Widelands

It is getting colder... Widelands build 19 first snow feature freeze is now in place. What does that mean? It means that we will only change translations and graphics for the foreseeable future - no new features. We will fix outstanding targeted ... [More] bugs and newly found critical bugs, but the current development version is pretty much what Widelands Build 19 will look like. What happens next? According to the Release Documentation, we will fix the remaining bugs and roughly two weeks after this, we will declare winter time feature freeze. This is to give you (the community) some more time to catch up with translations and provide some new graphics. Roughly one week after the winter time feature freeze, we will provide you all with the first release candidate for even more testing. What does that mean for me? You have only a few more weeks to update the translations for Widelands Build18. Head over to Transifex (instructions can be found in our wiki) and add the missing translations for your language! And play the current development version as much as you can and report bugs. Build 19 should be a rock solid release like all the others before it. Let's make it so. [Less]

As you might have noticed the code of the website must be updated to a newer Django version. See Call for testing for further explanation. Because of the update the site wl.widelands.org will be down for around 2 hours. The update will start on: ... [More] Monday 07.18.2016, 15:00 CET (UTC: 13:00) Hopefully all is working afterwards UPDATE: Seems like all is working. Feel free to inform me when something goes wrong! [Less]

It has been a year since our last development update, so it’s high time that I wrote about the work that has been done on Widelands throughout the year. A lot has happened in the development version, so this will be a bit tl;dr! Graphics A number ... [More] of Barbarian buildings as well as the Atlantean blackroot fields have now improved or completely new animations. We have also replaced all worker icons with better versions, and there are new food icons and warehouse policy buttons. Also, the direction of water animations has been corrected to be uniform for all water types. Moreover, each tribe now has their individual roads textures. Internationalization Regarding our translations, a number of strings have been improved, and phrasing of help strings is now more consistent. Font sets are now automatically selected for each language, so the user won’t have to take care of this any more. We have implemented support for Arabic script and for Japanese line breaks. The switchover to the new and improved font renderer is still a work in progress - finished elements are text areas, sliders, buttons, checkboxes and spinboxes. Also, the positioning of elements on screen for right-to-left languages is still a work in progress. Win Conditions The “Collectors” win condition is now default, and it will add the wares in ports to the players’ scores. The display of the status messages for this win condition has been improved. We also have a new win condition “Artifacts”, where you can go hunting for artifacts on the map. We have added artifacts to some of the official maps - you can filter for these when you select a new map to play. Engine Changes On the graphics front, we have improved the engine in order to speed up the loading and rendering. Also, felled trees won’t get up any more. We have fixed a bug where multiple hunters could hunt the same animal, and the parameters for trees and their terrain affinities have been improved. The biggest engine change this year is the merging of the three tribes, which will give us more flexibility for future engine improvements as well as making life easier for modders. The hiding of carriers in the warehouse window is now handled dynamically, which allows modders to add a buildcost to carriers if they want. On the economy front, the routing of ships has been improved to be more efficient on average. New workers will now be delivered by the nearest warehouse. Saveloading When loading a map or savegame, both the filename and the map name can now be displayed. We have also added version information to replays, so you can see which version of Widelands you need for each file. We have implemented a rolling autosave, so that you can have more than one autosave file. The performance for closing and loading big and long games has been significantly improved. AI The AI can now cope better with high game speeds. The decisions on when to colonize or which buildings to build have been improved, and the training of soldiers in training sites is now handled more intelligently. There have also been improvements to military decisions and seafaring. AIs now also get a personality assigned at random to make them less predictable, and we have redesigned the AI levels that the user can select from “weak”, “normal” and “aggressive” to “very weak”, “weak” and “normal”. The the balancing of these levels is still a work in progress. Gameplay During the game, players can now filter messages for their categories, e.g economy, military or seafaring. The size of the message window has also been reduced, while still allowing enough space for translations. The Building Statistics window has also been completely redesigned. Buildings’ “Out of resources” messages now depend on productivity percentage rather than a counter. Target quantity for wares can now be set to 0 in the economy, which means that warehouses won’t request those wares anymore - requests by buildings will still be fulfilled. The dialogues of the Empire’s campaign have been improved. Finally, spectators now have access to the “Show Building Spaces” function. In-Game Help Due to the engine changes, the Wiki help for the tribe’s can’t be updated any more - unless we find somebody who has the time to rework the website code. So, the in-game help system has been extended to include workers and buildings as well as additional information about wares, and all buildings now have a “Purpose” help text. Editor We have a new terrain type “forested mountain”, which allows both mining and the growing of trees. The naming of terrain types has been overhauled to be more intuitive. The user interface for loading or saving a map, and for the map options has been overhauled. The editor also automatically adds/removes the “seafaring” tag when saving a map. A big thank you to all who have helped us with coding, graphics, translations, testing, calculations and game design! [Less]

Widelands Live Stream This Saturday, Vassili and Cyberpangolin will play a long game of Widelands and live stream it for everybody to enjoy. The stream will be in French. Start is on Saturday, around 9.30am CET. The game is streamed at http://www.twitch.tv/VassiliJeux. Forum threads: English, French

