:

• Boost.filesystem ≥ 1.44
• Boost.locale ≥ 1.48
• SDL_mixer ≥ 1.2.12

For both the SCons and CMake build recipes, the first two dependencies may be disabled by turning off the boostfilesystem (SCons) and ENABLE_BOOST_FILESYSTEM (CMake) flags. Do note, however, that this will cause the game to use the older unreliable filesystem and internationalization code, thus negating all related fixes.

Known bugs»

• When run on Linux with “System default language” selected in the Language menu, Unicode characters in translatable UI and WML strings disappear. This includes accents, em dashes, quotation marks, apostrophes, and many more (bug #22921 [Gna.org]).
  A fix is already available (commit b6f916adf1a5) and will be included in the next RC or stable release.
  Workaround: Select your actual language in the Language menu, for example, “English [US]”.
  Note: This issue affects Apple OS X as well, but only when built from source with the new filesystem and internationalization code. Thus, our official OS X build is unaffected. The Homebrew recipe also includes the aforementioned patch as of this writing.
• Start-of-scenario saves cannot be loaded correctly in Multiplayer (bug #22068 [Gna.org]).
• There are a few known issues affecting the hotkey customization options:
  • It’s not possible to clear some default hotkeys with the Clear Hotkey option (bug #21983 [Gna.org]). This will not be fixed in 1.12.x.
  • Attempting to assign hotkeys including both the Ctrl and Alt modifiers does not work (bug #22219 [Gna.org]).

Known Windows-specific issues»

The following issues affect Wesnoth on Windows and they are pending fixes. However, they are not being worked on at this time and might not be solved in time for 1.12.0:

• ClearType font rendering is glitched and nearly unreadable (bug #21648 [Gna.org]).
  A workaround was added in version 1.11.10 to avoid using ClearType altogether. This is likely caused by outdated libraries in the packaging process.
• Consecutive line breaks (paragraph breaks) are not rendered as expected (bug #21649 [Gna.org]).
  There is no built-in workaround available yet. This is likely caused by outdated libraries in the packaging process.

Known OS X-specific issues»

The following issues (taken from this page) affecting Wesnoth on Apple OS X are known and they are pending fixes. However, many of them are beyond the scope of the 1.12.x series and require significant re-engineering that can only be done in 1.13.x development releases later, or cannot be properly addressed due to a lack of experienced OS X coders in our team. Thus, unless someone can contribute patches to address them, it is unlikely that these bugs will be fixed before or during the 1.12.x series.

• Color cursors are slow to the point of rendering the game completely unusable in windowed mode (bug #18112 [Gna.org]).
  As a mitigation measure, the old color cursors setting is ignored on OS X by Wesnoth 1.11.8 and later, and the option is hidden from view.
• Fullscreen mode does not fill the entire screen when maximum resolution is selected in Preferences → Display, and user interface elements are scaled and distorted.
• System commands do not work while Wesnoth is running in fullscreen mode (bug #21943 [Gna.org]).
• The mouse cursor is not mapped correctly to the game screen contents on Retina displays due to problems with detected vs. real screen resolution mismatches (bug #20332 [Gna.org]).
  A workaround is in place making Wesnoth default to 800x600 on OS X regardless of the incorrectly-detected maximum resolution.
• Trackpad tap clicking is sometimes not recognized (forum post).
• OpenMP builds randomly freeze (bug #18144 [Gna.org]).
  Official OS X builds are done with OpenMP disabled for this reason.
• Consecutive line breaks (paragraph breaks) are not rendered as expected (bug #21649 [Gna.org]).
  There is no built-in workaround available yet. This is likely caused by outdated libraries in the packaging process.

[/list]

There are a few more changes in addition to the aforementioned, including translation updates and fixes for minor bugs. Most of these items are listed in the full changelog. There’s also an alternative players changelog including only those changes deemed to be relevant for regular players.

An official announcement including a list with the most notable changes between 1.10 and 1.12 will be made available along with the 1.12.0 release when it is ready.


New Contributors

Do you want to help shape the future of Wesnoth? You are always free to join us in the #wesnoth-dev IRC channel on irc.freenode.net to ask for help with getting started!


Downloads

Source code (385.2 MB) (MD5 sum)

Xdelta from 1.11.18 (2.2 MB) (About Xdelta)

The Windows, OS X, and OpenPandora packages are already available and can be found on the Download page in the wiki.

All known Linux packagers have been contacted, and binaries for your distribution may have already been created. Information about where to get the respective binaries or how to install them can be found on the Linux binaries page in the wiki.

Downloads for other platforms may be found on the Download page in the wiki as they become available.

⁂

The multiplayer server for 1.12.x is up and running. This server can be used to play with other players running 1.11.17 and later 1.12.x versions, including release candidates.

The add-ons server for 1.12.x is already running. It was started for 1.11.10 and it will serve all future beta and RC releases from this series, as well as all releases in the stable 1.12.x series. If you encounter any problems involving add-ons not working as expected, please notify the content’s author or maintainer.

If you find any bugs, do not hesitate to report them, but please read the instructions on how to report bugs first! As bug reports in the forums tend to be forgotten, you will get better results using our bug tracker. We require your help for finding and fixing issues, no matter how obvious, trivial or complicated they seem!

Have fun!

[tekelili]

Still 1.11.18 as last version in download page, I guess is a matter of time...

[Iris]

Oops, sorry about that. It’s updated now.