Hi everyone,

it always takes me months to realize, that it's time to give you an update about the development process . So here it is.

What is happening lately?

Actually quite a lot.

• The seafaring implementation is making good progress. All three tribes are now able to build ports, shipyards and ships (although the ones of the barbarians and the empire look kind of strange as they only contain placeholder graphics ). However scouting and colonization is not yet possible.
• A multiplayer seafaring map was added to playtest that new feature.
• If you want to build your own seafaring maps, go for it, the editor got a new tool for port build spaces.
• The statistics windows was improved on many places, is now a lot more intuitive and has a nicer look.
• Finally all workers are running out of a burning warehouse or headquarters, if gets destroyed - before they just stayed inside and ... well...
• the message window was improved.
• Soldiers are finally healed in warehouses and the headquarters as well.
• The dedicated server model of Widelands was improved a lot (take a look at DedicatedServer if this is interesting for you)
• Graphic improvements at many places
• A new piece of music was added.

And of course more than just a whole bunch of bug fixes. Take a look at the ChangeLog for a complete list as I surely forgot a lot of changes in the list above .

A bit of statistics

There are currently 167 bugs targeted for our next release Build17 :

• 1 is marked as New
• 4 are marked as Incomplete
• 48 are marked as Confirmed
• 5 are marked as Triaged
• 4 are marked as In Progress
• 103 are marked as Fix Committed
• 2 are marked as Fix Released

Which reminds me of the "in Progress" bugs...

The metaserver rewrite

A few days (or may it be weeks) back, we got a mail, that debian is removing ggz libraries from their repositories and thus are unable to build Widelands with internet gaming support. This forced us, to finally get rid of ggz and take the chance to write our own little system - much easier and still with more features than ggz provided to us.

I won't reveal too much in this post, but the current progress is already quite far and I hope we can present some very nice features to you in the next time.

That's it, over and out.

Have Fun playing!

-- Nasenbaer

First Community Poll discussion

The first community poll has concluded. You can find the results here. Frankly, I am very unhappy with how everything turned out in the end and I am unsure where to go from here. But let me start from the beginning.

How we got here

The initial problem was the following: The Barbarian inn and big inn is backwards compatible to the tavern while the empire inn is not because it can no longer produce rations but only meals. There were different opinions if this a good solution or not and I finally started the first community poll with the following three options:

1. Keep the empire inn as is. (30 votes, 42.25%)
2. Make the empire inn backwards compatible. (9 votes, 12.67%)
3. Make all buildings backwards compatible. (32 votes, 45.07%)

We had some trouble with people voicing their opinion multiple times so I changed the system to one vote per account. The final result is listed in braces in the list above. As you can see most people want that all buildings are backwards compatible. I will now explain why this won't happen and why this is my mistake alone.

What we won't do

Widelands is a game of three tribes. All tribes are different - the differences might seem arbitrary or even confusing for new players but they really make that a game between empire and atlanteans plays out completely differently to a game between empire and barbarians for example. If you do not believe this, take some time to study the replays of the ongoing tournament.

For example, having the axefactory only produce axes for soldiers is a great advantage for the barbarians: they can stockpile axes and be aggressive much earlier in the game than the other tribes. If the axefactory would also spend its time making tools it would not be able to produce axes so quickly and this would destroy this advantage - and unique trait - of the barbarians.

How I screwed up

This was my error totally: I offered an unspecific option (number 3) which I would veto anyways because it would destroy relations which increase the variety in the game. Also, option 3 includes option 2 so it is hard to get a clear picture of the intentions of the voters. Vote options should be disjunct, clearly voiced and real options for the game. This is obvious in retrospection - but I clearly didn't think this through beforehand.

What we will do now

There is some guesswork involved here now and not everybody will be happy with the decision.

Most voters were pro changing every non backwards compatible building in the game. This seems so far fetched for me that I cannot believe most players would really enjoy this when implemented. Its like turning all pieces in chess except for the pawn into queens - it makes the game easier but eats up its essence. We will not follow through with this - the axe factory and the brewery are knight and bishop for the barbarians. Instead, we will redo the vote, one building at a time. I restarted the poll which will run now for exactly 6 weeks. There are three options now:

1. Change the Empire inn to be backwards compatible.
2. Keep the Empire inn as is.
3. Either way is fine for me.

Option three will show how many people spent some thoughts on this topic and might give an idea of the priority this has to the community as a whole. Please vote again for your favorite option.

