16 ms·

The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

397 points by mproud 11y ago

kazagistar 11y ago
Why does the game need to keep advancing? Most games in the industry are written, released, and finished. The best have a timeless nature, still excellent even though they haven't been changed for decades. Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?
- Frenchgeek 11y ago
  For the same reason my mechanic of a brother always has something to fix on his car : A labor of love never settle for anything less than perfection.
  - kazagistar 11y ago
    What strikes me as strange is that you don't usually ask others to maintain your unmaintained labor of love for you, because you don't have the time and manpower. Plus, it sounded like they were complaining that they "weren't keeping up".
    - exDM69 11y ago
      They were specifically asking for Windows and OSX programmers for example. Labor of love or not, doing maintenance work and testing on an OS you don't use yourself is not something most of us want to do on our free time. These guys are volunteers after all.
    - MadcapJake 11y ago
      Because the car analogy doesn't perfectly fit. This kind of labor of love is a game that's enjoyed by many. So asking people to help is more like a barn raising than an "engine hoisting".
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Counterpoint: Nethack. Sometimes the best games take a (long) while, and may never be finished.
  - chongli 11y ago
    Funny you should mention NetHack as the latest version, 3.4.3[0], was released on the 8th of December, 2003. I'd say it's a pretty good call to consider it finished. [0] http://nethack.org/v343/release.html http://nethack.org/v343/release.html
    - riffraff 11y ago
      there are a ton of forks of nethack, and basically the dev team seems to have disappeared[0], so I wouldn't consider it finished as much as "AWOL". [0] ok, not really, the nethack4 faq mentions 'The development team who worked on versions 1 to 3 of NetHack (the DevTeam) are still working on it (although there was no real evidence of this until 2014), but they don't release their progress, meaning that the situation is effectively the same as if they'd been doing nothing.'
      - chongli 11y ago
        Yeah, I'm aware of the forks and of the empty promises from the devteam. Should a new official release appear, I'll happily retract my statement. What I don't see is very much momentum toward establishing a proper successor fork a la Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.
        ectoplasm 11y ago
        SporkHack was good for a while, harder than 3.4.3 at least. Sometimes updates actually make things worse. I like Brogue 1.7.2 a lot more than 1.7.3 for example. You should try that game if you haven't already, it does so many things well!
        chongli 11y ago
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  went here to say the same thing. it's ten years old, and while I was super excited at the beginning, playing it and discovering every aspect of the many campaigns, it has felt stale in a while. the game is basically equals of it's former self, with many more graphic enhancement and sophistication that push the battle system, the maps and the editors to their limits, but while being timeless it also has exhausted its replay value and lives in a market which is vastly different to the circumstances that brought it to life many years ago
- Udo 11y ago
  I regularly play Wesnoth over the internet with a friend. Though we sometimes explore other games, we always come back to Wesnoth because it's compelling. However, and I say this as a fan, this game has severe issues - it's not just a few bugs and maintenance: Wesnoth makes current hardware sweat to the point where my relatively new MBP sounds like it's taking off, as is my friend's ThinkPad. It's also the only game capable of slowing my current-generation iMac down to the brink of operating system usability and beyond. The game itself is slow, UI actions, moving units across the battlefield - pretty much anything happens only after a noticeable pause. There is no apparent reason why a largely static, 2D, tile-based, pixel game should be this slow. The network code and its underlying model are an unmitigated disaster, by design. If you experience any network glitch during play, including short wifi disruptions, the connection collapses. But it doesn't do so right away. It can take up to a few minutes for the game to notice that a player has disconnected. There is no automatic re-connect, all players have to save, exit, and rejoin. While playing Wesnoth it's advisable to stay in contact over email to coordinate. Sometimes, the game state gets out of sync between players and the server. When the game notices that, you get the option to cancel the game or ignore and continue. If you do the latter, in-game causality breaks down completely (with hilarious results). If you opt for the former, once again, everybody has to save, exit, and re-join, and hope anyone has a non-corrupt save game. The game state isn't large or complex by the way. These are not merely bugs; they are deep, architectural problems.
  - em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
    I wanted to verify your comments about speed, and found this interview http://www.linuxexpres.cz/rozhovor/interview-david-white http://www.linuxexpres.cz/rozhovor/interview-david-white where the original developer says: "However, I wanted to be able to develop Wesnoth quickly, using the latest technology and latest C++ features. Because of this I didn't spend much time focusing on things like minimizing the memory Wesnoth takes up, or trying to make it ultra-fast. This does limit its portability a little in that it is difficult to get working on systems with limited memory"
    - joshstrange 11y ago
      Honestly I think it could be written in Javascript with better results than it currently has. I've never tried multiplayer as I found the single player laggy which is unacceptable for a game a "simple" as this. Just goes to show that language alone doesn't alway influence speed...
- INTPenis 11y ago
  This is a good point. Also as one who lived through the times when gaming on Linux was almost unheard of, or required a lot of imagination, I think Wesnoth is part of gaming history right now. The future is here and Valve helped bring it about, the quality and quantity of games on Linux has completely transformed in the last 5 years. So gamers looking for entertainment on Linux have so much more to look forward to right now than Wesnoth. It's time to move on.
- jonnybgood 11y ago
  I think it's somewhat the nature of open source games. It reminds me of the AoE clone 0 A.D.[0] which has been in development for over a decade and still considered in alpha. [1] http://play0ad.com http://play0ad.com
enraged_camel 11y ago
Perhaps the issue is that they are looking for intermediate to advanced C++ programmers who have experience with very large code-bases. That's a tiny portion of the programmer population. I know this is a risky thing to say here, but I wonder if they should re-write the game in a more common/popular language, maybe something web-based like JavaScript. They would have a much bigger talent pool to pull from, gain access to a much bigger audience, AND probably have an easier time developing multiplayer functionality. Not to mention the plethora of open-source tools and libraries they can leverage.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  If one of the problems they're trying to fix is not being able to iterate as fast as they'd like then rewriting the entireity of a ten year old game isn't going to help that.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    That's what I'm saying though: they aren't able to iterate quickly because it's a huge codebase written in a programming language that is quite complex and fairly outdated. Besides, I'd assume that intermediate and experienced C++ developers are probably older on average, and are unlikely to be interested in developing games.
    - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
      You would assume incorrectly.
      - enraged_camel 11y ago
        Why is that? C++ is over 30 years old, whereas JavaScript is 20 years old. Besides, the latter surged in popularity only recently. Based on these facts alone, we can comfortably assume that experienced C++ developers are older on average. I can see why this is a controversial assumption though.
meric 11y ago
I first started playing Wesnoth from version 0.5.0. Countless hours 'programming' in WML introduced me to software engineering. Back then I looked at the C++ source and wondered when I'd be skilled enough to contribute. Reading this, is making me consider returning to Wesnoth once again after years of not having looked at it. Wesnoth is still filed neatly in my bookmarks folder.
rdegges 11y ago
Wow -- I've spent countless hours over the years playing this games -- it is one of the best turn-based strategy games (like civilization) to ever be made, IMO. Back in the day, I used to play this on my linux computer in my room with my brother -- it was one of the games that got me into coding / development in the first place. I hope they find some good developers to carry the game onwards! It'd be a shame if such an awesome, free game ended up going extinct. <33 drakes!
johnchristopher 11y ago
I am trying to download the latest release (1.12.4a) but I am caught in a never ending loop http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/. Edit: okay, sourceforge is broken for me for any download, no matter the browser. Let's consider that my sourceforge rant of the week.
- kiiski 11y ago
  That seems to be a problem with sourceforge. I was trying to download something else earlier today and had the same problem.
- Figs 11y ago
  Well, Sourceforge is still recovering from a major fuck up in their storage system a week ago, so it's not that surprising that things aren't entirely working... http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration-update-for-724/ http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-s...
  - badpenny 11y ago
    Wow, that site has really seen better days. I notice it's still in the uBlock Origin block list as well.
- brownbat 11y ago
  Was trying to diagnose this for KeePass last night... Between this and the adware scandal, it's like someone slammed the door on an era. What's the download service everyone's going to move to that won't have these problems? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer_only_optin_adware_after_gimp_grump/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer...
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    I wished something like distributed git for the masses or torrent distribution would replace services that are a single point a failure such as sourceforge or self-hosting. Maybe even some kind of `Dropbox distributing' ? Maybe Mega and other file hosting and sharing services are up to the job but most have a very suspicious kind of aura. I remember chasing the web after some rapidshare hosted android rom (they still do that btw) and it's a pain to deal with. But that's just a technological POV, I don't know what kind of entity should/could distribute apps. FOSSHUB ?
anon3_ 11y ago
I have to tell you, when I see GPL license on a game, I see the good intention you have. Have you considered changing the license of Wesnoth to MIT so commercial game developers can use their time and effort on components can port them to their own projects too? I can't justify investing hundreds of hours programming new components a project (even one I'm passionate about) that a later derivative can't be used by my company. I could elaborate.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Regardless of the merits or lack thereof of changing the license, it'd probably present an even larger problem, since they don't seem to ask for copyright assignment and they have 100+ contributors, all of whom would have to consent to the new license or have their code thrown out and cleanly reimplemented.
  - anon3_ 11y ago
    Agreed here. It's tedious to change license later on. So that's why there's tools to push it along, it's not the first time [1] As a stop gap - they can implement a contributor clause starting immediately. They can also say future commits post-[ref] are <this license> until the prior code is sunsetted. Typically there is an uppercrust where a very high percentage of the contributions lay. I haven't looked at the code (played the game all the time back in HS) but I'd bet you 90% of the code contributions are with the top 5 committers. [1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054
- anon3_ 11y ago
  Sorry for being redpilled toward the GPL crowd, but we just need to get some realities straight. There's another side to this. Have you ever played a game an felt an eery "I've felt that before", but couldn't put your finger on it? Examples include: - Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon -> Roller Coaster Tycoon. - World of Warcraft + Starcraft's Download Programs (which both used a similar, skinned UX and bittorrent downloaders) - Shining Force III -> Golden Sun (battle gfx, character sprites / dialogs) Games have a unique type of taste and "feel" that come off them. As an artist, I'd like to see my touch be able to go along wherever I go. If finding and retaining top tier talent matters, why not try to be more accomodating to developers? 1. Creativity is priceless. GPL isn't geared toward creatives and game engineers. See the billion dollar video game industry. 2. It takes a tremendous amount of investment to meet the basal technical requirements to program a game. Let alone study the frameworks in question, build tools, so on and so forth. You have to cater to engineers who, care about open source, but won't tolerate reinventing the wheel again to satisfy a viral license (please research the position why, I could elaborate).
paradite 11y ago
The Battle for Wesnoth was the first game I that I installed and played after getting Ubuntu. I consider it the best game available on Linux platform (maybe except Braid). Sadly I am not equipped with enough C++ or Python knowledge to contribute.
- ectoplasm 11y ago
  Try out The Ur-Quan Masters a.k.a. Star Control II.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I second the recommendation. It's a great game. It may look simple, but it's quite deep and has a great storyline. It's the first game that actually forced me to start making notes. Also, starship duels in multiplayer (which consists only of starship duels) is so much joy!!.
- mproud 11y ago
  Just because they’re looking for programmers doesn’t mean you can’t contribute! Many of the games scenarios need maintainers, and Wesnoth has a friendly and budding add-on community that is always looking for new content.
nims11 11y ago
Wesnoth brought me into turn based strategy. Game mechanics and elements aside, the story in various scenarios were surprisingly captivating. I could imagine myself role playing as the protagonist.
deevus 11y ago
I wonder how much work it would be to get the basic game working using Unity with the assets already available...
- aliem 11y ago
  I guess this will violate the GPL license unless you are not going to release it to the public in any form.
  - eru 11y ago
    You can release the diff.
  - rhaps0dy 11y ago
    Why will that violate the GPL? Because Unity is proprietary?
losername 11y ago
here's the (official?) list of open bugs http://gna.org/bugs/?func=browse&set=open&group=wesnoth http://gna.org/bugs/?func=browse&set=open&group=wesnoth not on github or the forums
- mproud 11y ago
  Correct; the issue tracker is still on Gna. A simpler way to get there is http://bugs.wesnoth.org http://bugs.wesnoth.org
nly 11y ago
So far we've had one major thread calling for a rewrite in a new language, one calling for a new license, and one insinuating the devs should accept the project is done and move on with their lives. Is it any wonder open source gaming struggles with this kind of broad negativity?
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  On this website I am not at all surprised that people want it to be rewritten in javascript or to be relicensed from the GPL.
  - mproud 11y ago
    There has been some recent discussion with moving the art and music assets away from GPL into a CC or similar license. The developers understand GPL was never really designed for those media. (You’ll have to remember, Wesnoth started in 2003; back then, Wikipedia was using GNU FDL for everything.) The tricky thing would be contacting all the music and art contributors to get their permission first, which is not an easy task for a project of this size.
    - jordigh 11y ago
      The GPL was designed for non-code media. It is one of the reasons that GPLv3 has more broad language that does not refer specifically to code. Having the same license for the software and media has obvious advantage: it's a lot simpler to interact between the two of them. Some artists just get huffy about having "their" art modified, as if their artistic integrity should not allow modifications. They would have the same problem with any free license, though, so just teaching artists how the GPL works has worked ok so far.
      - wavefunction 11y ago
        I'm a big fan of use-reuse whether it's code, audio, visual or whatever, but it's a bit rude in my opinion to call artists who don't want other people modifying their art "huffy." I would like for everyone to feel comfortable putting their creative output in the commons but I respect people who aren't comfortable in that way and abide by their wishes.
tomcam 11y ago
Isn't this a textbook case for crowd sourcing?
wildster 11y ago
They should build in something like AngularJS, Backbone or Ember.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  I'm desperately hoping that this is satire.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested in learning why, because I maintain many open source projects myself and I want to know some of the reasons why skilled programmers who appreciate projects don't contribute to them.
- ObviousScience 11y ago
  Isn't Battle for Wesnoth looking for C++ programmers to maintain their codebase? It's not that I don't have significant programming skills myself, nor that I don't work on side projects, nor even that I don't really like Battle for Wesnoth... I've just sworn off every working on a C++ legacy codebase. So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to a legacy C++ codebase. Ed: I went back and read, and they're looking for people to add Python code to their toolchain. My answer is thus amended: I dislike trying to interface toolchains for building data to legacy codebases, and I do that for my job. I have no interest in doing ugly hacky things on legacy codebases for free, because it's honestly sort of soul crushing work.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    "I'm not interested in that kind of work" is a fair answer, but it seems pretty rude to dismiss it as an ugly hacky legacy code base without reviewing it first.
