Battle for Wesnoth 1.6 Release Notes

March ??, 2009. Once again it's time for that epoch-making event, a Wesnoth stable release. The Battle for Wesnoth team is proud to release version 1.6 of The Battle for Wesnoth, a Free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme and roleplaying elements. The game is available for download now for Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.


What's New in Wesnoth 1.6

We have many new features for your delectation this time around:

First, the new game content: There is a new mainline campaign, The Legend of Wesmere, with new gameplay features including (in one scenario) the ability to use the game AI as your commander for an allied side, setting its objectives as you like. Multiplayer has two new maps, 4p Underworld and 4p A New Land; existing maps have been revised and updated. There are two new units (Dread Bat and Royal Warrior), and one new terrain (cave path).

Many mainline campaigns have improved storyline prose and new cutscenes or epilogs. Several have improved and redrawn campaign maps. All now have dates in the Wesnoth history timeline and almost all have journey animations on their campaign maps. The history and geography of Wesnoth have been developed in more depth and detail, and more campaigns now include references to events in that overall history, adding depth and richness to the narration.

The game graphics have been improved, with a whole new range of unit portraits in more realistic styles. Many more units have full animations and team coloring. Forests get more variety with graphics for spring/summer, fall, and winter deciduous forest terrains. There are new village graphics for human cities and primitive tribal areas. There are three new original background tracks: Heroes' Rite, The Dangerous Symphony, and The Deep Path, and three special music clips for victory and defeat events.

The game interface has continued to evolve, especially in making more dramatic use of portaits. Unit recall dialogs now display useful information about your veterans' traits. Addons now display their category when you browse them on the download server.

For content authors, the map editor is much improved. It can be started from within the game now. You can toggle overlay displays of terrain codes and map coordinates while editing. The editor can handle multiple maps in a session, and you can take screenshots of full maps. There's also a new interactive editing tool for animated journey tracks.

Less visible changes include improvements in the game AI, including a new formula-based AI that allows more flexible setting of objectives and an improved pathfinding algorithm. As usual, WML has grown more powerful with many new tags and attributes to extend the range of what campaign authors can do.

A few features have been removed. The gamma-correction slider is gone; crash bugs in the SDL implementation behind the feature made it too dangerous. The support for writing Python AIs has been removed because the feature opened a serious security hole; we hope to build a functionally similar feature, possibly using a different and safer extension language, in 1.7.

New game translations include Arabic, Croatian, Friulian, Latvian, Macedonian, and Marathi. Existing translations have been extensively updated and revised.

For Players

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For Campaign Developers

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Download

Battle for Wesnoth is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Source code is available from wesnoth.org where you will also find instructions for building from source on a range of different operating systems. Ready-to-go packages are also available for most popular operating systems, including Linux and Windows and Mac OS X.

You can get up to date information about downloads at the downloads page.

If you downloaded previous versions of the game, you might be interested in downloading the xdelta files only.

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