Forking of Wesnoth...

[NarajinX]

I'm interested in this and would support it.

[lmelior]

I'm not convinced this would work. Your fork needs a clear reason for existence for people to care, and I don't see it in your proposed changes. It either needs to be significantly different than BfW, or you need to convince some or even most of the core developers to abandon BfW for the fork.

Given the extreme unlikelihood of the latter, I'd suggest more drastic changes, such as:

- Fully deterministic battles, i.e. always hit/constant damage. Alternatively, always hit/variable damage via random roll and/or occasional criticals.
- Completely new units and factions. The originals will be unbalanced by the above anyway.
- Replace all or most artwork to distinguish the game from BfW. This can be eventual to ease the burden.
- New campaigns. Alternatively, no single player at all to help focus development.

That's all I got off the top of my head.

[Zarel]

Okay, so here are my suggestions:

- Give all the units more attacks. This will offset the randomness a bit, so the damage they do will be closer to average.
- Port the game to run on OpenGL. Oh, and make it 3-D!
- A different setting, as well as the different factions. Make it post-apocalyptic, and realistic. You would fight with cyborgs and tanks!
- I think it would work better with a square grid, instead of a hex grid. Or even better, no grid at all!
- It should be in real-time, instead of turn based.
- It should probably be renamed. It's in a zone, and you're fighting wars, so maybe "War Zone"? It might be better as one word, though.
- Make the version number huge, like 2100.

That's all I have right now. Maybe we could move SVN to Sourceforge, too, and the tracker to our own website running Trac.

[Spell]

- Give all the units more attacks. This will offset the randomness a bit, so the damage they do will be closer to average.

I guess that was the only non-ironic point?

[Sangel]

I like the idea of a semi-official fork that handles the luck issue differently; it would provide an excellent testbed for making changes to a variety of core mechanics that are pretty much fixed in the current version. Who knows? Maybe some of those changes will become so popular they'll be backported.

- Give all the units more attacks. This will offset the randomness a bit, so the damage they do will be closer to average.

I guess that was the only non-ironic point?

Actually, I believe it too reflects the the game being alluded to for ironic purposes.

[Zarel]

Actually, I believe it too reflects the the game being alluded to for ironic purposes.

Yeah. They're all jokes, they're just sorted by how obvious the joke is.

[Gambit]

And remove the easy to use map editor. Who needs that?

[fabi]

Okay, I have implemented a slider that can double or triple the unit stats.
Multiplied are the HP, the number of attacks and all the healing/resting/poison amounts.

I consider the game still balanced beside the fact that slow and poison occur more often.
If that disadvantages is targeted somehow that statistic modification could be an easy way to
get a still balanced gameplay in which luck is not disabled but the damage to expect is
more predictable.

I have offered the proposed patch on Wesnoth's dev-ml and expect it to get rejected during the next
few hours by the rest of the developers.

So the patch can be a first that makes it into the fork so the community can try it out.

[tapik]

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.

WHOW! Somebody would like to change the BfW licence as XFree86 guys did!?!

[tapik]

Okay, I have implemented a slider that can double or triple the unit stats.
Multiplied are the HP, the number of attacks and all the healing/resting/poison amounts.
...
So the patch can be a first that makes it into the fork so the community can try it out.

Patching is better way than forking. Did you remeber Linux kernel patches maintained by Alan Cox? Linus didn't want to accept them to the Vanilla for a long time, co the first step after downloading the kernel sources was to apply AC patches...

Make your own set of unofficial, fabi-patches. May be the users would download them before the source compilation. And DON'T speak about binary distributions. PLEASE!

[fabi]

Okay, I have implemented a slider that can double or triple the unit stats.
Multiplied are the HP, the number of attacks and all the healing/resting/poison amounts.
...
So the patch can be a first that makes it into the fork so the community can try it out.

Patching is better way than forking. Did you remeber Linux kernel patches maintained by Alan Cox? Linus didn't want to accept them to the Vanilla for a long time, co the first step after downloading the kernel sources was to apply AC patches...

Make your own set of unofficial, fabi-patches. May be the users would download them before the source compilation. And DON'T speak about binary distributions. PLEASE!

If I understand YogiHH right he wants to support a wesnoth fork called "Experimental" that is a separate source tree.
And of course would that Experimental fork have binary distributions.

[Yogibear]

If I understand YogiHH right he wants to support a wesnoth fork called "Experimental" that is a separate source tree.
And of course would that Experimental fork have binary distributions.

Yep, pretty much that.

[Sauron]

I visit forums rarely, much to rarely to catch every thread like that. The problem people do their own mods/patches without any regard to existing solutions, the effect is terrible - instead of developing and improving something that was already thought out, instead of doing some research - new monsters are produced. Time and goodwill are pointlessly wasted. To all who post in such threads - people who are here on regular basis - PLEASE redirect everyone interested in modding fight mechanics so that variance got diminished - to the thread
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26803
I gathered there all existing solutions. It is POINTLESS to reinvent the wheel.

Well ... as the matter of fact it is yet another solution that does it ...
Welcome onboard. If you would like to pick up from where I want to finish ... it would be great.

I think one of threads pointing to solutions to 'LUCK problem/RNG whining' should be stickified in this subforum, so that everyone disappointed had a better starting point than just Rationale thread ...

[Sangel]

Agreed. The experimental fork is the perfect place to test out changes like this, but it won't be much use unless people know it exists. A sticky seems the perfect way to accomplish this; otherwise, it'll be reliant on word-of-mouth, which hasn't proved particularly effective in the past.

[fabi]

The experimental fork will get its own subforum.