Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

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What should Wesnoth Inc. do if given $500,000? (Select up to three options)

Poll ended at October 2nd, 2021, 7:56 pm

Advertise the 1.16 version of Wesnoth by pitching our content to media editors, making a professional promo trailer, buying ads, or something similar
6
17%
Commission portraits/sprite animations for all mainline units that may be missing them, or artwork for narrative sequences
11
31%
Hire freelance programmer(s) to completely port Wesnoth to modern engine (e.g. Godot)
5
14%
Hire freelance programmer(s) to create a secure multiplayer client (i.e. one not easy to cheat in)
4
11%
Commission writers/designers to develop/improve UMC add-ons to get them to “mainline” quality and have them mainlined
9
25%
Other (kindly elaborate with a response to the post, please)
1
3%
 
Total votes: 36

vghetto
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by vghetto »

You should update your radar. I am sure people working at big open-source companies or open-source project hosted by commercial companies are getting paid.
Yes, and it is called employment. That is not the same thing as what you've described.

Could you update my radar and name a company that operates on the model that you proposed here other than the welfare state, or is ad based?
Just as a reminder here is your model:
  • universal credit: people who have passion to contribute to wesnoth, but struggle with money, should get a monthly allocation, no question asked, to pursue their endeavors.
What I mean here: if wesnoth generating revenues and expects people who have been open about financial difficulties to work harder for free, it looks like a bad judgment call.
What are you talking about, wesnoth isn't coercing anyone.
Wesnoth has not benefited from the boom in gaming from that last 15(?) years. Anyone interested at increasing reach of wesnoth as a gaming proposal can start thinking on reasons why...
Maybe because there's GTA, Skyrim and games like those.

Why do I play wesnoth? Why am I here?
I'm here because my console blew up and haven't bought a new one yet. Also, my computer is old and it runs a live distro which means that the RAM is very scarce. Wesnoth was about the only thing that ran reasonably well for me. Even Freeciv couldn't do that. Although I'm not very optimistic about the newer wesnoth version, it's a drain on the memory.
When I get a new computer or console, will I keep playing wesnoth? The answer is no.
Anyone interested at increasing reach of wesnoth as a gaming proposal can start thinking on reasons why...
Could you show that the reason wesnoth hasn't benefited from the boom in gaming is because it is not being inclusive enough?
Could you demonstrate that if wesnoth decides to implement those policies "no torture, no rape, no slave, no "savage", no hate based on "race"" or the gender and less European non-humanoid stuff that it will actually increase it's reach and grow.
If yes, by how much?
Show me a goblin likely to play wesnoth and I will consider your question. I want a real goblin, an actual forum user.
Well, I'm actually glad you're seeing how silly this all sounds. But you dodged answering the question. I still don't see what the problem is and why we need that extended censorship that was proposed.

But let's take it further, again the quote was:
  • NRIW being extended to: no torture, no rape, no slave, no "savage", no hate based on "race", ...
I'm not aware of anyone on this forum enslaving, torturing or raping anyone. So it must apply to the game and the characters within it.

Ok, dim goblin is not hate based on "race". Do you have an example of hate based on "race" that is problematic to you?

What if we have a scenario where the goblins are enslaved by Orcs. Will that violate the "no slave"?
Maybe not, they are not humanoid enough. But I remember a scenario where humans have to enslave Ogres.. will that violate the "no slave"?
What if it is elves enslaving humans? what if one of the scenarios is humans enslaving humans?

