News: Build 19 is Getting Closer



We have squashed our last bug today, so we invite everybody who has the time to help with testing to make sure that we will get a good stable release again. If no new critical bugs are found, we should have a release in a few weeks!

Work on the code since our last development report has been mostly focused on cleanups and bug fixes. We do have a series of new features to offer though:

User Interface

We have continued work on our menu improvements and redesigns: the Options menu is now tabbed and divided into logical categories. In the editor, the user can now pick the default terrain when creating a new map. The Random Map menu has also been redesigned.

We display the Widelands version for each client in Internet lobby.

Furthermore, buttons and table headers will now automatically scale down their text if it is too wide, preventing cropping of text.

In single player games, map location markers are now stored in when you save a game.

And we finally fixed the mousewheel scrolling.

Graphics

We continued the general overhaul of the graphics rendering to increase efficiency, including visual and efficiency improvements to statistics graphs.

We also replaced the graphics for the work areas to make them more visible on all terrains and created new animations for the Empire’s Vintner.

Player and Developer Help

The automatically generated Encyclopedia and developer documentation has been updated on the website. This is still a work in progress, since we plan to add more information in the future.

We also created an in-editor help system that contains information about trees and terrains. This is entirely driven by Lua code now, so everybody is invited to provide ideas and code for more help sections – no C++ knowledge required!

To help with debugging, a debug window for ships has been added.

We also moved all data-related directories into a new "data" directory in order to make it easier to navigate the code.

Maps

Maps hints are now an extra field that’s separate from the map description. Hints can now also be displayed as an extra item on the website.

Trees’ terrain affinity has been fine-tuned to prevent forests from disappearing or expanding too much. We revised some of our official maps to balance with this new feature, and also added a few new ones.

The editor will now save your maps in a "My Maps" subdirectory in order to prevent accidental overwriting of official maps.

Gameplay

We added a new starting condition "Trading Outpost" that will periodically give the player some wares if needed. This is aimed at new players, or at experienced players who can give this starting condition to the AI.

Among other tweaks, the AI is now also more intelligent regarding the management of training sites.

In order to solve the problem of overgrown port spaces, when an expedition ship places a port, a bit of land is cleared of trees to make room for a few buildings.

For balancing: we added gold to the building cost for Atlantean training sites and made Barbarian attacks stronger. Conquered military sites can now be dismantled even if they belonged to a different tribe.

Finally, a bit of pretty: Ships now have individual names, and we have new sounds for some animals and production sites.