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News: 10 months...


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Development

10 months...

Already 10 months have past since our last release - Widelands Build 17.

Time for a new release?

Well, not yet. Anyways our current development version holds quite a lot of improvements and new features. So what has been changed since the release of Build 17? Here comes the list:

  • We added a mouse hover text for the costs of the buildings. The same feature was added for the resources that can be gained through dismantling a building.
  • We added a button to productionsites, which finally gives the ability to evict workers - want to kick a master miner out of one of your mines? Here you go! face-smile.png
  • We improved the start up time of Widelands games through "on demand" loading of graphics - in Build17 starting a game might take some minutes under some circumstances. The same circumstances will lead to just a few seconds of loading time in our current develpment version.
  • We improved Widelands' rich text rendering engine (the part of the program that takes care about text formating) a lot and improved all kind of text in different places of the game to look more appealing. E.g. the productivity of buildings is now coloured to ease the analysis of the economy's state.
  • We improved the !OpenGL rendering which leads to a huge speed up of Widelands.
  • We added a new win condition "Territorial time". It is similar to the "Territorial lord" win condition, but is limited to an in game time of 4 hours - if no one is able to gain half of the maps teritory in 4 hours, the player with the biggest terrain after 4 hours will win.
  • We improved the old stock charts in the statistics menu and added some new ones.
  • We improved many existing graphics and animations everywhere around the game.
  • We improved the graphics used in the road building mode to indicate the steepness of the terrain.
  • We improved the multiplayer scenario "Smugglers".
  • As decided in the community poll, we changed the Empire Inn to be backward compatible.
  • We added some new game tips to introduce some "nice to know" features to our players.
  • We added support for a "message of the day" to Widelands and the Widelands' dedicated server - if you logged into the lobby in the last months, you most likely have already read the motd.
  • We improved Widelands' translations and added some new ones.
  • We fixed quite a bunch of memory leaks - which basically means, that Widelands uses less RAM now.
  • And we fixed many more or less nasty bugs. face-smile.png

For a more detailed list of changes, take a look at our Changelog

Has your "favourite" bug already been fixed? What about the feature you wish the most to be implemented? Let us know and of course feel cordially welcome to join our team :).

7 comments Posted by Nasenbaer on 2013-02-24, 17:41

Comments on this Post:

QCS

Impressive list face-smile.png

sircrimer

Ships!

Nasenbaer

Hi sircrimer,

As ships were already present in Build16 and were usable for shiping wares and workers in Build17, I understand your post that way, that you would like to send expedition-ships :). Unfortunally there is no usable implementation for that until now. However the development is ongoing, so let's see what the future will bring face-smile.png

hjd

It's a lot of great things once you start adding them together. face-smile.png I'm really happy with the drastically reduced loading times. I had forgotten how recently this was added, so when I started a build 17 game recently it seemed to take forever to load compared to what I've grown used to.

I also think worker eviction and preview of build costs are two great features which we all have been waiting for a long time. Fantastic to finally see them included.

Of course, as software changes, bugs might creep in or things which used to work might break. This makes testing an important part of ensuring we can release a solid, high-quality build. Therefore I would encourage anyone to help us test out the latest development release and report any issues they come across. The next play day could be a nice opportunity. face-smile.png

DaggeTeo

Exciting news face-smile.png Looking forward to playing the enhanced version of widelands!
teppo

Could the old OpenGL code appear as old/compatibility mode? The development snapshot works fine on one of my computers, but performs horribly poorly on another (using fglrx) compared to latest release.
Ashkir

Nice! I check this out now/then. I get on Widelands binge and love updates.

My biggest feature request still is the resources/geologists. Those little tiny dots are hard to see and blend in so well. I'd like more noticeable ones :(.


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