Richard Kettering wrote:
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.
All nice points that will for sure improve the game.
— Conversion to new team color system (Thanks dFool !)
That one already is problematic. When playing in mp, i do not see a big
difference between the units of the elvish fighter line. Basically the
lvl1 and lvl2 units do look completely the same. Before they were easy
to distinguish due to the different color of their headband.
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).
Hmm, that will be hard. We would still have the problem that someone
actually needs to compile the things. I think atm it is fine for artists
to simply use the "new" image and data dir in their old verison. This
will not break too much. Once the system of terrain letters is changed,
this will not work. But since there will be a development release not
too far in the future (about one month) it should not be such a big
problem. I simply do think that it is almost impossible to have these
packages *compiled* for all the systems.
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.
I am not really in favor of these changes. There will be some problems
and Wesnoth will not be KISS anymore. We really should be carefull not
to make the game be too complicated. The CTH system could lead into that
direction. New factions and new units: sure, as long as they do fit.
Inventories: NO! This is not a RPG but a strategy game. Some RPG
elements, fine, but not too much. I don't think healing potions and so
on would be this good for Wesnoth. The new damagetypes Dave proposed
would mean something different: not adding new ones, but removing old
ones and replacing these with (by far less) others. The stuff scaled per
unit can be nice and on some things already is worked on. That is
changing the traits depending on the unit stats.
I think some changes are nice to have, but the game should still be
Wesnoth and not WesnothRPG or "World of Wesnoth".
Greets,
Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic
