Project direction ideas moving forward

[nemaara]

Hi all,

I'm opening this thread to track/discuss ideas for some ideas for overall project direction as we continue through the 1.17 dev cycle and further. From 1.12 to 1.14, we had a major goal in releasing on Steam, which we achieved thanks to Vultraz's leadership during that time. Since then, while development has continued and some amount of new players have come in, it doesn't seem like we have much of a clear direction or plan going from here.

The goal

As a game, our longevity and continued interest can come from a few places. Some games have a strong SP design paradigm either with high replayability like open world games (e.g. Elder Scrolls) or RPGs (e.g. Undertale). Continuous development of story-based gameplay could work as well, especially since some games have survived based on dedicated modding communities. Some games follow various MP design paradigms, such as offering highly replayable coop gameplay (e.g. Diablo), pvp strategy (e.g. Chess!), or mmo-style battle arenas. The point is, any of these designs are supposed to at minimum retain a decent amount of players while hopefully attracting new ones from time to time.

As of right now, the situation is less dire than it was a few years ago just prior to the Steam release, but the number of active players we have is still unfortunately small. I've had my thoughts on some big projects for Wesnoth in the past which have the goal of both attracting new players and generating excitement among existing ones. The idea is to fix up some issues that may prevent us from reaching a wider audience while possibly fulfilling a core game design paradigm that will make it more fun for people to play.

I'm listing the projects in a few categories below, the most important of which are first.

1. Modernizing the UI

Wesnoth's UI has been somewhat dated for a while and offers an overabundance of information while not being entirely intuitive in some places. I remember asking some new players for their first impressions and they said that while the game seemed fun, it felt like "something from the 2000s". This isn't necessarily a problem for people who have stuck around already, but probably prevents us from gaining many new players.

To me, redesigning the UI would be highly beneficial. However, working with it is rather difficult right now. So the practicality of this direction might involve working out the technical details of the UI implementation and maybe hiring someone to work on it.

2. Marketing the game to new players

First, a disclaimer: I have no expertise in marketing and don't know how to go about doing this. I'm pretty sure the Steam release helped us in this direction, but even then, there's not many people who have heard about Wesnoth to begin with, let alone anything about what the game is. Being able to reach a wider audience (the high fantasy and strategy audience is not small!!) would be very beneficial.

Second disclaimer: this might need to be after a UI modernization, maybe some content revamping. However, the content as is is probably good enough for brand new players, at least for the short term.


Next are some projects that are also important, but potentially have less obviously glaring issues than the ones above.

3. MP coop content

We have a small amount of MP coop content in mainline, but a incredibly small amount compared to what exists on the add-ons server. I'll add that we don't even have a single functional MP campaign (practically in terms of gameplay, LoW is broken). For new players, this means the game doesn't come across as being MP coop friendly, which is one of the ways we can attract and retain an audience. Focusing on this project might mean adapting existing addons to add to mainline, probably fixing up their code (especially fixing OOS errors), making it more lore-friendly, streamlining gameplay, etc. We probably would also need to make a new MP campaign for mainline though I believe Hejnewar has something in the works.

4. SP content

I've talked about this a lot in the past so I'll keep it brief here. Our SP content is good in some spots, less good in others, but overall pretty chaotic. This would involve modernizing the gameplay in the campaigns and creating a more directed experience for players rather than them opening the game and seeing 17 more or less disconnected campaigns on the menu.

Another thing to potentially add is more open-world campaign designs and RPG elements (or even full RPGs) to offer more replayability. These sort of go hand in hand with campaign reworks but can also be done as standalone scenarios available for solo play or MP as well. Practically speaking, an open-world or even semi-open world campaign design is a lot of work so it would require some effort into it.

5. MP PvP content

More or less the same thing as MP coop but for MP PvP. By this I mean not ladder-style gameplay but like different scenario maps for PvP that could be lore friendly or even arena style (e.g. Defense of the Goblin). Could be done in conjunction with MP coop.

And finally we have some that I would say are debatable projects

6. Redesigning the RNG

This isn't as much of a big project so much as a contention point. This used to be a much bigger point but ever since the introduction of other RNG options for SP, it became somewhat less of an issue. However, I wonder if it would still be nice to redesign or offer another type of RNG. At the very least we could implement an RNG that offers something closer to human expectations for SP.

7. Implementing ranked ladder/ELO

A big if on this one because while this is a big way to promote game longevity and keep players interested, it also can quickly become toxic and I don't know if we can handle the moderation aspect of it as of now. Most likely some kind of automod would need to be implemented at least?