Be clear on what you want exactly.
At the end, I can see the game you're playing here, take a 30-line post and extract three sentences and pound on them with all your prejudice. Not fun.
That's funny, because you started the post saying this:
Anyway as the current topic is about money only, let me try to contribute some more ideas around money:
And that quickly devolved into imposing your morality (having more genders) and censorship (no this and that) on wesnoth and UMC devs which will limit creativity.
Dave
Don't freaking throw an authority figure at me.
I don't care what Dave has to say about anything. Also I don't think that the "No religion in wesnoth" is a good policy either.
It is censorship. And censorship leads to more censorship.
"Hey we already have "no religion", why not add "no dot dot dot"
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Hejnewar
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by Hejnewar »

Part of description:
In part due to their use of faerie fire, most lords find themselves strongly aligned with enchantresses, thus associating themselves with the aspects of insight and destruction.
TipTaupe wrote: September 28th, 2021, 12:12 am but they don't transform to embody the faerie nature of elves
I would say that the only reason the dont is that noone ever done a sprite for thier transformation and looking at the descriptions both transformations shouldnt be exclusive at all, they just focus on different things. Lords focus on insight and destruction, and Sylphs on insight and manipulation. I fail to see how that could create third gender really, in physical sense they just gain wings and they still are male and female (Lord path probably wouldnt even lose sight because losing it is not needed with destruction as much as is with manipulation), its pretty much just taking a job of shaman by male. This could lead to making him an outcast or something because even after the fall job of a shaman was still female but really the only difference seems to be aspect.

That makes me wonder does all elves have wings that grow when imbuned with enough of magic? In my understanding they should because its like their origin, if so how owuld wings of destruction look like? Humans in comparison would gain tail probably. :P

500k? Make campaigns that answer lore questions! (To despair of UMC creators buhahahhahahah.)
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revolting_peasant
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by revolting_peasant »

I voted "Other" as one of my options - apparently the only one.

My "Other" idea is setting up a small organization (< 1 FTE) which would center around a fund. It would coordinate some longer-term money-generating activity - not IP or ad sales but things a donation/contribution crowd-funding infrastructure, merchandizing sales (apparel; boxed versions of the game with a printed manual, to give as a gift; figurines; posters etc), presence (via volunteers) at gaming-related events; and maybe other ideas.

Such an organization may also be able to set up cooperations, which could yield us some "manpower". There are quite a few institutions such as colleges, technical schools, design studios and such which train people in practical art and design, including some with focus on games. Now, such institutions often want to place their students in practical internships; or use actual projects in practical experience courses. I have a friend who's done this with a small (non-game-related) start-up of his in the Netherlands, and without paying anything, got 4 or 5 internships of people at the final year of their undergrad studies in industrial design, and in business management - and those were from bona fide universities. I'm not saying our case is the same as that of a small business, but it could theoretically attract "future generations" of people interested in Wesnoth.

Back to the question of the money - the organizational framework I suggested would help increase visibility and create a modest revenue stream. In addition to the organizational expenses, being able to rely on X money per annum would mean all of the proposals/ideas above could be considered on a multi-annual/longer-term basis but with smaller sums.
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ForestDragon
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by ForestDragon »

TipTaupe wrote: September 27th, 2021, 8:31 pm For example, I can personally see the elves having a third gender analogous to two-spirit people in indigenous American cultures. Male and female elves are both able to use faerie magic, but we only ever see female elves advance to become shydes. Perhaps elfish culture regards higher levels of faerie magic as fundamentally feminine, and if an elf who was born male managed to master it, they would be regarded as in-between male and female, having transcended the assumed limitations of their physical sex. I'm not demanding that someone go and add this, but I think it would definitely add interest to the world.
"male elf doing feminine magic = reason to add whole new gender" seems like a very big leap in logic imo. Plus, as others pointed, elvish lord exists, and works fine without needing an extra gender.
TipTaupe wrote: September 27th, 2021, 8:31 pm I also imagine that some players would like to play characters with non-traditional genders. As a woman, I personally prefer to play campaigns that center on female characters, and I imagine that some people would feel similarly about other genders.
Thing is, men/women are basically half the population, while non-traditional genders are only a tiny percentage of the population. Heavily changing things in mainline to appeal to a small demographic doesn't seem particularly worth it imo.
Pentarctagon wrote: September 27th, 2021, 9:47 pm I think the main point is that delving into these sorts of issues needs to be done tactfully and in a realistic, meaningful way. Few people would to be happy to have a token homosexual spearman added to HttT for example.
True

