I should have clarified a few things.
This was just a suggestion, one which I obviously have no authority to
implement. I have never done things without permission, I wouldn't
suddenly start doing so.
I meant that this "policy," such as things go for wesnoth, would only
apply for well-drawn units which, in the opinion of at least one
campaign author, might have use in multiple campaigns.
I tend to agree with the overall philosophy, however, why do we have
to actually ship the images and unit stats with the game? We've
already had a system where we had a 'library' of graphics in the Wiki,
and any campaign designer could cherry pick it for their use as they
wanted. Perhaps the system needs to be revised to combat the Wiki
vandalism problem, but the point remains that if the units aren't
actually used, I'm not sure they have to be shipped with the game.
Shipping them with the game also restricts the campaign designer
somewhat by saying "this is the stats the unit should have," while
just providing images externally gives the campaign designer more
implied freedom to use the images as they want, and assign them stats
and so forth.
Given the rate at which we get decent graphics for new units, these
days, we certainly wouldn't have a heap.
We would be lucky to get 3 fully animated units per month. I hope that
changes.
Another "psychological effect" of having things in mainline is that it
makes them much more visible than if they were in a user campaign.
This prompts artists (just like me), to go and improve them. If a unit
is buried in a campaign which I have no time to play, I am not likely
to do any work to improve it. I can only assume that other artists
would act the same way - if they are reminded of the ugliness of a
unit every time they go to the unit page, they will be motivated to fix
it every time they go there. If they never see it, they will never
improve it.
Example: A lot of people HATED the appearance of the woses. Had they
been in a user campaign, I doubt anyone would have touched them.
However, because they were in mainline, several people, including
finally, myself, took it upon themselves to improve the unit's
appearance.
Sure, if a unit has a use in the official version of the game, such as
in the 'Classic' era, then we can include it, but I don't see a reason
to otherwise. Especially since if the unit isn't actually used, it
won't be playtested, and so we'd be including a whole heap of units
with untested and unbalanced stats. Would we really want to do this?
A generic dwarven hero would really be a nice thing to have - right now
we just use the third level of the dwarven fighter as our "generic
dwarf leader".
A vague analog to the elven lord would, in my opinion, be a nice thing
to have. Several other people have stated so on the forums in response
to different posts about the runemaster for the last year. The unit I
am proposing is intended to replace a current MAINLINE unit which
somewhat fills that role, but has terrible graphics. By giving him a
full set of levels, he can be used more flexibly, and if someone wanted
to, they could use him as a campaign hero. He is used as a campaign
opponent ... somewhere ... right now, but is rarely used because he
looks so bad.
This guy:
http://wesnoth.slack.it/units.cgi?page=view&unit=Dwarvish%20Runemaster
