Battle for Wesnoth 1.10 Release Notes

January 2012. It is once again time for that thrill you’ve all been waiting for: the beginning of a new stable release series. The development team is proud to release version 1.10 of The Battle for Wesnoth, a free and open-source turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme and role-playing elements. The game is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and various GNU/Linux distributions.

What’s New in Wesnoth 1.10

For Players

Thanks to the Google Summer of Code projects from 2010 and 2011, there is a new Whiteboard system, which helps you make plans by visualizing recruitment, movement, attacks, and so on. It even lets you visualize plans to share with your allies in multiplayer games.

Since several terrain types were added, and many more completely redrawn or updated, including volcanoes, animated water, new embellishments, and completely redrawn grasslands, the Wesnothian battlefield is now a much more beautiful thing to see.

Many units, such as the saurians, have received new standing and other animations. These, along with the new, animated water, help breathe life into the previously nigh-on motionless battlefield.

The 1.10 series features a completely remade version of the old Northerners theme as well as two new tracks: Battle Epic and Silvan Sanctuary.

Campaigns

A new campaign, Dead Water, has been introduced; in it, you play as a young merman who is the heir to his kingdom’s throne; your task is to repel an undead invasion and to save your people. Dead Water spent some time being polished in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev project to prepare for mainline inclusion, just like Delfador’s Memoirs.

Most of the existing campaigns have received both major and minor updates and improvements. For example, A Tale of Two Brothers’s storyline was rewritten, and several scenarios from Legend of Wesmere were reworked to include more dynamic gameplay and better mechanics.

Multiplayer

Several new multiplayer maps have been introduced: Aethermaw, Arcanclave Citadel, Thousand Stings Garrison, and Volcano. Numerous updates and balancing tweaks were made to the other maps — including making full use of the new terrain types.

General

In addition to new portrait sets for An Orcish Incursion, Descent into Darkness, Sceptre of Fire, The Rise of Wesnoth, and The South Guard, generic portraits were added (for example, most of the Drakes and the skeletal undead), thus getting us closer to meeting our goal of having high-quality art throughout the whole game.

The lighting system can now illuminate specific areas differently to better show local time of day effects and, for example, keep caves dark during the day.

To help you quickly identify slowed units, they are now tinted light blue.

Various changes were made to the UI. For example, you can now remove multiple add-ons at once using checkboxes. Substantial improvements have also been made in regards to typography and consistency throughout the game. Also, the sidebar was modified to make it more appealing and easier to read.

Two new translations were started: Irish and Old English.

For Content Developers

The 1.10 series brings many new features for content developers, such as persistent variables, which allow add-on authors to save data to players’ user data directories for use by other content developers or in future playthroughs.

The game’s Lua capabilities have been strengthened considerably, which allows content developers to do much more than they could with it on the 1.8 series. In fact, one of our Google Summer of Code projects was focused on improving the AI-related Lua capabilities.

The terrain palette has been vastly expanded with the addition of new basic terrains as well as new structures and embellishments, thus allowing map makers to create more vibrant maps.

Thanks to a Google Summer of Code project that took place during 2010 and 2011, we now have a Wesnoth Eclipse plugin, which provides a full-blown IDE for WML in Eclipse thus providing features such as syntax highlighting, tag folding, autocompletion, and more. It even has front-ends for maintenance tools such as wmllint and wmlindent as well as the ability to start the game or map editor and have it go right to the desired scenario or map.

A new batch of item icons—drawn in the same style as the attack icons—have been made for the benefit of content creators; depictions of items such as potions, robes, armor, and jewelry are included.

Thanks to revisions in the code that handles [language], custom range and attack type strings can now be translated.

Download

The Battle for Wesnoth is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The source code is available from wesnoth.org, where you can 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 Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.

You can get up-to-date information on downloads at the downloads page. There you can also find packages and instructions for other platforms once they are available.

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

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