What percentage towards the next stable release is Wesnoth?

[Thrawn]

However, as the default era becomes more and more balanced, perhaps there will be people who want to balance other eras <_<

But yeah, expect better art, music, more campaigns, and better quality former UMCs probably. The more "stagnant" radical advancement becomes, the better the game becomes at what it is now...

Btw synerr, I think having ALL the frames for existing units makes the game more professional looking than constantly coming up with more units <_<. Especially as people with talent are able to create their own sprites as well as be encouraged to help with animations.

[Noy]

However, as the default era becomes more and more balanced, perhaps there will be people who want to balance other eras <_<

And has that happened in the last two years, at all?If anything its newer players that play the new eras, where the longer term players that tend to stick to the default era, playing EE or IE as a irregular diversion. Don't get me wrong though I'm all for other eras; I like EE and IE. However I think there are some fundamental challenges that UME face, and ignoring them does not help them at all. We work in a small development community and people don't stay that long. You might be passionate about IE or EE, but the reality is that not that many people are, at least not a critical mass that might make balancing and the refinement required to keep it going a viable outcome.

And default era will never be balanced.... its always going to be a process of balancing and rebalancing. If one of the two UME get to a point approaching general fairness (which they have made strides in) its still a continual process that it undergoes and needs to work on. The processes and institutional structure we created for the default era balancing does not exist at this time for other eras, and is unlikely to exist in the near future.

[Glowing Fish]

OFWRA

I think is the technical term.

[turin]

One thing that would help is if there was a better way to get feedback on the balance of the UMEs. I really don't know how that could be done though.

[Shadow]

Actually I was thinking that its never been specifically stated as such, so maybe it was useful to say so in this instance and explain why. That way I can answer the question and link to it later on.

It was stated the thread got deleted afterwards. Got a bit hot in there If I recall right. I took part in it.

[Nebiros]

However, as the default era becomes more and more balanced, perhaps there will be people who want to balance other eras <_<

And has that happened in the last two years, at all?If anything its newer players that play the new eras, where the longer term players that tend to stick to the default era, playing EE or IE as a irregular diversion. Don't get me wrong though I'm all for other eras; I like EE and IE. However I think there are some fundamental challenges that UME face, and ignoring them does not help them at all. We work in a small development community and people don't stay that long. You might be passionate about IE or EE, but the reality is that not that many people are, at least not a critical mass that might make balancing and the refinement required to keep it going a viable outcome.

I think two of the biggest obstacles user eras face are that they don't come with the game (therefore you can only play with people who have downloaded them... since the last time they changed version), and they have enough balance problems *now* that some people will prefer to avoid them and work on default. (There's certainly enough players who complain about the balance of Undead or Drakes - in a UME they might just abandon the era instead, when the faction might be quite well balanced once you understand how it interacts with the others.)

If one of them got reasonably balanced enough to mainline it, that would both eliminate some practical barriers to playing it, and appear as an endorsement that it is balanced *enough* to be fun, which might draw more players to it. Tournaments and other events could also be planned for it, and that would be a lot easier to organize if it is mainlined.

[Dave]

We have done 90% of the work and now it is time to do the other 90%!

[Glowing Fish]

We have done 90% of the work and now it is time to do the other 90%!

A story about Achilles and a tortoise comes to mind...

[CarpeGuitarrem]

We have done 90% of the work and now it is time to do the other 90%!

A story about Achilles and a tortoise comes to mind...

Slow and steady wins the race...

[Glowing Fish]

A story about Achilles and a tortoise comes to mind...

Slow and steady wins the race...

Wrong parable. Perhaps a better parable would be...

[Glowing Fish]

We have done 90% of the work and now it is time to do the other 90%!

I think this is like Xeno's paradox of the arrow. An arrow can't travel to its target, because before it does so, it must go half the way. And before it can go half the way, it has to go half of that distance. And before it can go half of that distance, it has to go...

Etcetera.

And this, you see, is why ranged attacks don't go past one hex in Wesnoth.

[longhair]

I think two of the biggest obstacles user eras face are that they don't come with the game (therefore you can only play with people who have downloaded them... since the last time they changed version), and they have enough balance problems *now* that some people will prefer to avoid them and work on default. (There's certainly enough players who complain about the balance of Undead or Drakes - in a UME they might just abandon the era instead, when the faction might be quite well balanced once you understand how it interacts with the others.)

It really would be nice if there was a way to either automatically download the Era when you join a battle, or offer to fetch and install the era. Something like: "You don't have this era installed/it's not up to date. Would you like to download it?" It's extremely rare in my experience to get a game going using EE or whatever where at least one of the players isn't kicked immediately after the battle starts because they don't have the era.

[Weeksy]

who would they download it from? The host? Are you prepared to shell out a few megs of bandwidth to every observer who joins your game? Also, that's not how the MP cache works at the moment. I'm not sure how hard it would be to modify it while it was still open.

[joshudson]

I'm sure I could find a way, but you're not going to like it if I do.

[Dave]

We have done 90% of the work and now it is time to do the other 90%!

I think this is like Xeno's paradox of the arrow. An arrow can't travel to its target, because before it does so, it must go half the way. And before it can go half the way, it has to go half of that distance. And before it can go half of that distance, it has to go...

This is actually kind of how software development works.

Getting software to look 'mostly' complete doesn't take too long. This fools non-technical people, but even fools programmers -- even the people writing the software. It leads programmers to report that they are '90% complete' when the software is 90% functional, which is different to when 90% of the work is done -- the last 10% of functionality takes most of the time.

I've seen a crazy number of projects which are stuck in "90% done mode" for months on end. Heck, Wesnoth itself was 90% of the way to 1.0 for more than a year.

And this is exactly why we say "It's Ready When It's Ready". We're not being arbitrary or intentionally obtuse. Rather, we know software is notoriously difficult to estimate, so we simply give the best estimate we can, which is "I don't know".

David