On Nov 28, 2005, at 4:51 AM, Nils Kneuper wrote:
— 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.
I, obviously, did not convert that unit. :) In fact, I haven't done
any yet. I'm quite likely to change his costuming. As for the
drake, I'm quite likely to give him a color change to his armor. The
team color system will require a complete rethinking of how we do
unit coloration, but I'm all for it - it's one of the best additions
we've had to the game.
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.
I think you misread what I'm saying - I'm saying "make a development
release soon after the creation of new graphical features, and
release a windows and mac version. I'm just worried that some people
will want to turn trunk into some pseudo-stable release, which it
should *not* be relied on to be.
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".
As always, this requires a careful hand on our part, which I'll be
the first to apply.
The inventory system would only be to make sane what we already
have. It seems absurd that we cannot, for example, trade the Sceptre
of fire between Konrad and Li'sar, or trade the Storm trident between
different mermen. Besides the point, some people might want to make
their own, much more RPG-like user-campaigns. Why restrict them?