These are just ideas for now, I can edit this post to add others or remove some as we see fit.

--- Pentarctagon Edit ---
8. Switching to an external UI toolkit

Related to #1 in a lot of ways, switching from having to maintain our own UI toolkit (which very few people currently contributing are able to do), switch to using an UI toolkit developed and maintained by another group, which is also more widely used. This would help significantly in terms of reducing the number of bugs and having more modern functionality. The downside being that there aren't a whole lot of GPL-compatible UI toolkits that also support iOS, so doing this would likely mean it would be impossible to ever provide an updated version of the iOS port.
--- End Edit ---

[Pentarctagon]

Some comments on what's been mentioned so far:

1. Modernizing the UI

Wesnoth's UI has been somewhat dated for a while and offers an overabundance of information while not being entirely intuitive in some places. I remember asking some new players for their first impressions and they said that while the game seemed fun, it felt like "something from the 2000s". This isn't necessarily a problem for people who have stuck around already, but probably prevents us from gaining many new players.

To me, redesigning the UI would be highly beneficial. However, working with it is rather difficult right now. So the practicality of this direction might involve working out the technical details of the UI implementation and maybe hiring someone to work on it.

The starting point for this would be:
a) deciding exactly what the new UI would look like
b) detailed descriptions defining what all needs to change with the current implementation in order to be able to accomplish (a).

Both (a) and (b) would largely rely on vultraz, being the current UI lead and one of the people more familiar with Wesnoth's current UI implementation. For doing the new implementation, that would also depend a lot of vultraz, but I could probably start learning it as well. More help would beneficial, but I don't want to speak for anyone else whether they'd be willing to spend time on this too.

2. Marketing the game to new players

First, a disclaimer: I have no expertise in marketing and don't know how to go about doing this. I'm pretty sure the Steam release helped us in this direction, but even then, there's not many people who have heard about Wesnoth to begin with, let alone anything about what the game is. Being able to reach a wider audience (the high fantasy and strategy audience is not small!!) would be very beneficial.

Second disclaimer: this might need to be after a UI modernization, maybe some content revamping. However, the content as is is probably good enough for brand new players, at least for the short term.

I also have essentially no knowledge of how to go about promoting anything to a wider audience, Wesnoth included. One big issue however would be cost. I don't know how much marketing costs, but my guess would be that it probably costs a decent amount of money to actually reach a significant number of potential players.

3. MP coop content

We have a small amount of MP coop content in mainline, but a incredibly small amount compared to what exists on the add-ons server. I'll add that we don't even have a single functional MP campaign (practically in terms of gameplay, LoW is broken). For new players, this means the game doesn't come across as being MP coop friendly, which is one of the ways we can attract and retain an audience. Focusing on this project might mean adapting existing addons to add to mainline, probably fixing up their code (especially fixing OOS errors), making it more lore-friendly, streamlining gameplay, etc. We probably would also need to make a new MP campaign for mainline though I believe Hejnewar has something in the works.

4. SP content

I've talked about this a lot in the past so I'll keep it brief here. Our SP content is good in some spots, less good in others, but overall pretty chaotic. This would involve modernizing the gameplay in the campaigns and creating a more directed experience for players rather than them opening the game and seeing 17 more or less disconnected campaigns on the menu.

Another thing to potentially add is more open-world campaign designs and RPG elements (or even full RPGs) to offer more replayability. These sort of go hand in hand with campaign reworks but can also be done as standalone scenarios available for solo play or MP as well. Practically speaking, an open-world or even semi-open world campaign design is a lot of work so it would require some effort into it.

5. MP PvP content

More or less the same thing as MP coop but for MP PvP. By this I mean not ladder-style gameplay but like different scenario maps for PvP that could be lore friendly or even arena style (e.g. Defense of the Goblin). Could be done in conjunction with MP coop.

As a general comment on these as a whole, it would be good to know what all is currently planned right now. You're aiming to have a LoW rework done and Lord-Knightmare is working on an MP AOI rework that is (I think?) aimed for mainline, but there's also been mention of other things people are working on (ie: astrid, Hejnewar, others?). So it would be good to know what those are, where they stand, and how they might fit into these.

6. Redesigning the RNG

This isn't as much of a big project so much as a contention point. This used to be a much bigger point but ever since the introduction of other RNG options for SP, it became somewhat less of an issue. However, I wonder if it would still be nice to redesign or offer another type of RNG. At the very least we could implement an RNG that offers something closer to human expectations for SP.

Some specifics of how the RNG would work to give results close to human expectations would be good. I'm not necessarily opposed, but I do think as part of this we'd need to trim down the RNG options (there'd be four different types of RNG for campaigns now?).

