Forking of Wesnoth...

[multilis]

Certain features have been requested which will never make it to core, or require tedious work arounds.

One way to try to get these features would be to fork a version of Wesnoth into a separate game.

Proposed changes in a Fork:

Ability to have game ratings handled by server rather than separate ladder.

Ability to roughly describe your skill level (eg noob/intermediate/pro), to make balancing noobs in 4 player games easier and have noob only or pro only games. Personally I would be happy to play with admitted noobs and give them extra 50% gold or whatever help.

Server would ideally handle random calculations to help avoid cheating, may also get rid of or better identify many out of sync problems.

Choice to have slider bar for adjusting how much luck affects a game. (Several patches have been made), similar to how Xp needed to lvl is game option.

Load add-ins screen have paragraph to describe currently selected add-in before you load it. (So for example you can know a beta campaign is only lvl easy and no gold carry forward before you download it). This info is already contained in downloads, just needs to be presented by server b4 you download, this may actually come to mainline eventually, has been todo for perhaps more than a year.

Ideally games can also talk to regular wesnoth server for normal games, and fancier server only when requesting features not available in regular game, so for example ladder games wouldn't show up in regular server.

This as at idea stage only, I am not sure who can do this sort of thing (I am programmer in Wesnoth dev languages and *sometimes* can accomplish lots quickly, but it depends on job). I know others have already done patches for some of what I describe.

[ivanovic]

Good luck with your fork! Just one tiny thing to comment:

Ideally games can also talk to regular wesnoth server for normal games, and fancier server only when requesting features not available in regular game, so for example ladder games wouldn't show up in regular server.

Please don't. Try to keep things well separated so that users don't get wrong assumptions. Beside this there might be resulting technical problems when doing some strange mixture of servers (which is currently not supported by Wesnoth, you can just be on one server). And no, we don't plan to change this, would be a really ugly thing to do technically, you would have to split the whole game matching from the lobby.

[multilis]

Good luck with your fork! Just one tiny thing to comment:

Ideally games can also talk to regular wesnoth server for normal games, and fancier server only when requesting features not available in regular game, so for example ladder games wouldn't show up in regular server.

Please don't. Try to keep things well separated so that users don't get wrong assumptions. Beside this there might be resulting technical problems when doing some strange mixture of servers (which is currently not supported by Wesnoth, you can just be on one server). And no, we don't plan to change this, would be a really ugly thing to do technically, you would have to split the whole game matching from the lobby.

Not as bad as you think, mainly affects which server hosts each game. Regular games use exact same code as mainline, only optional games hosted on different server. Lots of very popular clients from file sharing to chat to even games allow more than 1 server/protocol at same time. Can be tuned to help users know *exactly* who is logged on where and what game is hosted where, and trigger normal wesnoth game for old style server.

[AI]

Games aren't "hosted" by the server, the server merely passes data along between the players and supplies random numbers when needed.

The problem this will cause is that players of mainline wesnoth won't be able to tell the difference between games using mainline wesnoth or your fork. When the host then uses a feature they don't have, they will get OOS or even crash.

[grrr]

I hope this project takes traction, it would be an ideal playground to test long requested features without tedious discussions.

Forget about improving the server side for now, this stuff is hard. However:

* The ladder integration alone sounds useful enough to me to try this fork (you dont plan to reimplement a ladder system, right? I mean, if there are good libraries for this stuff, then fine. Otherwise just talk with eyerouge and define some interface).

* Regarding add-ons: How about auto-updates, or fetching and installing the add-on upon joining a game? Then there would be no need to distribute the add-ons with the game itself and no need to have this awkward split between "blessed" add-ons and UMC add-ons.

* Also, if done right a client download/update could become as small as 3-7 MB (if you happen to follow the debian way of splitting up wesnoth in shared data and binaries, just check how tiny wesnoth-core is in Ubuntu) - that would make a lot of users happy, even more so if there'd be a clever client update for Windows.

[jb]

You should also stop using wesnoth's forums. A new game needs a new forum after all.

I think for now we can move this to off-topic? Since it's not wesnoth related any more.

[Thrawn]

You should also stop using wesnoth's forums. A new game needs a new forum after all.

I think for now we can move this to off-topic? Since it's not wesnoth related any more.

