wesnoth/RELEASE_NOTES

This file is here to allow devs to easily add stuff in the release notes for the next release, it allows easy syncing with the release team, since you don't have to be around when the release takes place...

Just dump whatever you want to have mentioned in the release notes here. Please take care that it is in a way that allows copy&paste to the release notes. That is making sure that spelling/grammar/whatever is usable and that you are using complete sentences, not just single words. Please do use forum syntax and do *NOT* split lines after 80 chars!

Stuff that belongs in here:
* groundbreaking changes (new campaigns, extremely new feature, ...)
* changed dependencies (new things, version bumps, stuff that was removed)
* known bugs

The release team should empty this file after each release.


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CHANGES
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[rasection="Example section title"]
Example contents.
[/rasection]

[rasection="New user files location on Windows by default"]
[b]Short version:[/b]

The installer no longer provides a choice between storing user files in the installation dir and [c]Documents\My Games\WesnothX.Y[/c], forcing the latter instead (which no longer requires a command-line switch to be added to the game shortcut).

[b]Long version:[/b]

Up to Windows XP, mostly owing to the lack of user and process access control facilities on the mainstream Windows 9x series, applications would freely write user data into their installation paths without restriction. NT-based versions of Windows (including Windows XP) still supported this when running processes as accounts with administrator privileges, albeit at the risk of breaking things horribly in a proper multi-user environment. However, since Windows Vista, this practice is no longer recommended (and rightly so). Because there are too many applications that rely on the aforementioned broken scheme, Vista introduces User Access Control Virtualization to support legacy applications, by redirecting their writes to restricted paths to a user-dependent Virtual Store location.

Until now, the official Wesnoth installer has included the option to store user files either in the user’s Documents folder, or in the installation dir; the latter option forces Wesnoth to rely on UAC Virtualization if Wesnoth has been installed system-wide and then is run with normal user privileges. This has resulted in confusing documentation and countless forum threads on the matter of finding the actual location of Wesnoth’s user files on disk, mostly due to people choosing the install dir option [u]without a real need to do so[/u].

From this version onwards, the installer no longer provides the option to store user files in the installation dir, and the game itself defaults to using the Documents folder (more specifically, [c]Documents\My Games\WesnothX.Y[/c] where [c]X.Y[/c] represents the major and minor version numbers, such as [c]1.13[/c]) unless specifically instructed to do otherwise with the [c]--config-dir[/c] option in the command line. Additionally, [c]--config-dir[/c] paths can be either absolute, relative to [c]Documents\My Games[/c] (to support the previous installer approach to storing files in Documents), or relative to the process current working dir (usually the install dir) if either . or .. are provided as the first path component; this latter option is provided so that people can still install and run Wesnoth from removable media if they wish.

See also bug [bug]23753[/bug].

[b]Command-line changes short version:[/b]

(For people who need to customize the game’s command-line for any reason.)

[b]Before 1.13.2:[/b]
[list]
  [*]Default: use [tt]<cwd>\userdata[/tt]
  [*]With [tt]--config-dir <path>[/tt]: [list]
    [*]use [tt]<Home dir>\Documents\My Games\<path>[/tt] (installer adds [c]--config-dir WesnothX.Y[/c]) if path does not begin with a drive spec
    [*]use absolute [tt]<path>[/tt] otherwise
  [/list]
[/list]

[b]After 1.13.2:/b]
[list]
  [*]Default: use [tt]<Home dir>\Documents\My Games\WesnothX.Y[/tt]
  [*]With [tt]--config-dir <path>[/tt]: [list]
    [*]use [tt]<cwd>\<path>[/tt] if path begins with . or ..
    [*]use [tt]<Home dir>\Documents\My Games\<path>[/tt] (installer adds [c]--config-dir WesnothX.Y[/c]) if path does not begin with a drive spec;
    [*]use absolute [tt]<path>[/tt] otherwise
  [/list]
[/list]
[/rasection]

[rasection="New log files location on Windows"]
From this release onwards, Wesnoth no longer writes its stdout/stderr logs to [tt]stdout.txt[/tt]/[tt]stderr.txt[/tt] in the installation path. Instead, a single combined log file is written to [tt]<user data dir>\logs\wesnoth-<TIMESTAMP>-<PID>.log[/tt] containing all stdout [b]and[/b] stderr output. Up to 8 older log files are kept around, the rest being automatically deleted at game startup. Note that if an early startup failure occurs, the log file will be found at [tt]%TEMP%\wesnoth-<TIMESTAMP>-<PID>.log[/tt] instead.

Since this replaces SDL 1.2's buggy built-in stdout/stderr redirection code with a Unicode-aware alternative, this also fixes bug [bug]22897[/bug].
[/rasection]

[rasection="New game version dialog"]
Describe how awesome the new game version dialog is and how it replaces the old game paths dialog from 1.12.x
[/rasection]

[rasection="Fixed OOS errors on random maps"]
Some people experienced OOS errors on random maps due to sides being placed in different castles in the beginning of the game. This has now been fixed.
[/rasection]

[rasection="Replay turns during mp games"]
It is now possible to load an autosave in an networked mp game: when an autosave is loaded the local gamestate will be reset to the gamestate at that point. Then the game will be replayed (using the replay UI) until the current gamestate. When the current gamestate is reached the replay ui is removed and the game continues normally.
[/rasection]

[rasection="Default values for variables"]
In variable substitution it's now posible to specify default values for example name="$player_name?Klaus|" will evaluate to 'Klaus' in case the variable player_name is not set.
[/rasection]

[rasection="Custom [effect]s"]
It is now possible to create custom effects with the wesnoth.effects lua table.
[/rasection]

==========
KNOWN BUGS
==========

[list]
[*] The mp server has trouble with "Local" player types in campaigns. We have decided to postpone dealing with this. In the meantime, you might try assigning such sides to the host, or running multiple instances of wesnoth. https://gna.org/bugs/?21965
[*] Text for entry2.
[/list]