What we will change to work around such problems

I still think the community polls are a good idea and I am really sorry that it was so messed up the first time around. For the next community poll, I plan to write a news post introducing the problem and positions (just like for this one). We will then take some time to read and collect suggestions for a solution and I will compile the vote options for the poll from them.

Links:
Forum topic - http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/911/
Original News Post introducing the first vote - http://wl.widelands.org/news/2011/11/18/community-poll-backwards-compatibility-buildings/

Widelands Tournament No 2

In 2010 ivh won the first Widelands tournament, now, two years later, he needs a successor. This tournament will just like the former be knock out system, with an repechage so everyone plays at least two games. The tournament will start on the official play day (28 January), or if you can't make that in the following week. More information can be found on the wiki page and questions can be asked in the forum topic. If you like to join, send a private Message to Fopper with the tribe you like to start the tournament with.

Thanks to Fopper for the organization of the tournament! Let the games begin

Your vote is called for!

Here we go with a new category of posts on this very website we all love so much: Community Polls.

Every once in a while an issue pops up in the game balance or design that has no agreed upon best solution. Here is the idea of community polls which will follow the following ideas:

1. a community poll will run for roughly 4-6 weeks. Some might run longer than others and the time is not strict.
2. Every poll will be presented together with a pro and contra side of the argument.
3. The community poll will have some answers you can choose from. There might be more than one related poll running at the same time.
4. You are asked to only vote once. We will not technically enforce this for the moment. Update: we enforce this now.
5. The outcome of the poll will likely influence the game - rules might be changed, features might be changed. But the last word will always be with the core developers and as always, I will keep a veto right to kick/keep features out of the game. But if your opinion would not matter to us, we wouldn't ask. This is mainly a disclaimer if things turn out to be different than thought while writing the original poll text.

This will hopefully settle some long running discussions with a final decision. When a community poll is 50% 50% we will have a hard time deciding though.

The corresponding site in the Wiki is CommunityPolls. There is not much on it currently though.

Backwards compatible buildings

Some buildings in widelands loose features when upgraded. One example is the metal workshop of the barbarians which becomes an axe factory and will no longer produce tools. Only axes. Another is the barbarian brewer who will refuse to make anything else but the tasty strongbeer - an ale worthy of warriors. Most people seem to take these without any problem - but there is one building that gets a lot of heat:

The poor empire inn. As a tavern, it produces rations for mines but as the mines go deeper, real meals are needed to satisfy the miners. The inn provide those, but they are specialized and will no longer produce rations. And some people dislike this. The bug report on launchpad is quite busy and people feel strongly enough about this issue to specially sign up for launchpad to join the discussion.

Why is the inn okay?

I feel the specialization fits the lore of the empire: in my eyes, they are a highly specialized and bureaucratic culture: if someone promotes an empire cook to chef de cuisine he will not even think about touching a pan ever again. His job is all administration from then on. So I feel that inn keepers will refuse to produce lowly rations when they are hired to produce meals.

I also think it makes sense from a game mechanics point of view because this gives a distinction between the barbarian and the empire tribe: barbarian have a harder time juggling their mines and taverns because they have 3 levels of enhancement each. But if they make the error to enhance their taverns too early it will not bite them as hard because the enhanced inns are backwards compatible. The empire has only 2 levels but they have to be spot on with enhancing taverns to inns and rebuilding new taverns so that they can balance their production of meals and rations. This is not only a disadvantage: if you need a lot of meals, the empire will produce them faster than the barbarians because they are specialized on this very task - their building will not waste time on other products.

I feel the inns of the empire are a nice example of diversification and balance and should therefore stay as is. I feel it would make widelands more uniform to change them to also produce rations.

Why do others think the inn should remain backwards compatible?

The main argument is that it is illogical that inns suddenly stop making the ware they used to make as a tavern. This will especially confuse the beginner who enhances his tavern when he enhances his first mine and than suddenly the smaller mines no longer work. This is even worse when people have played the barbarians, because their taverns are backwards compatible. Most people also feel that the difference does not add much to widelands and only has a small effect on balance. Some seem this issue also as frustrating.

Astuur offers another argument: A second argument for having the Empire Inns also produce rations, is that doing otherwise is much more severe a handicap as it may seem. With each new mining and heavy industry area, you need to have a permanent tavern since all mines start as "normal mines" first. The crucial aspect is "space" and its severity depends on the map. The Empire is so challenged spacewise with sawmill, wine branch, stonemason and piggery (compared to the Barbarians), that I would welcome to lift the tavern plus inn requirement. No other tribe needs to have a mine (i.e. "marble mine") so early to progress. And yet another building seems too much for many starting points. Go and play "the green plateau" as Empire on green, and you will see what I mean.

