News: A big step forward
A big step forward
Time for an update! 
Since last time I wrote, a lot of things changed in widelands source code or where added to it.
First of all a point that might be uninteresting for most players, but might be very interesting for all that would like to help out in Widelands' development:
The Widelands source code was completely reordered (moved into fitting subdirectories, files were renamed to more fitting names and some classes and structs were outsourced to new files.), thousands of style fixes were done and some new stylechecker tools added. All these changes followed the goal of a more readable source code with more visible connections between the different files and libraries.
I am quite sure, that this step will ease the work of many coders (current and future)!
Now something more interesting for the ones that just want to play:
A new developer joined us: dunkelbrauer is currently working on an "autogeneration of maps" feature that allows the players to generate completely new maps with just some clicks. The feature is not yet complete, but it already reached an very impressive status: At the moment you can already select the world type, the height and width of the map, the percent of water, normal land, mountains and wasteland that should the map have and whether the map should be in island or normal mode.
Features that are still missing are resource, bob, animal and player startposition placements, so at the moment those parts need to be manually added.
Another new feature currently under development is the new message system. At the moment the players already get a message, when a new warehouse was created and when the geologist finds a resource. The long term goal for this feature is, to support the player with all important informations like "you are under attack", "Player2 was defeated" or "a new ship was build".
The computer player got many improvements as well. The players are now able to select the type of computer player to play against (Aggressive (default), Normal, Defensive or None). Latter will just do nothing, while the others are now able to build up a basic infrastructure, to expand their borders, to hire new soldiers and workers, to train their soldiers qualities and to attack and even to defeat other players. The strength of such attacks depend on the type of the computer player - The aggressive one is the hardest attacker, the normal one the medium attacker and the defensive one does not attack at all.
And... not to forget all the bugfixes 
That's it for now.
A last sentence: Testing current SVNBuilds is definitely worth the work to compile yourself!
2 comments Posted by Nasenbaer on 2009-05-20, 12:28
Hi. I was a big Settlers 2 addict years ago, and only recently I found out about Widelands (shame on me, i use linux for a decade now). No need to say, I got hooked in the first few seconds. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is - BIG, BIG THANK YOU for GPL Widelands. For me, it's THE BEST game EVER on linux, plus it's free and open source. THANK YOU, once more