7. Implementing ranked ladder/ELO

A big if on this one because while this is a big way to promote game longevity and keep players interested, it also can quickly become toxic and I don't know if we can handle the moderation aspect of it as of now. Most likely some kind of automod would need to be implemented at least?

Technically speaking, this would likely be the easiest of these to implement, since the backend is actually mostly ready for this - the main things remaining would be:

• Add an option on the UI to indicate a game is ranked, and add a column to the game_info database table to record it.
• Add a filter to the lobby UI to show only ranked/non-ranked games.
• Decide how to determine who the winner/loser of a match is.
• Implement the ELO calculation logic.
• Some way for people to view their ELO rank, and ideally their match history.
• Decide on the rules for how disputes involving ranked games are handled.

[nemaara]

Replying to the ones that I can:

[1] The starting point for this would be:
a) deciding exactly what the new UI would look like
b) detailed descriptions defining what all needs to change with the current implementation in order to be able to accomplish (a).

Both (a) and (b) would largely rely on vultraz, being the current UI lead and one of the people more familiar with Wesnoth's current UI implementation. For doing the new implementation, that would also depend a lot of vultraz, but I could probably start learning it as well. More help would beneficial, but I don't want to speak for anyone else whether they'd be willing to spend time on this too.

Just want to say that it would be better have a proper UI designer helping to figure out what the UI should look like(maybe Vultraz fits the bill I forget), not just us picking up UI design like a student project to put into the game. Maybe this means needing to hire someone or maybe we can have an announcement about it if this is the direction to go.

[3, 4, and 5] As a general comment on these as a whole, it would be good to know what all is currently planned right now. You're aiming to have a LoW rework done and Lord-Knightmare is working on an MP AOI rework that is (I think?) aimed for mainline, but there's also been mention of other things people are working on (ie: astrid, Hejnewar, others?). So it would be good to know what those are, where they stand, and how they might fit into these.

Hejnewar is working on an MP coop campaign. AOI rework is not meant for mainline and as it is right now would require a lot of work to go into mainline. I'm working on LoW rework but for the SP side the amount of total work for that direction is far more than I would be able to do for free as I said, perhaps even more than I would be able to handle alone (unless we want it to move at a glacial pace, which would defeat the purpose). Astrid has gotten busy on the DM/EI side so that would also fall to me. For more details on the SP stuff there's the other thread which I wrote down before.

On the MP side I think there's sufficient addon content that can be adapted for mainline but that requires some work in polishing it and looking at the code, which as I understand is not as simple as SP. Currently I don't think we have plans to mainline MP addons, there's only people working on new ones.

[6]Some specifics of how the RNG would work to give results close to human expectations would be good. I'm not necessarily opposed, but I do think as part of this we'd need to trim down the RNG options (there'd be four different types of RNG for campaigns now?).

Needs someone to implement and some careful thought. A cursory suggestion would be to have a weighted binomial distribution with the tails chopped (yes I know this makes the in game prediction actually incorrect). Humans expect a binomial distribution so if we just implement that and shift the values closer to the center (the expected value) it'll match human expectations more. This was what the Biased RNG was supposed to be but I think it's a bit too deterministic at the moment. This is all just a quick thought though, a survey of how other games do RNG might be worthwhile to get some ideas too.

[Pentarctagon]

Added #8 FYI.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

8. Switching to an external UI toolkit

Related to #1 in a lot of ways, switching from having to maintain our own UI toolkit (which very few people currently contributing are able to do), switch to using an UI toolkit developed and maintained by another group, which is also more widely used. This would help significantly in terms of reducing the number of bugs and having more modern functionality. The downside being that there aren't a whole lot of GPL-compatible UI toolkits that also support iOS, so doing this would likely mean it would be impossible to ever provide an updated version of the iOS port.

I'll just drop one possibility I've seen – TGUI, which uses the zlib license and is thus GPL-compatible, and also supports an SDL_Renderer backend. I haven't investigated it in detail to determine if it satisfies all of our needs, though… and for backwards compatibility we'd need to use a custom parser that converts GUIWML or ThemeWML into a layout. There could certainly be some tricky things to work out if we want to try and match feature parity as closely as possible.

TGUI claims to support iOS, so there's that too.

[Pentarctagon]

It would be good to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, since add-ons can create some pretty complex UIs that would be a pain to rewrite. ThemeWML I'd be less concerned about given it's used a lot less. I don't think 100% backwards compatibility would be a requirement for either though - I'd guess it'd result in a lot of time and effort that would be better spent on other things.