Wrapping up

You have an opinion of your own? A question? The discussion thread is here: http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/911. And of course, you can vote in the sidebar.

While writing this, I realized that I had less to say about the other opinion and I didn't even try to hide my own. For future community polls I will ask a prominent supporter of the other side as well. I will also update this post with new arguments from either side as they pop up. Let me know what you think about the community polls and the way this one was run. Please also suggest improvements so the next one is even smoother.

Update

Okay, it turned out that some people could not resist the temptation to press the button 20 times. The one vote per account will need to be technically enforced. I whip up a solution as quickly as I can and restart the poll.

Update 2

Some coding later I present you the all new poll system where everybody can only vote once. Your vote is bound to your account - this means we loose all the anonymous users which make up a big chunk of the traffic on this site, but it can't be helped. I reset the votes to 0 and reopened the poll. Now let's see again.

I updated the post and the wiki page to reflect the changes. I also updated this blog post with an argumentation from Astuur to better reflect the other opinion.

Update 3

The poll will run till the end of january. This is an arbitrary date not equal to today.

Wihack Day 3

First: last few hours of day 2: At approximately 3am I hit one of the sofas here at the entropia and I missed a historic event: the first ware that was transported on a ship from one port to another. Nicolai has quite something to show for this weekend.

The wihack is not over yet, but it feels like we will not keep hacking all day today. We are tired since we didn't get much sleep and nicolai needs to travel home, so he will leave us in ~30 minutes. Today was cleanup and polish day: We fixed some of the bugs that were discovered from the tireless play testers from the forum and this will likely continue till tonight. No biggy new feature is worked on right this moment so I feel it justified to begin the summary post of things that were done. I will keep this updated as stuff pops up.

Participants in Karlsruhe

5 people were dedicated to widelands in the entropia this wihack. I will present them to you in order and tell you what they did for us in this sprint session.

Nomeata

His proudest achievement is the new clicking cursor: the hand you use in widelands to click things will now really move its finger when you click on a building. But his main work was in redoing the statistics menu: the plot area now can show more time areas and you can select them via a nice slider. Buttons that have a toggle state are now shown pressed or depressed as well. And he sped up the rendering of the plotting lines. Ohh, and he fixed many a bug in the UI code.

Shevonar

Shevonar committed himself to bug hunting. He fixed soo many of them, e.g. there was a bug when you updated a building it would sometimes suddenly 1.5 times on the map. Fixed. The wares help was not alphabetically sorted in other languages. fixed. The graphics in the building window in the background are now centered and nicely toned down. Similarly the display of wares in wares queues has been optimized by him. All very noticeable and nice changes.

Ixprefect

The man of many names (nicolai, nha or ixprefect) continued the efforts from the last wihack and worked on ships. Ships can now be build and they deliver wares between harbors in a useful fashion. That is, if you would have two harbors on two islands and a ship, you would already have a useful sea-faring. Expect to see this soonish in a scenario!

Kristin

Kristin looked through all maps shipped with widelands and looked if they are fair, if they can be played in team, if they are scenarios and so on. This is a grinding task that took forever but it is necessary to sort the maps into categories so that you can rely on the multiplayer maps to be playable by every tribe and to be fair.

SirVer

I did some work before the wihack which lead logically to the work I did here: I began adding the possibility to choose the number of wares you want in production and constructionsites and finished the work here. This was the groundwork for the dismantle site which I did finish here as well. I did a lot of CPU optimizations before the wihack and fixed the problems and corner cases that remained here as well. And I introduced the framework for adding help texts to the windows. I am looking for people who are interested in writing building help texts. Oh, and I fixed some bugs as well.

Remote Participants

Thanks goes out to the guys in the chat, the play testers who had bug reports ready for features that were only just introduced and especially Tino who did not drop the ball on the nightly builds: we had constantly fresh builds from trunk ready for windows users to enjoy.

Wrap up and summary

This WiHack was different. Less people, but more focused work. And fantastic new features (nearly) ready for prime time. My summary is: the socializing aspect was bigger with more people, but the work per person was bigger on this wihack. It was loads of fun and I enjoyed it totally. I am also very impressed and proud with what we achieved all together in this time.

I am really looking forward to testing the new stuff in-game!

