Summoning Wars

[Lastmerlin]

Hello everybody,

I am here to announce the release of Summoning Wars 0.5beta version. It is a free and open source game developed by four german students.

Summoning Wars is an action RPG with point-and-click fight system. Choose from 4 Classes with 24 unique
abilities each and jump into a campaign playable in both single and multiplayer mode. Multiplayer mode is usable by up to 8 players and does not only offer collective monster slaying, but also some slight story modification, as the as the dialogs adapt to the number and class of players in game. There are hundreds of items to collect and dozens of
monster types to fight. Meet citizens and sinister puppet-masters with secrets of their own and trade with well-equiped traders
- or search for the blackmarket and stock enchanted items.

Summoning Wars has a flexible engine that allows to modifiy and extend most aspects of the game by editing some easy to read XML files. In addition, there is a lua-based scripting system that allows triggering events or starting cutscenes at runtime.

Here is a litte screenshot:


For now, we have precompiled Binary for Windows and a Source code package for Linux. To download it, visit our homepage:

http://www.sumwars.org

There, you will also find some more screenshots and forum where you can post some feedback. The forum has been created very recently and is very empty so far, but there is no need to keep it in that state. If you encounter a bug, please report it at the forums or at the Sourceforge bugtracker.

While previous developement was done by a small, closed group of team members, we plan to search for additional contributors in future. So if you enjoy the game and notice that you could help to improve certain aspects feel free to contact me. In fact there is work to be done in dozens of areas, for example graphics, sound, music, storywriting, scripting, translation and, of course, programming. So any help is very appreciated.
To be honest, I especially hope to find some contributors in wesnoth community, as this is the biggest open source game developement community at all and wesnoth is the prototype of success in that area.

Beeing made by only german developers so far, language is german at the moment, but we have an english translation. If activating the translation ingame does not work (namely under Windows), you have to set the system locale to english before starting. We also plan to switch to english as original language soon. The story translation is not complete, we are working on that as well.

Now enjoy the game

[Telaron]

This looks cool, just, not for mac.

[Lastmerlin]

We hope to get a Mac build in future. At the moment the problem is simply, that we do not have a Mac computer to make a build. Apart from that I am not sure how much experience is needed to do that. I have heard its a pain similar to Windows x(

[lmelior]

Pretty interesting setup you got there, Lua embedded in XML to control the game. Are your assets GPL as well? I couldn't find any indication on your website or in SVN.

Also, I'm curious, is it typical for code to be in English with German programmers? Obviously the keywords are in English but all the variable names I saw were also in English.

Lastly, I saw West is listed on the team page. So perhaps this is his secret project. You are lucky!

Best of luck to you, this looks very promising.

[Lastmerlin]

Both code and content is GPL.

For the coding standard: You always have to include some libraries which have english function and class names, so using german ones yourself will create a horrible mix. Unforturnately, the documentation is in german at the moment, which must be changed to make it easy for other programmers to join.

And yes, we already convinced the first wesnoth team members to contribute to our project as well, which is a significant step into the right direction and demonstrates that this game is considered to be promising.

[lmelior]

I get this error on Ubuntu 9.04:

X Error of failed request: GLXBadDrawable
Major opcode of failed request: 161 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 17 (X_GLXVendorPrivateWithReply)
Serial number of failed request: 57
Current serial number in output stream: 57

Also, I get this in Ogre.log but from what I've read it shouldn't be fatal:

21:01:03: OGRE EXCEPTION(6:FileNotFoundException): Cannot locate resource GLX_icon.png in resource group General or any other group. in ResourceGroupManager::openResource at OgreResourceGroupManager.cpp (line 604)

I'm posting this in the off chance you've seen this, but I probably just need to update my main laptop. I've fiddled with several different versions of OGRE and CEGUI and other libraries so it's just a big mess.

[Lastmerlin]

This problem look rather like an OGRE specific problem - at least there are more users complaing about this problem in OGRE forum. Does this occur, when you try to start our Game, or some Ogre Samples ?

In general, compiling Ogre yourself is a pain sometimes and I cant do a lot about this. The best is to apt-get it and hope it works.
If you encounter more problems with compiling of the game itself, please have a look at our forum or IRC channel. We could not test the build on all the >1000 Linux variants out there, so we desperately seek for people who explain us, what things are not working instead of throwing the game away instantly.

[lmelior]

This problem look rather like an OGRE specific problem - at least there are more users complaing about this problem in OGRE forum. Does this occur, when you try to start our Game, or some Ogre Samples ?

In general, compiling Ogre yourself is a pain sometimes and I cant do a lot about this. The best is to apt-get it and hope it works.
If you encounter more problems with compiling of the game itself, please have a look at our forum or IRC channel. We could not test the build on all the >1000 Linux variants out there, so we desperately seek for people who explain us, what things are not working instead of throwing the game away instantly.

Compiling Ogre is not too bad by itself, but when you mix it with CEGUI it gets annoying because in my experience CEGUI is highly dependent on the Ogre version. Since I've been messing with newer versions than are available in the repository (and I didn't keep track of them), I had all kinds of package conflicts when I tried to revert to the older one.

No worries though, I'm due for a clean install anyway.

[West]

Lastly, I saw West is listed on the team page. So perhaps this is his secret project.

Indeed it is

[Dveman115]

Lastly, I saw West is listed on the team page. So perhaps this is his secret project.

Indeed it is

Back in the old game development mood West?

[West]

Back in the old game development mood West?

No, just the normal music making mood.

[monochromatic]

Just registered in your forums. Looking forward!

[Sangel]

Intriguing - it looks like you're off to a great start on this project. And with West on the team, the music is sure to be top-notch.

We hope to get a Mac build in future. At the moment the problem is simply, that we do not have a Mac computer to make a build. Apart from that I am not sure how much experience is needed to do that. I have heard its a pain similar to Windows x(

Unfortunately, I'm on a Mac, so I'll have to wait before giving Summoning Wars a try. Please do let us know when you get a Mac build up and running!

[Lastmerlin]

Hi,

I have released the next version (0.5.1) right now. You might be interested in having a look at it. For the download visit our homepage
http://www.sumwars.org . It is also the first version that includes some content created by new programmers and artists who joined the team during the last month. We are still searching for new contributors, so visit our forum or IRC if you are interested.

I want to say thanks to wesnoth developers, who gave me some valuable advice how to start the project and helped with some specific programming question. In additions thanks to crimson_penguin who has started working on a MAC build. Unfortunately, there were some issues, so there is no mac version right now, but I am sure that this will be done in future.

Some important changes are:
- Improved target selection system
- Dialogs use only two corners now
- full English translation and set this as default option
- new Worldmap
- support for cmake build system
- Single-player game may be paused with ESC now

Have a lot of fun!

[Lastmerlin]

Hello,

I just want to tell you, that we have a Mac build now (finally). For that, I want to say special thanks to crimson_penguin (who should be well-known here) and trapdoor for their hard and persistant work as well as their patience...
To get the current build working, the sound system and the network support were removed temporarily, because these two libraries were causing some problems we could not solve so far. I just decided, that a Mac build with somewhat reduced functionality is better than no Mac build after all. Of course there features will be activated again, as soon as the issues are solved.