My Wesnoth 1.3 wish list

Post by **torangan** » November 23rd, 2006, 1:49 pm

I guess the problem might be the same one as with EBay votes for example. You either vote good or it's seen as bad. People don't understand that there's a huge neutral area in between. Many campagins would fall into that one until they're finished and reach "state good".

-> What i might be working on · Post by **Eleazar** » November 23rd, 2006, 2:39 pm

torangan wrote:I guess the problem might be the same one as with EBay votes for example. You either vote good or it's seen as bad. People don't understand that there's a huge neutral area in between. Many campagins would fall into that one until they're finished and reach "state good".

And how is that a problem? I daresay the people who would only choose campaigns with a "complete" lable are the people who only want to play finished campaigns.

The only possible benefit to not clearly labeling campaigns that i can see, is campaign developers might feel better because their download count is inflated by people who accidently download it, but don't play it once they find out it's incomplete.

It's impossible to devise a perfectly fair system where each campaign unvaryingly gets the attention it deserves. But we can give the player more info, so he can make a more intelligent decision.

kshinji · Post by **kshinji** » November 23rd, 2006, 3:18 pm

Post by **zookeeper** » November 23rd, 2006, 3:29 pm

kshinji wrote:Just to generalize: i would love if you considered focusing on making WML more powerful & easier to use.

More powerful...little need, as you can do almost anything within reasonable bounds (reasonable bounds being most things that would make any sense in the game in the first place) with it already. Easier...well, yeah, it's not very convenient in all cases.

I never mind adding more useful WML features or such, but the lack of WML capabilities is the least of the problems Wesnoth (or the Wesnoth community, or whatever) currently has. The lack of good content (campaigns) is what I see as the major problem.

Post by **Maeglin Dubh** » November 23rd, 2006, 5:03 pm

In my understanding, WML has actually been expanded to a great degree in recent versions. Perhaps it should be left for a time, so the campaign writers can bring their creations up to date, and have a solid basis to write on for a good time to come.

Post by **tapik** » November 24th, 2006, 9:44 am

Eleazar wrote:
tapik wrote:For example most add-ons from the campaign server will be marked as "non-good", so no-one will use them.
I don't understand this line of reasoning, though i've heard it before.
Is the point to get people to download campaigns, or to actually play them?
If a player wants a finished and polished campaign, he's not likely to continue playing once he discovers that the campaign he downloaded isn't actually finished or functional. It's great that the server has WIPs so players can test and provide feedback. But it should be abundantly clear if a download is going to provide a finished product or a playtesting opportunity. I doubt people who are looking for a complete campaign provide much useful feedback anyway.

It's easy. If you know, that all good campaigns were taken from campaign server into the mainline distribuiton, you will not search for good campaigns at the campaign server at all.

If some reasonable attributes will be added to the campaigns stored at server, it will have two impacts:
* people will be able to download only well marked completed campaigns
* campaing authors will do more improvements to let their campaigns belong to the well marked ones

So let's enhance ther campaign server protocol!!!

Post by **torangan** » November 24th, 2006, 10:38 am

I wouldn't agree. Just because a campaign is not marked good or included in mainline doesn't mean it's total crap. So if you played everything else or simply are interested because of what's written about some campaign in the forums, you can still get it.
Of course less people will get unmarked campaigns but that's ok. Most people don't want to play half finished stuff anyway. What we really need then of course are volunteers to marks campaigns as good / include them into mainline. Doesn't help much to improve your campaign until it's fantastic if it takes half a year to get it reviewed for inclusion.

kshinji · Post by **kshinji** » November 24th, 2006, 12:52 pm

Post by **zookeeper** » November 24th, 2006, 1:08 pm

kshinji wrote:Probably something like identifying version of Wesnoth, for which WML was made, would be good, as long as it's not making Wesnoth 'overweighted'. I mean something like [WML=1.0.2][/WML] or [WML=1.1.12][/WML] makes the game parse code inside like it did in past.

Way too hard to do, really (well, I'm pretty sure).

What would be possible, and IMHO the only way something similar could be done, would be to allow a few #ifdef's for specific versions or branches - for example, stuff inside an #ifdef WESNOTH_1.2 would only be used by the 1.2 branch, and #ifdef WESNOTH_1.3 would only be used by the 1.3 branch, and so on. This way, one could write a campaign that works with several otherwise incompatible Wesnoth versions (which might be much more convenient than maintaining two separate versions of the campaign).

Multiplayer Scenarios / Campaigns · Post by **Rhuvaen** » November 24th, 2006, 4:02 pm

zookeeper wrote:stuff inside an #ifdef WESNOTH_1.2 would only be used by the 1.2 branch, and #ifdef WESNOTH_1.3 would only be used by the 1.3 branch, and so on. This way, one could write a campaign that works with several otherwise incompatible Wesnoth versions (which might be much more convenient than maintaining two separate versions of the campaign).

Interesting, but if I write a campaign for the recent version and I'm using features that aren't available in a previous version I'm doing so for a reason. Probably it's not even possible to do what I am doing in an earlier version. And obviously, if I'm not maintaining my campaign to keep it up to date with newer versions, I'm also not going to add preprocessor switches for versions to come...

Post by **zookeeper** » November 24th, 2006, 5:01 pm

Rhuvaen wrote:
zookeeper wrote:stuff inside an #ifdef WESNOTH_1.2 would only be used by the 1.2 branch, and #ifdef WESNOTH_1.3 would only be used by the 1.3 branch, and so on. This way, one could write a campaign that works with several otherwise incompatible Wesnoth versions (which might be much more convenient than maintaining two separate versions of the campaign).
Interesting, but if I write a campaign for the recent version and I'm using features that aren't available in a previous version I'm doing so for a reason. Probably it's not even possible to do what I am doing in an earlier version. And obviously, if I'm not maintaining my campaign to keep it up to date with newer versions, I'm also not going to add preprocessor switches for versions to come...

Yep, couldn't make forwards-compatible stuff with that, it would only make adding backwards-compatibility hacks much more convenient.

The problem with supporting multiple WML "versions" is that the WML handling code is scattered all around the codebase - the unit reading code parses the unit WML, theme code parses the theme WML, etc. If all WML handling went through one module only, this might be possible to do, but currently...no.