Battle for Wesnoth 1.8 Release Notes

Christmas, 2009. It is once again time for that thrill you've all been waiting for, a Wesnoth stable release. The Battle for Wesnoth team is proud to release version 1.8 of The Battle for Wesnoth, a free open-source 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 1.8
- For Players
- For Campaign Developers
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What's New in Wesnoth 1.8

The improvements this time around include one entire new full-length campain, hundreds of new and revised unit portraits, four new music tracks, some UI redesign, and substantial improvements in the game's AI.

For Players

To help the player keeping those who are loyal to him alive, this units are now marked with an overlay symbol that looks like a bronze ring.

Campaigns

A new campaign, Delfador's Memoirs, tells the tale of how a mage-apprentice rose to become Delfador the Great. This campaign was imported from the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev project, where it spent almost a year being adapted for mainline.

We've continued to polish and improve the mainline campaigns. The hero Kaleh's custom advancements in Under the Burning Suns, long a source of problems, have been debugged and streamlined. Significant continuity problems in Heir to the Throne's "Cliffs of Thoria" scenario have been fixed. Some scenarios in Legend of Wesmere have been rewritten and significantly enhanced. An early version of it's multiplayer port is available to test Wesnoth's multiplayer campaign feature.

There are four new full-orchestral music tracks: Casualties of War, Into the Shadows, Over the Northern Mountains, and Journey's End.

The game AI has been significantly debugged and improved; it chooses recruits/recalls better, and does smarter target selection.

Multiplayer

The operating system's gui can be allowed to "notify" the online player that it is on him to play on.

The multiplayer lobby has been completely redesigned for improved ease of play and better appearance.

Random numbers are generated on the Wesnoth server during MP combats. This make certain kinds of cheats and out-of-sync conditions impossible, at the cost of breaking compatibility with versions before 1.7.3.

There have been no unit multiplayer unit balancing changes in this release.

General

The right sidebar on the main game display has been tuned for usability. It now gives more prominance to the selected unit's terrain defence percentage and time-of-day modifier.

There is a new monster unit: the Water Serpent. Additionally, the Dwarvish Scout from Under the Burning Suns is now part of normal Dwarvish sides in campaigns. Several other unit lines - most notably the Drakes — have been completely redone with improved art and animations.

Add-on descriptions are now visible on the download server.

Most translations have been updated. New translations include English in the Shavian alphabet and Vietnamese.

For Content Developers

This year Wesnoth was once again a Google "Summer of Code" program; one of its major results was a complete rework of Wesnoth's support for multiplayer campaigns. Sides in multiplayer games are now persistent and can be carried over from one multiplayer scenario to the next. The leaders of AI sides are now able to recall from their side's list. As a side effect it is now possible to have more than one leader with the ability to recruit per side.

Another Google of summer result is a new framework for Wesnoth's artificial intelligence. The ai can now be scripted to reflect the needs of certain event based story settings better. Even possible but by far harder is the creation of a different ai that fits into the framework.

A very helpfull little new tool is called the "gamestate inspector". A content developer can use it to view the values of the wml variables and the recall list ingame through a gui.

Our "Summer of Art" program, working in concert with Google's "Summer of Code", produced big results. There are hundreds of new and reworked unit portraits available for your add-ons. There are new terrain graphics as well, including the Orcish Village and Orcish Keep.

We paid a lot of attention to world continuity, from small details like replacing earth-human names for characters up through larger ones like putting many new placenames on the main map. The main Wesnoth history timeline has been tweaked to eliminate various minor inconsistencies.

More of the AI's control parameters can now be modified from with WML, enabling campaign designers to give enemy sides more distinct tactical personalities.

We kept the promise we made in 1.6 when we had to remove Python for technical reasons; WML events can now be written in lua. The integration of lua in the wesnoth game engine is advanced enough to even allow the coding of self defined action wml tags. This is the first time wesnoth allows the content developers to modify wml itself.

It is now possible for translators to localize images in Wesnoth. For more information and tutorials, look at the wiki article on Image Localization.

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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