
Show HN: Wesnoth – Free, turn-based strategy game  - freeslugs
https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth
======
Morgawr
This game will always hold a special place in my heart. Back when I was 17 I
got hospitalized (nothing serious or life-threatening) for a couple of months
and back then I didn't have internet everywhere or a smartphone to keep me
company. My parents had brought my laptop to me but having no internet was
really really boring. I had Linux installed but, alas, in 2006-2007 there
weren't many Linux games to keep me company. Luckily after some time I
remembered I had downloaded this "Wesnoth" game a few months before, so I
started playing it.

Boy, it was a blast, for weeks and weeks I played all the scenarios and
campaigns and I got really good at it. Every now and then I go back to it even
today, just to play a few scenarios.

I met the main developers at Fosdem this year and they are great people, they
are doing an amazing job with this game. Kudos to them.

~~~
SixSigma
Isn't life strange. I had to wait over 15 years for my computer to be
connected to the internet and somehow I managed.

~~~
Morgawr
Were you stuck in a hospital bed all that time without any chance to go out,
see your friends, breathe fresh air or even eat food properly?

I managed to read around 10 books in the first week I was hospitalized, my
parents didn't know what to provide me anymore because I just tore through
every piece of literature I could find.

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JoachimSchipper
If you haven't seen Wesnoth before,
[http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Description](http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Description) may
be a gentler introduction than the source code.

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ZirconCode
This is an amazing game. If you are interested in it's structure, there is a
good chapter on it here:
[http://aosabook.org/en/wesnoth.html](http://aosabook.org/en/wesnoth.html)

~~~
jwdunne
This is really strange because I read that chapter before checking HN and to
my surprise its here. The chapter is a great read and gives some ideas on how
to architect a game, especially one that you want the players themselves to
contribute too.

A similar game hooked me on programming at an early age. It's called Graal and
you had to pay to contribute. I wish I had found this game instead.

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acc00
A link to github when the project has a well-made functional website?

Did you want to show us the source code specifically?

~~~
haliphax
I'm wondering the same thing. Also, this is not even close to new. My
understanding is that it has been open source and freely available for quite
some time.

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izietto
I've just discovered that one of the biggest contributors [1] is Eric S.
Raymond [2], who is the author of The art of UNIX programming [3] and one of
the open source contributors of all time I admire most.

[1]
[https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/graphs/contributors)

[2] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/](http://www.catb.org/~esr/)

[3]
[http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/)

~~~
BryantD
FWIW, this is mostly scenario design and writing contributions. Which are of
course also important.

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chrisfosterelli
While I don't play anymore, I used to play this game quite often. It is an
absolute blast to get a few friends together, hop on a Skype call, and spend
the night playing. Glad to see the game is still under development!

~~~
meric
I started playing Wesnoth in 2005. Practised 'programming' in WML to make
custom maps. There was one I designed called 'DOTW' which was a rip off from
DOTA. For a good few weeks it was the most played map in Wesnoth multiplayer.
Good times.

~~~
electronvolt
I definitely played that map back sometime between '05 and '08\. It's been a
while.

Being reminded that this game exists and seeing that the project is still
going makes me super happy.

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bane
This is a great game and runs fantastic on older systems. I've turned more
than one old and "useless" laptop into a Wesnoth/ScummVM/mp3 player box in the
past and they work fantastic.

This is also about as close as you're going to get to a native Advance Wars
game on PCs. If you've played any of the AW games (GBA and DS) you'll know how
addictive they can be.

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lkrubner
I love this game. I have not played it in a few years (have not played any
games in a few years) but this was my absolute favorite somewhere around
2007-2009. A great amount of careful thought went into this game, and you can
tell when you play. Also the width of the community ensures a diversity of
scenarios.

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highCs
The number of contributors is quite impressive:
[http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Credits](http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Credits)

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Cheerios
There's a great port of this on Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androthsof...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androthsoft.battle)

~~~
bru
Is that legal? That version seems closed-source!