Pentarctagon wrote: September 27th, 2021, 9:47 pm Wesnoth has not benefited from the boom in gaming from that last 15(?) years. People are free to avoid playing wesnoth if they don't like it and they are using this freedom all the time. Anyone interested at increasing reach of wesnoth as a gaming proposal can start thinking on reasons why...
Ehhh, instead of inclusivity (or the alleged lack thereof), imo the reasons for that are far more likely 1. the fact that wesnoth pretty much doesn't advertise itself, mostly spreading though word of mouth and the fact it's one of the very few good games on Linux, and 2. as vghetto pointed out, the spotlight is taken by the much flashier AAA games (though as someone who played both wesnoth and the AAA games mentioned, wesnoth is still the game I keep returning to while AAA games get stale fairly quickly)

demario wrote: September 27th, 2021, 11:04 pm In my first post, I make a reference to NRIW. Let me give you an old quote from the founder of this project. See how you could apply to the topic mutatis mutandis.
This is, though, 1. religious people are a far, far larger percentage of the global population than people with non-traditional genders, 2. fictional religions do very much exist in UMC, and even mainline has religion in UtbS, plus the fact that paladins/white mages have clear religious undertones 3. religion matches medieval-ish settings much better than modern ideas of gender
TipTaupe wrote: September 28th, 2021, 12:12 am Right. This is just one idea, but in any case, it enriches a fantasy world to think about how the people in it would interact with complex and sometimes uncomfortable topics like gender.
Exploring those topics is one thing, forcing them onto a universe that existed for more than a decade without them is another
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by TipTaupe »

Hejnewar wrote: September 28th, 2021, 6:28 am I fail to see how that could create third gender really, in physical sense they just gain wings and they still are male and female
Sure, but most third-gender people in the real world are also physically male or female. Gender is about how cultures form social categories around biological sex, and it sometime includes third or other non-binary genders.
ForestDragon wrote: September 28th, 2021, 1:59 pm "male elf doing feminine magic = reason to add whole new gender" seems like a very big leap in logic imo.
I'm not saying it necessarily follows from faerie magic being gendered, I just think it would be a plausible way that more genders could fit into the world established in Wesnoth.
Hejnewar wrote: September 28th, 2021, 6:28 am its pretty much just taking a job of shaman by male. This could lead to making him an outcast or something because even after the fall job of a shaman was still female
That's one possible interpretation. Basically, we have someone who's physical sex and magical/spiritual role are contradictory with respect to gender. In Western culture (give or take a century), we regard physical sex as the overriding factor. If someone was born male but is drawn to feminine stuff, they're just an unusual male. But that is not how all cultures see it, especially when it comes to deeper stuff like spirituality or magic. For instance, in Indigenous Hawaiian culture, there are people called Māhū who were born male but perform female roles in spiritual activities. They are regarded as a third gender. There are similar roles in many cultures around the world and historically. I don't think the way we see magic divided along gendered lines in Elvish society necessitates the existence of such a third-gender, but I think it would be a realistic possibility.
ForestDragon wrote: September 28th, 2021, 1:59 pm Thing is, men/women are basically half the population, while non-traditional genders are only a tiny percentage of the population. Heavily changing things in mainline to appeal to a small demographic doesn't seem particularly worth it imo.
I agree that that it shouldn't be a priority compared to, say, adding a mainline campaign focused on Drakes, but I can see reasons why someone would want it. I don't think it would qualify as "heavily changing things," since it would just be a piece of lore that would probably almost never come up.
ForestDragon wrote: September 28th, 2021, 1:59 pm This is, though, 1. religious people are a far, far larger percentage of the global population than people with non-traditional genders, 2. fictional religions do very much exist in UMC, and even mainline has paladins/white mages, with very clear religious undertones
I would be interested in learning about the religions in Wesnoth, but my understanding of NRIW is that (some) religious people don't really want to be represented in the game. It would be unrealistic for all of the groups in the game to worship the same god, so you would either end up having either false religions or polytheism, both of which I think would make some religious people uncomfortable.
ForestDragon wrote: September 28th, 2021, 1:59 pm 3. religion matches medieval-ish settings much better than modern ideas of gender
More genders does not necessarily imply an anachronistic concept of gender. What I've described is not "modern": it's positively ancient.
TipTaupe wrote: September 28th, 2021, 12:12 am Exploring those topics is one thing, forcing them onto a universe that existed for more than a decade without them is another
Who's forcing anything?
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lhybrideur
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by lhybrideur »