    - ObviousScience 11y ago
      For the record, I looked at the Wesnoth codebase in college, so my opinions are outdated (by 5+ years) but not unfounded. Rather, I'm merely repeating why I didn't help then, instead of particularly why now, which is a much more boring "I'm just busy". I suppose it's possible the codebase has changed so much in those years that the answers are no longer relevant, but they would be the only open source project (not sponsored by a corporation) I'm aware of that happening in.
smoyer 11y ago
I'm not much of a game player but I find the mechanics of building a game engine indescribably cerebral. I'm probably a bit rusty with C++ but my years (and years and years) as an embedded systems programmer taught me a lot about optimizing software to minimal resources. I'm going to take a look at the engine and see if it warrants some of my kind of love.
seasoup 11y ago
If it's got a big fan base they should crowdfund something so they can afford to hire new devs.
- mproud 11y ago
  The project prides itself with being fully free and open source. Its goal is not turning profits or hiring developers. Wesnoth has participated in the Google Summer of Code in the past, and it’s possible artwork has been or could be commissioned.
a3n 11y ago
$ aptitude search wesnoth p wesnoth - fantasy turn-based strategy game - complete s $ aptitude show wesnoth Package: wesnoth State: not installed Version: 1:1.10.7-1ubuntu0.14.04.1 Priority: extra Section: universe/games Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com> Architecture: all Uncompressed Size: 21.5 k Depends: wesnoth-1.10 (>= 1:1.10.7-1ubuntu0.14.04.1), wesnoth-1.10-data (= 1:1.10.7-1ubuntu0.14.04.1) Description: fantasy turn-based strategy game - complete suite (metapackage) This metapackage pulls in the complete set of the latest stable version, most helpful if you always want to have all the official campaigns installed. If you only want to play over the network with other players or want to play only a few campaigns you just need to install the wesnoth-core package and the wanted campaign packages. Battle for control of villages, using variety of units which have advantages and disadvantages in different types of terrains and against different types of attacks. Units gain experience and advance levels, and are carried over from one scenario to the next in a campaign. Homepage: http://wesnoth.org/
- simoncion 11y ago
  I'm confused. Why did you post this?
  - a3n 11y ago
    Not familiar with the game, was delighted to see that it's in the repository.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      Ah. Your comment would have been better received if you'd said this, rather than posting output from aptitude.
prottmann 11y ago
For the most companies your specified reasons are used to start with a clean fresh new Version 2. New System, new Language, use the good parts rewrite the bad parts. And new Language would make it more interesting for "younger" developer that start with e.g. Rust / Go / Whatever. (That did not mean the code will be better)
copsarebastards 11y ago
I think a lot of these older open source projects have a tough time because they use C++ so extensively. There are plenty of people who "know" C++, but it's not a language many people can be productive in. The argument for using C++ is that it's faster and uses lower memory, but that's not actually true for naive implementations: C++ allows lots of tricks for speed and memory efficiency, but it takes work to make it actually more efficient. These days I tend to think that it's easier to write first in a higher-level language and optimize from a position of knowing where your bottlenecks will be than to write a low level language like C/C++ efficiently from the beginning, not knowing where the bottlenecks will be. I'm not saying that a rewrite is the answer, however.
- m3talridl3y 11y ago
  I think the real reasons are: Unity, Unreal Engine, HTML5, etc. People who would want to contribute never find BFW, instead they make their own games and satisfy their creativity that way.
- zanny 11y ago
  This is the case with old code in general, though. 2003 Javascript, 2003 C++, any Java, especially 2003 C#, any C, 2003 Python, etc are all horrible messes to work with today. C++ got so much better with C++11/14 I can't even think of it as the same language. Python literally broke itself. Java is pretty much dead except for on Android (consumer facing) for good reason. C# was practically an infant in 2003 and got so much better with so many frameworks around it since then. C is still as bad as ever, and Rust / Go didn't exist, and Scala came out that year. It is why frameworks and toolkits are so important. You want to minimize your codes aging surface area, and having individual parts you can manage and age independently kicks the pants off of starting from int main() and hoping for the best. Wesnoth's greatest library dependency is SDL, which honestly should make the engine fairly futureproof if they could get it ported to SDL2. But that doesn't change how everything else is pretty much raw C++, with just AI rules in Python or Lua. I'd have to look into if they are giving a thumbs up to std=c++14 or not, because if they are I might go poke around just to see how much you can fix. I'll have to read more on that though.
mcv 11y ago
Is that game still not finished? Maybe everybody is happy with it and moved on to something new?
entelechy0 11y ago
I'd like to explore the possibility of contributing to its development and maintenance. I may not be an "experienced" C++ programmer, but I am an experienced programmer looking for more experience with C++.
McElroy 11y ago
They should do a kickstarter and then they can use the money to have more time to develop the game or to hire people as good as they are looking for.
- listic 11y ago
  I wonder how much would it cost to get sort out all the issues? From the look of it, I am wondering whether the architectural and management debt would make the cost unreasonably high.

