Battle for Wesnoth 1.8 Release Notes

April 2010. 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

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

For Players

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

The names on maps and other images can now be localized to the player's language; several languages already use this new feature. For more information and tutorials, look at the wiki article on Image Localization.

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 redesigned in a more robust and streamlined fashion. 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 its multiplayer port is available to test Wesnoth's multiplayer campaign feature.

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

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 told to notify the player that it's his turn to play.

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

Random numbers are generated on the Wesnoth multiplayer server during MP combats. This makes certain kinds of cheats and out-of-sync conditions impossible, at the cost of breaking compatibility with versions before 1.7.13.

General

The right sidebar on the main game display has been tuned for usability. It now gives more prominence 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. A remake of the merfolk units out of our Art Director's virtual pencil has been completed in this release cycle. (But most animations are still missing for them.)

Add-on descriptions are now accessible from the add-on download dialog via a button.

Most translations have been updated. In addition, Vietnamese has returned, and we have a new transliteration, English in the Shavian alphabet.

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 Summer of Code result is a new framework for Wesnoth's artificial intelligence. The AI can now be scripted to significantly change its behavior in different story settings and in response to campaign events, give enemy sides more distinct tactical personalities. It is possible, though not easy, to use scripting languages (formula_ai, lua) to create alternate AIs that are also scriptable.

A new tool called the "gamestate inspector" allows a content developer to view the values of the WML variables, ai configuration, and the recall list while a game is in progress.

New Orcish Village and Orcish Keep terrain graphics improve the options available to map designers.

We've also achieved excellent results with our inaugural 'Summer Art Scholarship' program. This has led to dozens of new portraits, as well as a complete rework of the Drake sprites. We hope to continue this program in coming years.

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.

We kept the promise we made in 1.6 when we had to remove Python for technical reasons; WML events and AI components can now be written in lua. The integration of lua in the wesnoth game engine is advanced enough to even allow the coding of WML action tags with lua definitions that can read and modify game state variables in the C++ core.

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. 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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