vghetto wrote: September 28th, 2021, 2:27 am Why do I play wesnoth? Why am I here?
I'm here because my console blew up and haven't bought a new one yet. Also, my computer is old and it runs a live distro which means that the RAM is very scarce. Wesnoth was about the only thing that ran reasonably well for me. Even Freeciv couldn't do that. Although I'm not very optimistic about the newer wesnoth version, it's a drain on the memory.
When I get a new computer or console, will I keep playing wesnoth? The answer is no.
I'm afraid you are therefore not representative of Wesnoth players. Mind me, we should totally care about your opinion, not only because of that, but you cannot really say that you are representative of Wesnoth players either.
I am probably not representative either. I play Wesnoth because someone made me discover it and I like playing it. Not because I can't play anything else. I'm playing it on a gaming computer, while I also play new games on the same computer and on consoles.
revolting_peasant wrote: September 28th, 2021, 12:41 pm
I love your idea. I am not sure how it is compatible with the current status of Wesnoth Inc.
What is the current status of Wesnoth Inc. actually ? Is it a company ? A non-profit organization ?
From what I understand from your post, you suggest to create a NPO whose money would be invested and the revenue from those investments would be used for what you described. I like that.
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by vghetto »

lhybrideur wrote: September 29th, 2021, 7:29 am you cannot really say that you are representative of Wesnoth players either.
I never claimed to be one. I never said that. I don't know how you reached that conclusion.
What I am though is a UMC dev. And I wouldn't like having others imposing their morality on my work.
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revolting_peasant
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by revolting_peasant »

I'd like to ask those folks discussing gender and race issues in Wesnoth to consider switching to a different thread, because it seems to be a longer/deeper discussion that is entirely orthogonal IMHO to the question of how to use a potential monetary windfall. (And note I said orthogonal, not useless to discuss.)

And back to the thread's subject - I'm not involved enough in the Wesnoth to answer your question, @lhybrideur, about what legal entity/ies exist for the project. Surely somebody pays the bills for hosting, but maybe it's just an informal collection and an individual pays it. Anyway, yes, I'm suggesting a non-profit prganization (NPO) be formed, assuming that doesn't already exist in skeletal form. Of course there's the question of _where_ to set one of these up and which exact legal category it should belong to, since there are lots of kinds of NPOs and the categories are not the same in different world states.
Last edited by revolting_peasant on February 11th, 2022, 6:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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ForestDragon
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by ForestDragon »

vghetto wrote: September 29th, 2021, 7:39 am What I am though is a UMC dev. And I wouldn't like having others imposing their morality on my work.
100% agreed
revolting_peasant wrote: September 29th, 2021, 10:49 am I'd like to ask those folks discussing gender and race issues in Wesnoth to consider switching to a different thread, because it seems to be a longer/deeper discussion that is entirely orthogonal IMHO to the question of how to use a potential monetary windfall. (And note I said orthogonal, not useless to discuss.)
Alright
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by shevegen »

The thread is a little bit difficult to follow now, but I wanted to somewhat briefly comment on one of the poll options mostly (maybe I missed this before; was the poll here from the get go? I totally forgot ... ):

"Hire freelance programmer(s) to completely port Wesnoth to modern engine (e.g. Godot)"

I think we need to be careful here too. You can find examples where a different engine caused different problems or where things
did not work for a long time, or worked in a limited manner. A simple example for the linux users may be the xorg-server versus
wayland. Perhaps wayland is all better and what not, but if you follow reddit, you also see problems, different bugs, different
behaviours, some applications not having a working alternative on (x)wayland and so forth (I actually mean more xwayland than
wayland as protocol but I think you get the main idea here).

So let's please keep that in mind that while you may solve some problems or limitations, often you trade in some problems with
other ones. Any move to any different engine should be taken with much consideration and careful planning.

The best would be if wesnoth could be uncoupled from any engine, a bit like how scummvm now works for more games
than merely the old lucas arts / sierra games. That way we could have a full specification, and then "downstream" of
that people could use the "legacy" engine or "godot" or whatever else. So all of this should be very carefully planned.

I try that approach with ruby too by the way, so I may have a DSL like:

button {
}

And underneath that I have support for ruby-gtk, ruby-tk, ruby-libui, ruby-gosu and www elements (the ones you can use
on a webpage to interact, where all HTML tags can be treated as objects; also I am a bit cheating here because I mostly
only look for ruby-gtk and ruby-libui, but in theory it could be all used in a unified way. For those who use ruby, look at
glimmer - the main dev tries that: https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-libui for ruby-libui part ).

Art is probably less problematic because, well ... an image or animation will be fine no matter the engine. (I should, however
had, also note that while artists are epic and great, if the underlying game part would not interest me, then I would not
play a game. So the underlying game has to be interesting. To me this is actually the most important part, e. g. if a game
is interesting or not. I can't speak for newcomers though - they may have a completely different opinion. I also admit that
I am slowly entering grandpa fossil state now, so you should listen to the newcomers a lot more in general!)
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Krogen
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by Krogen »

I always felt elves needed their own "mage" unit. Right now the closest an average elvish army comes to magic, are a few enchanted roots. The Default faction, that is named after the Rebels, relies on help from human mages. At level 2, they get the sorceress, which is quite powerful, but still weaker than the human equivalents. So right now humans seem to be better at magic than the mighty elves. Weird.
I don't suggest adding anything to the Default faction, as that would mess up the balance too much. But it'd be cool to have a campaign-only elvish mage, a bit like the Thug and the Dwarvish Scout. Could be a level 1 for Elvish Lord, but it's probably possible to get more creative than that. Can be of whichever gender, or preferably both, but a unit like that will definitely make the game more fun.
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revolting_peasant
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by revolting_peasant »

Krogen wrote: September 29th, 2021, 7:02 pm I always felt elves needed their own "mage" unit etc.
Is that really something that has support at the moment, and is just missing the developer/designer/author time which large amount of money would buy? ... Remember, this thread is about how we/the project would use $500,000 - not about what significant faction changes we would like to see.
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Krogen
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by Krogen »

Well, this is the active thread right now, it's kind of related as it's what i want to add to the game, and unlike the 500,000, it has a realistic chance of happening at some point. So, of course i'm going to bring it up in this kind of discussion.
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by dwarftough »

Krogen wrote: September 29th, 2021, 7:02 pm But it'd be cool to have a campaign-only elvish mage, a bit like the Thug and the Dwarvish Scout.
Some campaigns, like the famous Invasion from the Unknown (or its sequel, or both, don't remember exactly) has a unit line starting fromc Elvish Acolyte. Is it what you would like?

https://units.wesnoth.org/1.10/After_th ... olyte.html
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Re: Suggestions to improve Wesnoth if we had $500,000?

Post by Mawmoocn »

shevegen wrote: September 29th, 2021, 4:39 pm So let's please keep that in mind that while you may solve some problems or limitations, often you trade in some problems with
other ones. Any move to any different engine should be taken with much consideration and careful planning.
To enhance this point, I would like to see Wesnoth use a framework for logic compatibility.

For example, replay compatibility uses different logic decision between Wesnoth versions.

If we use a different programming language, we can import it's logic nearly the same, to work in a similar way.

Basically, 1 + 1 = 2 and the logic (rules and specifications) used to get it was 1 * (1+1) = 2, the new code might use 1 - 3 = 2, the result was the same but the logic wasn't.

Some problems are bound to occur due to these details.
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