Another question would of course be performance, such as with things like animated water and the terrain system in general.

[Lord-Knightmare]

3. MP coop content

We have a small amount of MP coop content in mainline, but a incredibly small amount compared to what exists on the add-ons server. I'll add that we don't even have a single functional MP campaign (practically in terms of gameplay, LoW is broken). For new players, this means the game doesn't come across as being MP coop friendly, which is one of the ways we can attract and retain an audience. Focusing on this project might mean adapting existing addons to add to mainline, probably fixing up their code (especially fixing OOS errors), making it more lore-friendly, streamlining gameplay, etc. We probably would also need to make a new MP campaign for mainline though I believe Hejnewar has something in the works.

In the 1.15 dev cycle, there was a mention of mainlining an add-on named "Undead Empire" but seems to have been dropped? Summarizing it, it's identical to the A New Land survival but themed towards Undead and is more challenging. However, a harder MP content doesn't help nurturing new players.

Also, World Conquest is playable as an MP coop campaign but the 1.16 (as we have seen), is somewhat buggy (banner no stack / bezoar no work) as it was a last minute shove. Anyways, what the game lacks is a hybrid campaign (both SP/MP mode of the same story, which is what LoW was meant to be, but failed).

AOI rework is not meant for mainline and as it is right now

As Nemarra has stated, it was reworked to be a hybrid campaign, which it is right now but as an add-on. I was previously told it was not on the table for mainlining again, so I did not consider that while reworking it. Hey, at least I made a good hybrid working campaign.

On the SP/MP(PvP/Coop) things, I had these drafts/WIP:

• Northern Rebirth Proposal Draft which absorbed THoT into NR as well as providing player with the choice of picking Tallin's alignment in three branches of the NR plotline. As in, Tallin can be the Lawful Marshal/some Northland human/Undead Death Knight. (SP campaign)
• Open-world/semi open-world drake campaign set in the northlands during the 1200 YW which are based on a drake tribe/clan finding the hidden grove where the last dragon egg is kept while the northern earls, elves and dwarves form an alliance to eradicate the north of monster races. (SP Campaign)
• Open-world MP Coop Scenario about a party of heroes who are hired to investigate increasing drake attacks on an multi-racial settlement in the northlands. Takes place on a large map with 2 city areas. Can be split into scenarios as well (MP Coop scenario/campaign)
• Siege/Assault MP scenario. The idea is originally Max_Torch's. One player is defender, other player is attacker. Defender is inside the fortress, while the attacker is attacking (and has more resources and supplies). Objectives are different for each. One has to outlast or secure an objective. Other has to defeat the other player's NPC. Follow ups with the same scenario but the players are reversed with attacker becoming defender/defender becoming attacker (MP PvP)
• UTBS rework S12 (SP)
• UTBS rework S11 (SP)

If any of these are worth advancing to the next steps (or if you want more details), do let me know.

[doofus-01]

If Terrain Graphics are the thing holding back the transition to a new engine, let's talk. I don't know the C++ at all, but I have had to deal with the terrain-graphics/ macros, and can say a lot of that stuff is legacy. Provide an environment where the keys layer, base, and map mean the same thing as they currently do, and we can probably figure this out.

I know , it won't really be that simple, but we could figure out what needs to be done. Let's not panic.

[Pentarctagon]

I don't know much of anything about how terrain graphics work (other than pretty much everyone I've seen saying they're a nightmare), but what do you mean that a lot of it is legacy stuff? Even just on its own, if there are things that can be removed (or perhaps deprecated and then removed), that'd be beneficial in terms of simplifying the codebase.

[doofus-01]

but what do you mean that a lot of it is legacy stuff?

A lot of the macros predate the optional arguments macros feature, I believe we could get by without most of the "_PLFB" stuff.

The builder.cfg concept predated the bracket animation syntax, we could probably get by without that too.

A little less clear how much it will really change, but older terrain did not overlap images as much. The macros were basically written for a different set of assets. We've been moving to the things in new-macros.cfg over the years.

I will open an issue for a terrain-graphics macros cleanup, so I'm not just speculating.

[Elvish_Hunter]

1. Modernizing the UI

Wesnoth's UI has been somewhat dated for a while and offers an overabundance of information while not being entirely intuitive in some places. I remember asking some new players for their first impressions and they said that while the game seemed fun, it felt like "something from the 2000s". This isn't necessarily a problem for people who have stuck around already, but probably prevents us from gaining many new players.

To me, redesigning the UI would be highly beneficial. However, working with it is rather difficult right now. So the practicality of this direction might involve working out the technical details of the UI implementation and maybe hiring someone to work on it.