Maintenance work ahead! Next weekend, July 4/5, the website and the meta server will not be available. Our server requires an OS update. This unfortunately means a full reinstallation of all infrastructure. We plan to do all of this work on the ... [More] coming weekend. During this operation on the server, it is unable to perform its duties - therefore website and meta server will not be functional during that time. Update: Work has concluded. Website should be stable again. Please report any issues on sight. [Less]

We have a winner team! 
Yesterday, the final of the Team Tournament 2015 has been played, and the winner is: Team A! Congratulations!! Team A has won ALL their matches and has shown an astounding abtitude to build up a highly productive economy. ... [More] For king_of_nowhere and Cyberpangolin, it‘s time to harvest now: besides all the congratulations and admiration, they receive a winner‘s T-Shirt. Thanks to all teams for this first team tournament. There were many good games! [Less]

The group phase is over! Thanks to all players for the great games there have already been in the tournament! Really exciting ones. The replays can be downloaded here. See also the bracket. For 4 teams, the way is open to play the double ... [More] elimination part of the tournament. Congratulations! We can now look forward to the matches of juma, Kuvastin, Team A and Whynstein. Good luck! [Less]

Our former elder of graphics, chuckw followed through on his promise to be back one day. He recently started putting out formidable graphics for some of the barbarian buildings again. And now, he also volunteered again for the spot of elder of ... [More] graphics. As the elder of graphics, he is the one you need to be talking to if you are unhappy with anything visually in Widelands or want to contribute graphics in any kind of way. He will also monitor the graphics forum which is the place to discuss graphic development. Also, he will be administrating the widelands-media project on launchpad. Welcome back, Chuck. We missed you! Here is what he has to say: Well, I “warned” when I left Widelands activity two years ago that it was not a “Good bye.” I am very happy that I now have more opportunity to spend time with one of my favorite communities. Widelands and Widelanders have always held a special place in my heart. My sabbatical from Widelands since 2013 included stepping away from graphics and almost from computers altogether. Since that time, there has been much advancement in Widelands and its development environment. So I am playing “catch-up” and I think I am at a point where I can be useful to Widelands again. I've been dismayed that the role of Graphics Elder has laid vacant for so long, because there is so much work to do. That is why I have offered to undertake the post of Graphics Elder again. But I alone cannot do all that must be addressed. My skills and knowledge are limited and we continue to look for help and expertise with a variety of the visuals in Widelands. Like I wrote when I first stepped up, “As your Elder of Graphics, I'll be here to coordinate graphics development for Widelands and work with you. I'll serve as a contact point for requests and questions, and to receive any suggestions and finished works you may offer to contribute to the Widelands project. "I look forward to working (and playing) with you and want to see any samples or graphic contributions YOU may have to offer or point you to where we can use your help. "Together, let's make Widelands as graphically entertaining to the eye as it is to play.” Cheers! Chuck Wilder (chuckw) [Less]

Back in 2010, Widelands decided to move away from SourceForge which had hosted the game’s development for the first 8 years of its existence. Launchpad was chosen as a new and very prominent platform over GitHub mainly for its superior bug tracker ... [More] and the ability to have Widelands being translated by drive by contributors in the web frontend. However, development of Widelands means constantly tweaking and changing our strings - be it just by fixing typos or changing some words around - and Launchpad made for a frustrating experience with this: it would not recognize “fuzzy” matches, i.e. if you change one character in a string, the translations would be thrown away completely and the string marked as new and untranslated. Translators have voiced frustration, but web translation was providing so many more good translated strings than the offline process we had before and there was just nothing better around at the time. However, we have now found a more suitable platform with which we can address this issue: Transifex. So, we have decided to move our translation effort off Launchpad. Transifex is a professional tool for translating software which is free for open source projects. It offers us plenty of nice features that makes collaborative translating easier: Online Translation Memory with Fuzzy Matches With Transifex, we will get our own translation memory that will display similar strings below the string a translator is currently translating, and the differences between the strings can be flagged up. There is also a percentage shown as to how good the match is. Translations can then be recovered with a single mouse click and edited as needed. We are also uploading the Build 18 translations to give translators a baseline to work from. Working Offline and Source Code Integration Translators will be able to instantly download translation files as well if they prefer to work offline and then upload them again. The new and updated translations will appear immediately. From the programming side, we will also be able to automatically update templates and pull the new translations as before. Glossary Transifex also offers a glossary function, so we have started moving our Translation Dictionaries over there. The entries have to be added manually though, and we’ll try to copy everything over for you from our wiki before we do the switch. If you prefer to work offline, you can download a glossary table for your chosen language. Translating Widelands is a time consuming and difficult task and we appreciate that so many community members put so much time into this task (Thank you!!!). Changing and adding strings is a necessary evil in developing the game and will not stop - but with our move to Transifex, we hope that we will make translating Widelands less frustrating and more fun and rewarding. The move is planned for sometime next weekend. We encourage all our translators to sign up now, so you can have a look around. The new translation templates (called “Resources”) can be found on Transifex. If you have a GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter account, you can also use that instead of specifically signing up for Transifex. [Less]

Dear Widelands Players! There will be a tournament in the new year! It will be a Team Tournament, so every game is a 2 vs 2. All information are listed on the wiki site WLTournamentTwentyFifteen. Please registrate until January 4th. For questions ... [More] please contact me: Kristin I am looking forward to many exciting games as in the past tournaments! Greetings! Kristin [Less]