Wesnoth-UMC-Dev

Happy 10,000th Commit!

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 23:40:00 +0000

Today July 4th 2011, around ten minutes before 22:00 (UTC), the ten thousandth commit to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN repository was made to the NX-RPG add-on by its maintainer, one of our most recent members: vultraz.

This is a story of five friends who must journey through the northlands and defeat the Dark Lord, before he releases the force of the Void and crushes the Empire of Wesnoth into dust.

A SurvivalXtreme-based MP campaign. Also contains some features from Bob’s RPG Era, along with some new ones. Features in the works: weather effects, new abilities, more classes, better magic system, and an greatly renovated shop. 16 scenarios planned, some of which will be multi-part.

On August 14th 2008, five months and one day after the Coordinated Wesnoth User Made Content Development Project was founded under the original name of UMC Sandbox by Ignacio Riquelme Morelle <shadowmaster/Shikadilord> and Eric S. Raymond <esr>, Alexander van Gessel <AI0867>, who would later become administrator of the project, committed r1000 to The Dark Hordes add-on.

Wesnoth-UMC-Dev has been around for three whole years and has and continues to serve its original purpose of being a staging area for add-ons selected by the Battle for Wesnoth Project to enter mainline, but the bulk of the contributors’ work is not for mainline candidates. The Project’s mission was extended to providing interested authors a platform to work with the advantages of versioned content for any kind of Wesnoth add-ons shortly after its creation. The second add-on to join Wesnoth-UMC-Dev is Thunderstone Era, and it’s the first add-on to begin its life under our platform, on March 28th 2008.

So far the following add-ons from our repository have entered mainline:

Legend of Wesmere (October 7th 2008)
Delfador’s Memoirs (April 10th 2009)
Dead Water, the mainline merfolk campaign (April 6th 2010)

Wings of Victory, a work-in-progress campaign by Fabian Müller <fabi/fendrin> and Eric S. Raymond <ESR> centered on the Drake faction, is intended to be mainlined once it’s complete and polished. It can currently be found in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev trunk for Wesnoth 1.9/1.10.

Other popular user-made add-ons hosted include Invasion from the Unknown, Era of Magic and its flagship campaign To Lands Unknown; and more recently, Archaic Era and the campaigns Bad Moon Rising and Trinity.

We hope to see more add-ons thrive with the features and support Wesnoth-UMC-Dev has to offer during the following years! See you all next time!

Era of Magic, and To Lands Unknown

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:01:00 +0000

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev staff members are proud to welcome inferno8 and the Era of Magic and To Lands Unknown development team (a.k.a. Infernal Studios) to our project, along with their groundbreaking add-ons to enrich your Wesnoth experience!

It’s always great to see more big add-ons joining us, after the Ageless Era entered the repository in July 2010. Era of Magic sports nearly 200 units and over 1,800 frames of animation; its first official campaign, To Lands Unknown, boasts scenarios with large, complex environments built around the game’s terrain graphics builder engine, featuring visual and auditory weather effects, epic animated cutscenes, a mysterious, new world, and more.

These cool add-ons have been around for a while, and TLU is one of the few complete campaigns ever added to our repository, with 16 scenarios in total.

Currently, EoMa is provided for the 1.8 stable branch and 1.9.x development versions, whereas its campaign proper is only available for 1.9.x. You can obtain them both from the official add-ons server, add-ons.wesnoth.org, or you can check them out with SVN to track the latest revisions:

svn co https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/Era_of_Magic
svn co https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/To_Lands_Unknown

The trunk tree for EoMa is also compatible with Wesnoth 1.8 at the moment.

We believe that the addition of EoMa and TLU to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project will enable better coordination between their developers and mainline as our staff ensures compatibility with these add-ons and the technologies used by them in the future.

In other news, the repository HEAD is currently over 9,000 (*grin*) as I recently announced in Twitter, minutes after noticing the progress made in SVN. We have just a bit less than 970 commits left to reach the next milestone with the 10,000th commit!

Despite the sad state of mainline Wesnoth’s development versions due to various bugs and loose knots plaguing trunk, we believe this will be a very productive year for the UMC developers community, eagerly awaiting version 1.10 to be released in the near future.

Bug and patch trackers

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 05:58:00 +0000

A hardly ever mentioned facility hosted by the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project at Sourceforge.net is the issue tracker, which is linked in the least appropriate manner possible in our site’s front page.

Following SF.net’s, err, “quaint” redesign of the web interface, the trackers are reachable by going into our project page, click on the Develop link, and then checking the Tracker item; or just following this neat direct link. Or you can paste this URL in your address bar:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=221284

You’ll notice we have three issue trackers available for your use:

Bugs. This area is intended for users to report bugs on our hosted user-made content. Assigned add-on maintainers are supposed to watch this area.
Feature requests. Guess what this is! Users are intended to be able to post wishlist items, suggest enhancements and such to this list.
Patches. People can propose patches here, potentially for any filed bugs or FRs.

Truth to be told, our issue trackers are mostly unused at the moment, because they haven’t been advertised enough by the few add-on maintainers who have opted to have categories created in them, or by our project staff.

This can be easily fixed, though. If you are a maintainer of one of the add-ons hosted at the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev repository, you can contact our staff and request a new category for your UMC, so users can select it when filing new items. But this also requires some involvement with us! As an add-on maintainer, you must advertise our tracker URL in your official contact forum thread or web site, and teach your users about how they should use it — in other words, what category they should select for your add-on, and what your own guidelines for submitted items are.

Of course, if you do this you’ll also be allowed by our admins to manage the tracker so you can assign/reassign items, close and reopen them, and much more! Just don’t forget that with great power comes great responsibility!

Textdomain Conventions

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:45:00 +0000

I have just published a new guide on the “do’s and do not’s” of translator-friendly campaign design:

Textdomain Conventions

Our hosted add-ons are occasionally checked for textdomain inconsistencies using one of our tools. Unfortunately, textdomain_check is undocumented and unmaintained, and until I can replace it with something cleaner we can’t provide help with using it — which would be a good idea for content authors otherwise.

Nonetheless, I hope this little guide helps to promote the WesCamp-i18n Project by teaching the audience what they must and must not do to get their content properly translated. As usual, comments or corrections are welcome in our forum discussion thread or our IRC channel.

Introducing wesnoth-optipng

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:39:00 +0000

Today I bring you a smallish website update including a minor fix in the Contact page that rendered AI0867 email-less, and new documentation.

In this opportunity I’ve decided to talk about one of the tools we admins run on add-ons from time to time, particularly when checking them into the repository — wesnoth-optipng, an image file recoding/optimization tool used by the mainline Wesnoth project to try to reduce image files’ size as much as possible for distribution.

It’s not rocket science, but Linux users may be interested in trying it out by themselves. Thus you can find a little explanation of what it does and how to use it in the Documentation section.

Wesnoth-UMC-Dev 2011, codename “Hakone”

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 22:52:00 +0000

As of lately shadowmaster has been announcing progress in his personal weblog but it’s finished at last, now: the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project has got a facelift today after the completion of the work on project “Hakone”.

It’s not supposed to be immediately obvious (probably), but this isn’t just a superficial “look and feel” change — there is new documentation for project members and users, updated application procedures, and of course, this news source you are reading right now, which we’ll try to keep updated with any relevant information or announcements for our add-on developers.

We’ve also made our IRC channel more accessible: there’s an embedded chat interface available here so you can easily talk to us from your web browser after following a few simple steps!

Welcome to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project, and happy holidays!