@jb: I'd say give him time to get the project underway before letting this move to the Paper shredder Off Topic. While it's true that at some point (once his project is more than idle speculation) having a separate place to work on this will be a must, until he can get people here interested in helping out/giving imput, it would simply kill his project to remove the audience. And as his project will give us an answer to people who want a ranking system in-game, it's to both parties' benefit to not trivialize his project

[Zarel]

Server would ideally handle random calculations to help avoid cheating, may also get rid of or better identify many out of sync problems.

Server already does this in 1.8.

Load add-ins screen have paragraph to describe currently selected add-in before you load it. (So for example you can know a beta campaign is only lvl easy and no gold carry forward before you download it). This info is already contained in downloads, just needs to be presented by server b4 you download, this may actually come to mainline eventually, has been todo for perhaps more than a year.

I'm sure if someone wrote a patch that did this, it would be accepted into mainline Wesnoth, so this is hardly something we'd add to a fork.

You should also stop using wesnoth's forums. A new game needs a new forum after all.

Forks of Wesnoth are still relevant to Wesnoth. Though I wouldn't mind if this got moved to Game Development or something.

[ancestral]

Also keep in mind that if you’re forking this with the intention of ladder play you had better come up with a good deal of anti-cheating methods because you’re surely going to get plenty of people trying to exploit the system.

[Yogibear]

I am very interested in supporting this on the development side.

While i think that a fork is a good idea and that it makes absolute sense to fully separate the source repository and the development tracking (bugs / features), i would appreciate it if we could have a subforum here (call it "Wesnoth Experimental" for example?).

I think it would gather a lot of creative energy that is mostly blocked at the moment and of which much would get lost if there would be a completely separated forum.

[fabi]

I am very interested in supporting this on the development side.

While i think that a fork is a good idea and that it makes absolute sense to fully separate the source repository and the development tracking (bugs / features), i would appreciate it if we could have a subforum here (call it "Wesnoth Experimental" for example?).

I think it would gather a lot of creative energy that is mostly blocked at the moment and of which much would get lost if there would be a completely separated forum.

I don't think that a fork is a good idea.
But it is more of a beast outside the wesnoth development environment.
I don't see the chance to attract enough developers from the core team or to recruit new ones out of the community to maintain the branch/fork properly.
We have 3 build systems around for example, every useful in the one or the other case each with its own maintainer.

Rebuilding the Wesnoth infrastructure is just to much work.

But a fork even inside Wesnoth's infrastructure and supported by a subset of the developers won't be easy to merge into trunk.
And we would certainly want to have some of the features merged back in.

To the threads initiator: Why not just try to overtake Wesnoth.
I mean that seriously.

Find more people in the community that support your goals.
Each of them must submit at least two middle sized patches that make it into mainline.
Look at the wiki or in the feature requests what patches are wanted by the developers.
The patches will be accepted if done well enough and their authors earn the red developer rank
if they participate in a productive way on the irc channels and forums.

That is a much easier task than forking wesnoth away.
I am sure that every person that goes that way will be assimilated by the project in a form
that makes their suggestions moderate enough so that the game benefits from your work.

[silene]

I think it would gather a lot of creative energy that is mostly blocked at the moment and of which much would get lost if there would be a completely separated forum.

Agreed.

And I tend to see forks in a positive light. If not for the X fork for instance, Linux could just have disappeared from desktop computers. I hope your fork will bring as much goodness as X.org did.

[Gambit]

OP: These are some of the fine people you tried to smear in an across-the-board fashion on wikipedia by the way.

[Yogibear]

To the threads initiator: Why not just try to overtake Wesnoth.
I mean that seriously.

Find more people in the community that support your goals.
Each of them must submit at least two middle sized patches that make it into mainline.
Look at the wiki or in the feature requests what patches are wanted by the developers.
The patches will be accepted if done well enough and their authors earn the red developer rank
if they participate in a productive way on the irc channels and forums.

I don't think that would work without serious consequences, it would just move the conflicts from the forum inside the development team.

Look what happened to sauron. His mod wasn't even seriously taken into account, not because it was badly coded or something, but because his idea is not wanted.

New developers are motivated to realize exciting stuff. They don't want to fight their way through negative feedback, often enough likely with the result of not being able to do what they had in mind.

Edit: Changed sauron's patch to sauron's mod as that is what i had in mind. Thanks to Soliton for pointing that out.

[5dPZ]

Nice ideas. This could make wesnoth more player-friendly.

Best of luck.