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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. Howev
by 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 agoI 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 agoHonestly 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...
- mproud 11y agoThis game isn't exactly simple. There's an entire meta language called WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), support for a powerful AI and Lua scripting. There's also very intricate multiplayer code that I don't think in any way could be trivial with JS. Yes, Wesnoth is hamstrung a little by its tech stack. The dev team very much wants to move to SDL 2 and support OpenGL in the future. How will they do that? With more and interested developers. Hence, the call to action.
- ectoplasm 11y agoWhy don't you just stabilize everything and prepare to release a final polished version? Then, you can decide if you want to keep working, or if you want to stop and put the game in maintenance mode. Do you even have enough developers to support that? There is value in completing creative projects.
- timdorr 11y agoThen, to be extremely frank, it sounds like the game is a technical failure and should be abandoned. Trying to fix an older game such as this seems like an uphill climb. Better to greenfield it and start from scratch. The original engine sounds like it needs a rewrite anyways. Getting it running on an existing engine (UE4 can do 2d fairly well, for instance) seems like a better investment of resources. What they're building is a solved problem. It was a valiant effort to do it on their own, especially in a time when that was the only way. They could reap the benefits of all those learnings in the backend and instead focus efforts on tweaking gameplay, inventing new forms of play, and smoothing out rough edges in the UI or visuals.
- Narishma 11y agoUE4 is overkill for such a game.
- 0xCMP 11y agoYet it sounds from these comments like it'd be faster and more people would be willing to help maintain it.
- eropple 11y agoThe problem there, though, is not the maintenance, it's the actual reimplementation of the thing. At this point it's probably man-years of work to do that sort of a port to a new engine, and getting that sort of commitment doesn't strike me as easier than finding one or two folks to help out.
- bjourne 11y agoAre you playing wesnoth 1.12 because they have significantly improved the rendering performance in the latest version. I know 1.10 could lag my computer but 1.12 is very fast and snappy. Also in my experience, playing 1.12, the game state almost never gets out of sync. If it happens it is because one or more players have different version of some add-ons. So yeah, you really should try 1.12 or even checkout and play the version from their repo because it has even more improvements to it.
- bertocq 11y agoI too was in love with this game when I only had a cheap pc with windows, but years later started burning my new laptop and got me angry and ended erasing it.