Wow -- I've spent countless hours over the years playing this games -- it is one of the best turn-based strategy games (like civilization) to ever be made, IMO.
Back in the day, I used to play this on my linux computer in my room with my brother -- it was one of the games that got me into coding / development in the first place.
I hope they find some good developers to carry the game onwards! It'd be a shame if such an awesome, free game ended up going extinct.
Why does the game need to keep advancing? Most games in the industry are written, released, and finished. The best have a timeless nature, still excellent even though they haven't been changed for decades.
Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?
What strikes me as strange is that you don't usually ask others to maintain your unmaintained labor of love for you, because you don't have the time and manpower. Plus, it sounded like they were complaining that they "weren't keeping up".
went here to say the same thing. it's ten years old, and while I was super excited at the beginning, playing it and discovering every aspect of the many campaigns, it has felt stale in a while.
the game is basically equals of it's former self, with many more graphic enhancement and sophistication that push the battle system, the maps and the editors to their limits, but while being timeless it also has exhausted its replay value and lives in a market which is vastly different to the circumstances that brought it to life many years ago
Funny you should mention NetHack as the latest version, 3.4.3[0], was released on the 8th of December, 2003. I'd say it's a pretty good call to consider it finished.
there are a ton of forks of nethack, and basically the dev team seems to have disappeared[0], so I wouldn't consider it finished as much as "AWOL".
[0] ok, not really, the nethack4 faq mentions 'The development team who worked on versions 1 to 3 of NetHack (the DevTeam) are still working on it (although there was no real evidence of this until 2014), but they don't release their progress, meaning that the situation is effectively the same as if they'd been doing nothing.'
SporkHack was good for a while, harder than 3.4.3 at least.
Sometimes updates actually make things worse. I like Brogue 1.7.2 a lot more than 1.7.3 for example. You should try that game if you haven't already, it does so many things well!
I first started playing Wesnoth from version 0.5.0. Countless hours 'programming' in WML introduced me to software engineering. Back then I looked at the C++ source and wondered when I'd be skilled enough to contribute. Reading this, is making me consider returning to Wesnoth once again after years of not having looked at it. Wesnoth is still filed neatly in my bookmarks folder.
Well, Sourceforge is still recovering from a major fuck up in their storage system a week ago, so it's not that surprising that things aren't entirely working...
The Battle for Wesnoth was the first game I that I installed and played after getting Ubuntu. I consider it the best game available on Linux platform (maybe except Braid). Sadly I am not equipped with enough C++ or Python knowledge to contribute.
Wesnoth brought me into turn based strategy. Game mechanics and elements aside, the story in various scenarios were surprisingly captivating. I could imagine myself role playing as the protagonist.
Perhaps the issue is that they are looking for intermediate to advanced C++ programmers who have experience with very large code-bases. That's a tiny portion of the programmer population.
I know this is a risky thing to say here, but I wonder if they should re-write the game in a more common/popular language, maybe something web-based like JavaScript. They would have a much bigger talent pool to pull from, gain access to a much bigger audience, AND probably have an easier time developing multiplayer functionality. Not to mention the plethora of open-source tools and libraries they can leverage.
If you're looking to rewrite the game, I'd recommend looking into Unity3D[1] instead of trying to make it in JavaScript. It'll be a lot less painful.
Out of the gate, Unity3D provides a much better indie game development environment than trying to do it JavaScript. Even though their name includes "3D", their software fully supports 2D games. Plus, there are no royalties/costs for the personal edition.
If one of the problems they're trying to fix is not being able to iterate as fast as they'd like then rewriting the entireity of a ten year old game isn't going to help that.
another of the problem is that they need more polish and fixing and there aren't major captivating features in the works, and it's hard to bring unpaid volunteers on board with that prospect in mind.
That's what I'm saying though: they aren't able to iterate quickly because it's a huge codebase written in a programming language that is quite complex and fairly outdated. Besides, I'd assume that intermediate and experienced C++ developers are probably older on average, and are unlikely to be interested in developing games.
I've made a litte patch for Wesnoth long time ago. While the codebase wasn't small it didn't really matter that much. There are a lot of things in the game (animation, networking, ui, game logic) that are separated enough that it's not that much of a big code mess like most commercials projects you see.
Also the C++ used isn't the monster from under the bed people tell tales of. It's mostly simple OOP/procedural code using boost library.
It's not that difficult to learn enough C++ to be useful.
I have to tell you, when I see GPL license on a game, I see the good intention you have.
Have you considered changing the license of Wesnoth to MIT so commercial game developers can use their time and effort on components can port them to their own projects too?
I can't justify investing hundreds of hours programming new components a project (even one I'm passionate about) that a later derivative can't be used by my company.
Regardless of the merits or lack thereof of changing the license, it'd probably present an even larger problem, since they don't seem to ask for copyright assignment and they have 100+ contributors, all of whom would have to consent to the new license or have their code thrown out and cleanly reimplemented.
Sorry for being redpilled toward the GPL crowd, but we just need to get some realities straight. Don't really care about Karma, but there's another side to this.
Have you ever played a game an felt an eery "I've felt that before", but couldn't put your finger on it?
Examples include:
- Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon -> Roller Coaster Tycoon.
- World of Warcraft + Starcraft's Download Programs (which both used a similar, skinned UX and bittorrent downloaders)
- Shining Force III -> Golden Sun (battle gfx, character sprites / dialogs)
Games have a unique type of taste and "feel" that come off them. As an artist, I'd like to see my touch be able to go along wherever I go.
If finding and retaining top tier talent matters, why not try to be more accomodating to developers?
1. Creativity is priceless. GPL isn't geared toward creatives and game engineers. See the billion dollar video game industry.
2. It takes a tremendous amount of investment to meet the basal technical requirements to program a game. Let alone study the frameworks in question, build tools, so on and so forth. You have to cater to engineers who, care about open source, but won't tolerate reinventing the wheel again to satisfy a viral license (please research the position why, I could elaborate).