397 points by mproud 11y ago

Why does the game need to keep advancing? Most games in the industry are written, released, and finished. The best have a timeless nature, still excellent even though they haven't been changed for decades. Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?

Frenchgeek 11y ago
For the same reason my mechanic of a brother always has something to fix on his car : A labor of love never settle for anything less than perfection.
- kazagistar 11y ago
  What strikes me as strange is that you don't usually ask others to maintain your unmaintained labor of love for you, because you don't have the time and manpower. Plus, it sounded like they were complaining that they "weren't keeping up".
  - exDM69 11y ago
    They were specifically asking for Windows and OSX programmers for example. Labor of love or not, doing maintenance work and testing on an OS you don't use yourself is not something most of us want to do on our free time. These guys are volunteers after all.
  - MadcapJake 11y ago
    Because the car analogy doesn't perfectly fit. This kind of labor of love is a game that's enjoyed by many. So asking people to help is more like a barn raising than an "engine hoisting".
SwellJoe 11y ago
Counterpoint: Nethack. Sometimes the best games take a (long) while, and may never be finished.
- chongli 11y ago
  Funny you should mention NetHack as the latest version, 3.4.3[0], was released on the 8th of December, 2003. I'd say it's a pretty good call to consider it finished. [0] http://nethack.org/v343/release.html http://nethack.org/v343/release.html
  - riffraff 11y ago
    there are a ton of forks of nethack, and basically the dev team seems to have disappeared[0], so I wouldn't consider it finished as much as "AWOL". [0] ok, not really, the nethack4 faq mentions 'The development team who worked on versions 1 to 3 of NetHack (the DevTeam) are still working on it (although there was no real evidence of this until 2014), but they don't release their progress, meaning that the situation is effectively the same as if they'd been doing nothing.'
    - chongli 11y ago
      Yeah, I'm aware of the forks and of the empty promises from the devteam. Should a new official release appear, I'll happily retract my statement. What I don't see is very much momentum toward establishing a proper successor fork a la Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.
      - ectoplasm 11y ago
        SporkHack was good for a while, harder than 3.4.3 at least. Sometimes updates actually make things worse. I like Brogue 1.7.2 a lot more than 1.7.3 for example. You should try that game if you haven't already, it does so many things well!
        chongli 11y ago
LoSboccacc 11y ago
went here to say the same thing. it's ten years old, and while I was super excited at the beginning, playing it and discovering every aspect of the many campaigns, it has felt stale in a while. the game is basically equals of it's former self, with many more graphic enhancement and sophistication that push the battle system, the maps and the editors to their limits, but while being timeless it also has exhausted its replay value and lives in a market which is vastly different to the circumstances that brought it to life many years ago
Udo 11y ago
I regularly play Wesnoth over the internet with a friend. Though we sometimes explore other games, we always come back to Wesnoth because it's compelling. However, and I say this as a fan, this game has severe issues - it's not just a few bugs and maintenance: Wesnoth makes current hardware sweat to the point where my relatively new MBP sounds like it's taking off, as is my friend's ThinkPad. It's also the only game capable of slowing my current-generation iMac down to the brink of operating system usability and beyond. The game itself is slow, UI actions, moving units across the battlefield - pretty much anything happens only after a noticeable pause. There is no apparent reason why a largely static, 2D, tile-based, pixel game should be this slow. The network code and its underlying model are an unmitigated disaster, by design. If you experience any network glitch during play, including short wifi disruptions, the connection collapses. But it doesn't do so right away. It can take up to a few minutes for the game to notice that a player has disconnected. There is no automatic re-connect, all players have to save, exit, and rejoin. While playing Wesnoth it's advisable to stay in contact over email to coordinate. Sometimes, the game state gets out of sync between players and the server. When the game notices that, you get the option to cancel the game or ignore and continue. If you do the latter, in-game causality breaks down completely (with hilarious results). If you opt for the former, once again, everybody has to save, exit, and re-join, and hope anyone has a non-corrupt save game. The game state isn't large or complex by the way. These are not merely bugs; they are deep, architectural problems.
- em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
  I wanted to verify your comments about speed, and found this interview http://www.linuxexpres.cz/rozhovor/interview-david-white http://www.linuxexpres.cz/rozhovor/interview-david-white where the original developer says: "However, I wanted to be able to develop Wesnoth quickly, using the latest technology and latest C++ features. Because of this I didn't spend much time focusing on things like minimizing the memory Wesnoth takes up, or trying to make it ultra-fast. This does limit its portability a little in that it is difficult to get working on systems with limited memory"
  - joshstrange 11y ago
    Honestly I think it could be written in Javascript with better results than it currently has. I've never tried multiplayer as I found the single player laggy which is unacceptable for a game a "simple" as this. Just goes to show that language alone doesn't alway influence speed...
INTPenis 11y ago
This is a good point. Also as one who lived through the times when gaming on Linux was almost unheard of, or required a lot of imagination, I think Wesnoth is part of gaming history right now. The future is here and Valve helped bring it about, the quality and quantity of games on Linux has completely transformed in the last 5 years. So gamers looking for entertainment on Linux have so much more to look forward to right now than Wesnoth. It's time to move on.
jonnybgood 11y ago
I think it's somewhat the nature of open source games. It reminds me of the AoE clone 0 A.D.[0] which has been in development for over a decade and still considered in alpha. [1] http://play0ad.com http://play0ad.com