Hiring someone might also leave us with a UI that our players still won't like. So, I think that one option could be to ask our players how would they redesign the UI (from a graphic point of view) and see if someone comes up with useful ideas.

2. Marketing the game to new players

First, a disclaimer: I have no expertise in marketing and don't know how to go about doing this. I'm pretty sure the Steam release helped us in this direction, but even then, there's not many people who have heard about Wesnoth to begin with, let alone anything about what the game is. Being able to reach a wider audience (the high fantasy and strategy audience is not small!!) would be very beneficial.

Let's face it, most gaming nowadays is done on consoles or smartphones. Which means that, to get somewhere, we should consider implementing a UI designed precisely for smartphones.

8. Switching to an external UI toolkit

Related to #1 in a lot of ways, switching from having to maintain our own UI toolkit (which very few people currently contributing are able to do), switch to using an UI toolkit developed and maintained by another group, which is also more widely used. This would help significantly in terms of reducing the number of bugs and having more modern functionality. The downside being that there aren't a whole lot of GPL-compatible UI toolkits that also support iOS, so doing this would likely mean it would be impossible to ever provide an updated version of the iOS port.

Maybe this can't be done at all, due to the lack of manpower, but would it be possible to make GUI2 a separate toolkit for SDL? This way, other game developers would be able to use it, which in turn might bring in patches and bugfixes.

If Terrain Graphics are the thing holding back the transition to a new engine, let's talk. I don't know the C++ at all, but I have had to deal with the terrain-graphics/ macros, and can say a lot of that stuff is legacy.

I don't think that's the problem. The thing that holds back the transition to another engine is our engine itself, with its complexity and with the lack of a suitable replacement (the Godot effort, sadly, didn't bring us Wesnoth 2).

I will open an issue for a terrain-graphics macros cleanup, so I'm not just speculating.

Speaking of terrain macros, one of the many things I'm trying to do is getting rid of all the spurious warnings issued by wmlscope. I've been able to fix the warnings about cross-references and unresolved references, however I'm not really sure about how to proceed to fix the mismatched references warnings (which, more or less, are checks for incorrect data types in macros).
I guess I'll have to open another thread to discuss it in detail, however (since terrain macros throw a lot of these) has anyone ever used these mismatched reference warnings to fix something? Or should I just remove them entirely?

[Pentarctagon]

8. Switching to an external UI toolkit

Related to #1 in a lot of ways, switching from having to maintain our own UI toolkit (which very few people currently contributing are able to do), switch to using an UI toolkit developed and maintained by another group, which is also more widely used. This would help significantly in terms of reducing the number of bugs and having more modern functionality. The downside being that there aren't a whole lot of GPL-compatible UI toolkits that also support iOS, so doing this would likely mean it would be impossible to ever provide an updated version of the iOS port.

Maybe this can't be done at all, due to the lack of manpower, but would it be possible to make GUI2 a separate toolkit for SDL? This way, other game developers would be able to use it, which in turn might bring in patches and bugfixes.

Even if that were done, there just wouldn't really be a reason for people to use it over any of the many other more modern UI frameworks that already exist.

[Hejnewar]

I completly forgot to respond.

In short, Im currently working on 3 and 5, putting much more emphasis on 3, but I also have pretty good idea of what I would like to do with 5 and what players might like that they not yet have. 5 is much less work intensive but also much harder to do well at the same time.

I can also provide any necessary opinions / info about 7, Im constantly in between MP players anyway.

Let's face it, most gaming nowadays is done on consoles or smartphones. Which means that, to get somewhere, we should consider implementing a UI designed precisely for smartphones.

Do we have a single well working smartphone port of 1.16? If we do have one on iOS, are wesnoth players a demographic that in majority uses iOS / can afford devices with iOS just for wesnoth?

[Elvish_Hunter]

Do we have a single well working smartphone port of 1.16? If we do have one on iOS, are wesnoth players a demographic that in majority uses iOS / can afford devices with iOS just for wesnoth?

Right, that's another problem that I forgot to mention. Currently we don't have 1.16 for Android either, so unless we manage to keep these ports updated we're cut off from a huge amount of devices.

[Pentarctagon]

Both the Android and iOS ports are on 1.14. Even before 1.16 came out though, mobile users were very much in the minority (at least in terms of online players). The old multiplayer activity reports can be checked for exact numbers.

I think having support for those platforms would be good to have, but I also think they do need to be done as part of regular development in mainline that everyone can easily view and contribute to rather than separately and maintained by one person.