And I couldn't even access the developer's website (www.androthsoft.com). If
the money went to the authors/official website I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but
in the current situation I'd rather circumvent the official download
channels...

~~~
VLM
"That version seems closed-source!"

[https://github.com/cjhopman/Wesnoth-1.8-for-
Android](https://github.com/cjhopman/Wesnoth-1.8-for-Android)

The "Is that legal?" question is extremely complicated because you're looking
for a positive answer in a marketplace full of a bazillion theoretical
negative answers. They're not "selling GPL without releasing the source" as
long as github doesn't go out of business. Is it legal, in the sense that
there used to be a raging debate if your agreement to sell on the apple store
was invalid thus illegal if you "sold" GPL'd software, which I stopped caring
about once I got rid of my last iDevice and went all Android, so it may or may
not be legal to "sell" GPL software on at least some app stores. Another app
store example, for no reason I'm aware of, wesnoth used to be stuck in the
incoming queue on fdroid, I donno why or if that was ever resolved or if it
had anything to do at all with the license.

"If the money went to the authors/official website I'd buy it in a heartbeat"

Well, CJ is listed by name on

[http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Credits](http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Credits)

Along with about 500 other people. I suppose paying one of the 500 is superior
to paying none of them. Personally I think the work he did to port is worth a
"tip" so I paid for it a long time ago.

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barbs
I wanted to get into this game, but I seem to remember being turned off by the
amount of luck in it. Maybe I should give it another go?

~~~
Jach
While you shouldn't need to at lower difficulties or on easier campaigns, you
can always quick save before a move or at the end of your turn and reload if
you didn't like the result of your move or the enemy moves. Do it a lot in the
early scenarios to build up hero unit reserves and see if you can make it
through later scenarios without reloading. Mark the turn start save and try a
strategy, if it fails go back to that turn instead of starting over. And note
that if your strategy is poor, continually reloading alone won't let you win.
(Unless maybe you spend a crap ton of time waiting for positive outcomes of
minuscule-probability events...)

Edit: I remembered a quote I liked from early on in Iain Banks' _The Player of
Games_. While I still like chess (and take issue with the notion that reality
is built on chance, rather than our predictive measurements of reality
restricted to chance due to us being part of reality not outside it) I thought
this was a pretty great put-down of games without chance at all:

 _" All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of
our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple
rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most
elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being
unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be
fully predicted, the future remains make-able, and retains the possibility of
change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word.
In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the
best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly",
such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be
traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone
the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience
societies.

"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they
rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines,
no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the
scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers
and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus
which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages
behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work
of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something
old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're
just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit
at the same time."_

~~~
sspiff
This technique has a (derogatory) name in the world of strategy games, "save
scumming". I think in a single player game, the only thing that matters is
that the player has fun.

It is more common practice in games like RPGs, but less looked down upon,
since certain quest lines and story elements are mutually exclusive. Think of
the typical choice of being a "good" or "evil" character, and how they
sometimes lead to different subquests.

~~~
chongli
Save scumming is so pernicious and ubiquitous that it's driving the growth of
an entire genre in response: Roguelikes!

~~~
sspiff
Don't Roguelikes usually enforce restarting the game after death? I thought
they didn't allow you to (easily) have multiple saves.

~~~
a-saleh
> I thought they didn't allow you to (easily) have multiple saves.

That _is_ the response :-)

~~~
sspiff
Oh, I completely misinterpreted the earlier comment! Sorry!

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listic
I wish they finished Wtactics, the card game.
[http://wtactics.org/](http://wtactics.org/)

~~~
Vaskivo
I didn't know about Wtactics. Is it from the same devs?

While I see the value of Wesnoth, it's not my kind of game. Now a constructed
card game, that I enjoy!

Browsing that website, I think the game rules should be easier to find.

~~~
DDR0
I think it uses the art, or at least was heavily inspired... seems to be
something there, but the original programmer moved on to do this ccg instead.
[https://github.com/davewx7/Citadel](https://github.com/davewx7/Citadel) (It's
still a work in progress, though.)

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JoshTriplett
I don't play the standard Wesnoth scenarios very often anymore, but because
Wesnoth has a full scripting language in it to construct custom scenarios,
people have invented whole new games for it.

I personally enjoy the "SurvivalX" family of single-unit multiplayer RPG
campaigns: you have a party of adventurers, one unit per player, that gain
experience and gold through combat, and can develop skills, spells, abilities,
new weapons, and otherwise become more powerful, leading up to large boss
fights against the leaders of the opposing armies. And when you lose your one
unit, you lose.

RPG scenarios provide a very different feel from the standard game of Wesnoth,
but personally I enjoy them far more.

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phildini
I am amazed how long this game has existed and been iterated on. I remember
first playing this on linux almost a decade ago.

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abus
freeslugs did you make this? If not, why are you tagging it "Show HN"?

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mathgeek
I remember playing this back in high school many years ago. Kudos to
continuing to improve it!