enraged_camel 11y ago

Perhaps the issue is that they are looking for intermediate to advanced C++ programmers who have experience with very large code-bases. That's a tiny portion of the programmer population. I know this is a risky thing to say here, but I wonder if they should re-write the game in a more common/popular language, maybe something web-based like JavaScript. They would have a much bigger talent pool to pull from, gain access to a much bigger audience, AND probably have an easier time developing multiplayer functionality. Not to mention the plethora of open-source tools and libraries they can leverage.

jon-wood 11y ago
If one of the problems they're trying to fix is not being able to iterate as fast as they'd like then rewriting the entireity of a ten year old game isn't going to help that.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  That's what I'm saying though: they aren't able to iterate quickly because it's a huge codebase written in a programming language that is quite complex and fairly outdated. Besides, I'd assume that intermediate and experienced C++ developers are probably older on average, and are unlikely to be interested in developing games.
  - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
    You would assume incorrectly.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      Why is that? C++ is over 30 years old, whereas JavaScript is 20 years old. Besides, the latter surged in popularity only recently. Based on these facts alone, we can comfortably assume that experienced C++ developers are older on average. I can see why this is a controversial assumption though.

meric 11y ago

I first started playing Wesnoth from version 0.5.0. Countless hours 'programming' in WML introduced me to software engineering. Back then I looked at the C++ source and wondered when I'd be skilled enough to contribute. Reading this, is making me consider returning to Wesnoth once again after years of not having looked at it. Wesnoth is still filed neatly in my bookmarks folder.

rdegges 11y ago

Wow -- I've spent countless hours over the years playing this games -- it is one of the best turn-based strategy games (like civilization) to ever be made, IMO. Back in the day, I used to play this on my linux computer in my room with my brother -- it was one of the games that got me into coding / development in the first place. I hope they find some good developers to carry the game onwards! It'd be a shame if such an awesome, free game ended up going extinct. <33 drakes!

johnchristopher 11y ago

I am trying to download the latest release (1.12.4a) but I am caught in a never ending loop http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/. Edit: okay, sourceforge is broken for me for any download, no matter the browser. Let's consider that my sourceforge rant of the week.

kiiski 11y ago
That seems to be a problem with sourceforge. I was trying to download something else earlier today and had the same problem.
Figs 11y ago
Well, Sourceforge is still recovering from a major fuck up in their storage system a week ago, so it's not that surprising that things aren't entirely working... http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration-update-for-724/ http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-s...
- badpenny 11y ago
  Wow, that site has really seen better days. I notice it's still in the uBlock Origin block list as well.
brownbat 11y ago
Was trying to diagnose this for KeePass last night... Between this and the adware scandal, it's like someone slammed the door on an era. What's the download service everyone's going to move to that won't have these problems? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer_only_optin_adware_after_gimp_grump/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer...
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  I wished something like distributed git for the masses or torrent distribution would replace services that are a single point a failure such as sourceforge or self-hosting. Maybe even some kind of `Dropbox distributing' ? Maybe Mega and other file hosting and sharing services are up to the job but most have a very suspicious kind of aura. I remember chasing the web after some rapidshare hosted android rom (they still do that btw) and it's a pain to deal with. But that's just a technological POV, I don't know what kind of entity should/could distribute apps. FOSSHUB ?

anon3_ 11y ago

I have to tell you, when I see GPL license on a game, I see the good intention you have. Have you considered changing the license of Wesnoth to MIT so commercial game developers can use their time and effort on components can port them to their own projects too? I can't justify investing hundreds of hours programming new components a project (even one I'm passionate about) that a later derivative can't be used by my company. I could elaborate.

icebraining 11y ago
Regardless of the merits or lack thereof of changing the license, it'd probably present an even larger problem, since they don't seem to ask for copyright assignment and they have 100+ contributors, all of whom would have to consent to the new license or have their code thrown out and cleanly reimplemented.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  Agreed here. It's tedious to change license later on. So that's why there's tools to push it along, it's not the first time [1] As a stop gap - they can implement a contributor clause starting immediately. They can also say future commits post-[ref] are <this license> until the prior code is sunsetted. Typically there is an uppercrust where a very high percentage of the contributions lay. I haven't looked at the code (played the game all the time back in HS) but I'd bet you 90% of the code contributions are with the top 5 committers. [1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054
anon3_ 11y ago
Sorry for being redpilled toward the GPL crowd, but we just need to get some realities straight. There's another side to this. Have you ever played a game an felt an eery "I've felt that before", but couldn't put your finger on it? Examples include: - Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon -> Roller Coaster Tycoon. - World of Warcraft + Starcraft's Download Programs (which both used a similar, skinned UX and bittorrent downloaders) - Shining Force III -> Golden Sun (battle gfx, character sprites / dialogs) Games have a unique type of taste and "feel" that come off them. As an artist, I'd like to see my touch be able to go along wherever I go. If finding and retaining top tier talent matters, why not try to be more accomodating to developers? 1. Creativity is priceless. GPL isn't geared toward creatives and game engineers. See the billion dollar video game industry. 2. It takes a tremendous amount of investment to meet the basal technical requirements to program a game. Let alone study the frameworks in question, build tools, so on and so forth. You have to cater to engineers who, care about open source, but won't tolerate reinventing the wheel again to satisfy a viral license (please research the position why, I could elaborate).