Second day, wrap up

Here we go again folks: today was a good day for widelands. We got a bunch of bugs fixed (13 are down in total now). And we got a few new features: nomeata and shevonar worked their ways through a number of bugs and worked on new features like the cool plot time slider...

ixprefect is still working on the ships. They are now so close to actually drive between harbors. Still, a long way is yet to go.

Kristin continued here work on the maps and she is nearly through with all of them.

And me? I finished the dismantle site today. There will no longer be any hard deadlocks in widelands: you can now also deconstruct an already finished building and get half your resources back. I also fixed a bad performance regression I introduced yesterday - that's what I call an employment-creation measure.

The things that happen here already whirl together... I hope I will be able to produce a valid list of things we achieved here on the wihack 2011. One thing is sure already: we didn't slack and have quite something to show already.

First evening, wrapping up

This wihack is different. There are less people than the last times but all of them are clearly focused on the task they want to achieve. This also leaves me a little freer to get my own work done instead of helping new people getting started. This is not better nor worse - it's just different.

Currently, we are 5 widelanders + 1 entropianer hacking on widelands. And we have quite something to show already: the bug headcount is up to 5. Let's see what people are working on:

Kristin is sorting maps and checks the maps shipped with widelands for fairness. Her work will (hopefully) lead to clear distinctions between 1v1, 2v2, 4v4 or 1 vs cpu and fun maps and this will also make clear what maps we are lacking.

nomeata continued to work on his work from last time: he changed the time selection buttons from the various statistics menu into a slider which solves an inconsistency in those menus. He also made the finger wiggle: if you click anywhere, the mouse cursor will animate and the finger will press down on the spot. A small feature that makes a big impact on the eye candy.

Shevonar churns through UI bugs. Especially, he tries to track down a bug that I introduced in one of my last revisions. That bugger is hard though and needs to wait till tomorrow.

ixprefect is working on ships: his goal is to have them recognize and navigate to harbours. Integrating them into the economy code is no small feat. We will see what he has to show on sunday, but I am really positive that he will advance seafaring in widelands significantly this weekend.

Tino started to investigate the huge memory consumption of widelands. He installed investigative tools and will likely analyze their output tomorrow.

Myself, I fixed some bugs concerning the maximum wares configuration: you can now set in production- and constructionsites the maximum number of wares that you want to have in this building. You can for example empty taverns now before enhancing them so that you do not loose the wares. I build some bugs into this feature which had to die today. Also, I started working on the dismantle site, that is the feature that you can deconstruct buildings to get some of your build wares back. This is all still extremely rough around the edges, but I advance.

All together we did a good bit of work today. Tiredness is spreading though and we will call it a day for now.

See you tomorrow.

Wihack here we go

I just sat down, opened up my laptop and fixed the first bug. The wihack has officially launched. So far I am the only widelander at the Entropia, but some Entropia guys are also here. Shevonar should show up shortly and Nicolai will arrive in ~2 hours. Kristin is on her way as well.... Who knows who else will show up?

I will keep you update with more or less regular news posts, but this year, I will also try to twitter some more. You can follow me @SirVerII.

Wihack 2011 Reminder Post

The WiHackTwentyEleven is right around the corner: Less than 6 days from now it will start and we have quite something planned.

There will be some discussion about controverse (or maybe not) new features and changes in the community. For examples I will push the idea of creating soldiers not in warehouses but in a special low cost training building - an idea I was opposed to, but which was sold to me by Astuur recently. Also we will discuss allowing immovables on triangles (and not only on fields like they are currently) - this idea is also not new, it was suggested some years ago that all immovables should be on triangles. The original idea was voted down because it would significantly change the game play. The current iteration is more thought of as an visual improvement - but some game influencing factors are still to be decided.

Of course, we will not only debate, discuss and tweak, we will also work on non-controversial stuff to increase the awesomeness of widelands: new scenarios, new features, bug fixes and so on. And we can use every helping hand! See two posts earlier for details, or look at WiHackTwentyEleven in the wiki. If you can't make it to the wihack but want to help out, just come into the IRC chat and we will help you out. We obviously need c++ coders, graphicians, html gurus, css understanders, python hackers. But we also need people willing to make new maps - because we are lacking good, fair, balanced multiplayer maps. Also, some scenarios need map fixing. So if you want to, you can work on that! Basically: It doesn't matter what kind of skill you have, it is likely we need you for something.

oooh year: we will also play a bunch, so if you want to do that come around or join us in the IRC Chat!

See you this weekend on the Wihack! omg, so excited!