In my mail with the topic "Discussions about changes and "one-men-shows"" I did adress somehow the same things. We really do have these problems and some of these do really need to be addressed or we won't be able to make any progress.
>If we are to be able to release a new stable version some time in the >future I think we need to decide where we are heading, what are the >overall goals. Jepp, I think so, too. >Are KISS still the mantra? or do we want to add more complicated >features. What will this do to game stability/code complexity... Do we >need more rigorous methods or are commit and break ok.. Game mechanics wise we should definatly stay with KISS. The simple machanics make Wesnoth what it is. It is really easy to learn the basics, but hard to master the advaned things. Even good players will find ways to improve. That is what makes Wesnoth be a good game. I don't really know about the code, the only thing I know is that this is rather complex. Of course the game should be stable as a result, but eventually we got to break some things to improve it further. >Many are also looking into some major rewrites of part of the code, this >will need to be planned quite well imo, or it might turn into a mess. Some rewrites mybe needed and make lots of sense. But I do not know the code, so I can not judge about this. >I would like to hear what other peoples goals are. I do not really have any big goals that I got to implement (or that I am able to implement). But these are the things that I would like to see ingame: -GUI improvements making it easier to handle the game, the "improved" default theme is a step into the right direction. -MP campaigns: This really is a nice thing, isn't it? ATM MP-scenarios do lack several features that are there for SP. Stuff like random events and the next_scenraio tag. These have to be implemented to have this support. Eventually parts got to be rewritten to have every campaign behave like a MP-campaign though SP-campaigns are played with only one Player. -Reordering of mainline campaigns: I would like to see the mainline campaigns behave like usercampaigns. So that we would simply have the folder data/campaigns/ and all the campaignspecific stuff in there. The art would (partly) stay where it is now and the translations would stay there, too. The rest would look like in usercampaigns. Eventually I will try to port some things myself or at least help the people maintaining the campaigns to port this stuff. But some code changes will probably be needed, and I am not the one to do these. -Add new campaigns to mainline and improve the difficulty levels of the current ones: I think some new campaigns for mainline in trunk would be nice. Some usercampaigns like South Guard and others would be really nice to have directly with the game. But we should do this AFTER making the mainline campaigns behave like usercampaigns. This way we only got to copy the files and change some paths. The difficuly levels of the mainline campaigns should be better "balanced". An increasing difficulty and not "jumping around" is needed. And if we name a difficuly level easy, it should be easy and winnable for total beginners. For us as devs and campaign designers they should be trival so that we would win them easyly when being totally drunken or something like this. I think these are the major things I see for the next time. Everyone is welcome to join the IRC-channel #wesnoth-dev to really discuss this stuff in there. Of course I want to hear your opinions, too. Greets, Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic
