These are my goals for wesnoth 2.0. With a few minor exceptions,
these are things I plan to code or spearhead myself.
Graphical Improvements:
— Particle system with z-buffering of internally clipped objects,
scriptability, and support for bitmap particles - (eventually, with z-
buffering, moving around vertically deformed terrain, such as
mountains/castles, villages).
— Conversion of terrain to new multi-tile system.
— Walking animations. I'm doing the preliminary work, and Darth Fool
has expressed interest in coding support.
— 3+ frame directional animations in all directions.
— Finish death animations.
— Conversion to new team color system (Thanks dFool !)
— More large-size art by yours truly, less pixel art by yours truly
(working on this now, actually). We're starved for this stuff.
In order to make the whole "walking animations" and "directional
animations" thing happen, I'm going to do something we haven't done
before - solicit art contributors. Until now, we've been running
purely on people just showing up of their own accord. A number of
other projects out there have actually had considerable success with
going out and asking people to come help them. This should actually
work rather well for us, since we have the attraction of being a
popular and successful project - we're not going to fold before the
game gets finished, like many others do. :P
Before I do that, though, I'm going to prototype all of these
animation dealies on one unit - the Elvish Fighter. When people
start coming to do the work, we need to have sort of a red carpet in
front of them - we need to have an example for them to follow, and
the code needs to work. If people work on the thing, they need the
"instant gratification" of being able to plug it into their existing
copy of wesnoth and run it. Release and packaging of occasional
(every month or two), unstable trunk builds is a MUST, because only a
very small minority of people can compile wesnoth, and these usually
aren't artists. It's ok if things are broken in these builds, we
just need *something* for artists to use the latest features with.
(I'm not suggesting these trunk builds replace the Stable build -
these would be offered at the bottom of the downloads page, as
something the average person doesn't see).
Gameplay Improvements:
— Tweak of abilities to allow multiple attack specials.
— Retrofitting of CTH bonus system to allow flexible application.
Magic and marksman were fine when we had ~5 factions. They're way
too granular for what is to come.
— Addition of several new factions to mainline, addition of several
units to certain existing factions (dwarves, saurians, naga).
— Possible addition of proper unit inventories, including item
dropping, transfer, and use-on-demand (healing potions are basically
useless right now).
— Addition of new damage types (pierce, impale, shadow - the impale
part is Dave's suggestion).
— Retrofitting of all basic abilities to allow them to be scaled per
unit (regeneration, for example, healing for another). Poison is not
included in this.
Most of these scaling issues revolve around the fact that I believe
our current system to be far too rigid for a game with many more
factions, even if said factions are not in the official release.
These are trivial to support in our code (e.g. for healing, just ask
the unit for the value, rather than a global). These will be no more
common than special abilities themselves, and thus should be easy for
people to remember (a fact that has been proven across the videogame
industry - after all, there are already quite a few people who have
memorized the complete unit stats of wesnoth, which are several
orders of magnitude more complex, to say nothing of, say, games like
Diablo). The point of this is that if we do *not* implement this,
then all these different factions really will be too similar - right
now, one of the primary things that makes our factions different is
wildly different abilities, but when you have, say, four factions of
elves, it's not going to be so easy to differentiate their stats.
The CTH system will allow us to give small (or large) bonuses to
units which we currently do not give a bonus because it would be too
powerful. This has been suggested before (an equivalent of Marksman
for melee units), but has not been implemented because of naming
problems, and the lack of certain units (ex: Master-at-Arms) who
would use it. This will allow us to subtly reflect the skills of
certain special units without having to heavily modify their stats in
a bad direction to keep them from being overpowered with the current
abilities. As I said before, this will *rarely* be used (no more
than magical and marksman are - like the former, only about one unit
from a faction _might_ get the ability). Compared to certain other
modest code additions, such as the business Darth Fool did to plague,
this should be fairly simple to implement.
That's a tall order, and I'm saving the particle system for last
(when I finish that, it should be my crowning achievement, and then
I'll do what Dave is doing now; fade into the background). Again,
this is what I'm personally spearheading, and this is a long-term set
of goals, for wesnoth 2.0.