paradite 11y ago

The Battle for Wesnoth was the first game I that I installed and played after getting Ubuntu. I consider it the best game available on Linux platform (maybe except Braid). Sadly I am not equipped with enough C++ or Python knowledge to contribute.

ectoplasm 11y ago
Try out The Ur-Quan Masters a.k.a. Star Control II.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I second the recommendation. It's a great game. It may look simple, but it's quite deep and has a great storyline. It's the first game that actually forced me to start making notes. Also, starship duels in multiplayer (which consists only of starship duels) is so much joy!!.
mproud 11y ago
Just because they’re looking for programmers doesn’t mean you can’t contribute! Many of the games scenarios need maintainers, and Wesnoth has a friendly and budding add-on community that is always looking for new content.

nims11 11y ago

Wesnoth brought me into turn based strategy. Game mechanics and elements aside, the story in various scenarios were surprisingly captivating. I could imagine myself role playing as the protagonist.

deevus 11y ago

I wonder how much work it would be to get the basic game working using Unity with the assets already available...

aliem 11y ago
I guess this will violate the GPL license unless you are not going to release it to the public in any form.
- eru 11y ago
  You can release the diff.
- rhaps0dy 11y ago
  Why will that violate the GPL? Because Unity is proprietary?

losername 11y ago

here's the (official?) list of open bugs http://gna.org/bugs/?func=browse&set=open&group=wesnoth http://gna.org/bugs/?func=browse&set=open&group=wesnoth not on github or the forums

mproud 11y ago
Correct; the issue tracker is still on Gna. A simpler way to get there is http://bugs.wesnoth.org http://bugs.wesnoth.org

nly 11y ago

So far we've had one major thread calling for a rewrite in a new language, one calling for a new license, and one insinuating the devs should accept the project is done and move on with their lives. Is it any wonder open source gaming struggles with this kind of broad negativity?

J_Darnley 11y ago
On this website I am not at all surprised that people want it to be rewritten in javascript or to be relicensed from the GPL.
- mproud 11y ago
  There has been some recent discussion with moving the art and music assets away from GPL into a CC or similar license. The developers understand GPL was never really designed for those media. (You’ll have to remember, Wesnoth started in 2003; back then, Wikipedia was using GNU FDL for everything.) The tricky thing would be contacting all the music and art contributors to get their permission first, which is not an easy task for a project of this size.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    The GPL was designed for non-code media. It is one of the reasons that GPLv3 has more broad language that does not refer specifically to code. Having the same license for the software and media has obvious advantage: it's a lot simpler to interact between the two of them. Some artists just get huffy about having "their" art modified, as if their artistic integrity should not allow modifications. They would have the same problem with any free license, though, so just teaching artists how the GPL works has worked ok so far.
    - wavefunction 11y ago
      I'm a big fan of use-reuse whether it's code, audio, visual or whatever, but it's a bit rude in my opinion to call artists who don't want other people modifying their art "huffy." I would like for everyone to feel comfortable putting their creative output in the commons but I respect people who aren't comfortable in that way and abide by their wishes.

tomcam 11y ago

Isn't this a textbook case for crowd sourcing?

wildster 11y ago

They should build in something like AngularJS, Backbone or Ember.

jon-wood 11y ago
I'm desperately hoping that this is satire.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested in learning why, because I maintain many open source projects myself and I want to know some of the reasons why skilled programmers who appreciate projects don't contribute to them.

ObviousScience 11y ago
Isn't Battle for Wesnoth looking for C++ programmers to maintain their codebase? It's not that I don't have significant programming skills myself, nor that I don't work on side projects, nor even that I don't really like Battle for Wesnoth... I've just sworn off every working on a C++ legacy codebase. So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to a legacy C++ codebase. Ed: I went back and read, and they're looking for people to add Python code to their toolchain. My answer is thus amended: I dislike trying to interface toolchains for building data to legacy codebases, and I do that for my job. I have no interest in doing ugly hacky things on legacy codebases for free, because it's honestly sort of soul crushing work.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  "I'm not interested in that kind of work" is a fair answer, but it seems pretty rude to dismiss it as an ugly hacky legacy code base without reviewing it first.
  - ObviousScience 11y ago
    For the record, I looked at the Wesnoth codebase in college, so my opinions are outdated (by 5+ years) but not unfounded. Rather, I'm merely repeating why I didn't help then, instead of particularly why now, which is a much more boring "I'm just busy". I suppose it's possible the codebase has changed so much in those years that the answers are no longer relevant, but they would be the only open source project (not sponsored by a corporation) I'm aware of that happening in.

smoyer 11y ago

I'm not much of a game player but I find the mechanics of building a game engine indescribably cerebral. I'm probably a bit rusty with C++ but my years (and years and years) as an embedded systems programmer taught me a lot about optimizing software to minimal resources. I'm going to take a look at the engine and see if it warrants some of my kind of love.

seasoup 11y ago

If it's got a big fan base they should crowdfund something so they can afford to hire new devs.

mproud 11y ago
The project prides itself with being fully free and open source. Its goal is not turning profits or hiring developers. Wesnoth has participated in the Google Summer of Code in the past, and it’s possible artwork has been or could be commissioned.

a3n 11y ago

$ aptitude search wesnoth p wesnoth - fantasy turn-based strategy game - complete s $ aptitude show wesnoth Package: wesnoth State: not installed Version: 1:1.10.7-1ubuntu0.14.04.1 Priority: extra Section: universe/games Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com> Architecture: all Uncompressed Size: 21.5 k Depends: wesnoth-1.10 (>= 1:1.10.7-1ubuntu0.14.04.1), wesnoth-1.10-data (= 1:1.10.7-1ubuntu0.14.04.1) Description: fantasy turn-based strategy game - complete suite (metapackage) This metapackage pulls in the complete set of the latest stable version, most helpful if you always want to have all the official campaigns installed. If you only want to play over the network with other players or want to play only a few campaigns you just need to install the wesnoth-core package and the wanted campaign packages. Battle for control of villages, using variety of units which have advantages and disadvantages in different types of terrains and against different types of attacks. Units gain experience and advance levels, and are carried over from one scenario to the next in a campaign. Homepage: http://wesnoth.org/

simoncion 11y ago
I'm confused. Why did you post this?
- a3n 11y ago
  Not familiar with the game, was delighted to see that it's in the repository.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    Ah. Your comment would have been better received if you'd said this, rather than posting output from aptitude.

prottmann 11y ago

For the most companies your specified reasons are used to start with a clean fresh new Version 2. New System, new Language, use the good parts rewrite the bad parts. And new Language would make it more interesting for "younger" developer that start with e.g. Rust / Go / Whatever. (That did not mean the code will be better)

copsarebastards 11y ago

I think a lot of these older open source projects have a tough time because they use C++ so extensively. There are plenty of people who "know" C++, but it's not a language many people can be productive in. The argument for using C++ is that it's faster and uses lower memory, but that's not actually true for naive implementations: C++ allows lots of tricks for speed and memory efficiency, but it takes work to make it actually more efficient. These days I tend to think that it's easier to write first in a higher-level language and optimize from a position of knowing where your bottlenecks will be than to write a low level language like C/C++ efficiently from the beginning, not knowing where the bottlenecks will be. I'm not saying that a rewrite is the answer, however.

m3talridl3y 11y ago
I think the real reasons are: Unity, Unreal Engine, HTML5, etc. People who would want to contribute never find BFW, instead they make their own games and satisfy their creativity that way.
zanny 11y ago
This is the case with old code in general, though. 2003 Javascript, 2003 C++, any Java, especially 2003 C#, any C, 2003 Python, etc are all horrible messes to work with today. C++ got so much better with C++11/14 I can't even think of it as the same language. Python literally broke itself. Java is pretty much dead except for on Android (consumer facing) for good reason. C# was practically an infant in 2003 and got so much better with so many frameworks around it since then. C is still as bad as ever, and Rust / Go didn't exist, and Scala came out that year. It is why frameworks and toolkits are so important. You want to minimize your codes aging surface area, and having individual parts you can manage and age independently kicks the pants off of starting from int main() and hoping for the best. Wesnoth's greatest library dependency is SDL, which honestly should make the engine fairly futureproof if they could get it ported to SDL2. But that doesn't change how everything else is pretty much raw C++, with just AI rules in Python or Lua. I'd have to look into if they are giving a thumbs up to std=c++14 or not, because if they are I might go poke around just to see how much you can fix. I'll have to read more on that though.

mcv 11y ago

Is that game still not finished? Maybe everybody is happy with it and moved on to something new?

entelechy0 11y ago

I'd like to explore the possibility of contributing to its development and maintenance. I may not be an "experienced" C++ programmer, but I am an experienced programmer looking for more experience with C++.

McElroy 11y ago

They should do a kickstarter and then they can use the money to have more time to develop the game or to hire people as good as they are looking for.

listic 11y ago
I wonder how much would it cost to get sort out all the issues? From the look of it, I am wondering whether the architectural and management debt would make the cost unreasonably high.