Lots of great good stuff This Week in Wesnoth. All the news is kind of what inspired me to start doing this. I'm a little afraid future weeks won't be able to live up actually…
With only a "read the rest of this story" link to serve as "further adieu", here we go!
The Weekend
Over the weekend I took my Breaking Ground add-on/tech-demo from Wesnoth 1.8, and completely rewrote it from scratch for Wesnoth 1.9.13. It's a lot better now. Go check it out.
Nothing else happened as far as I know. Sad.
Monday
Monday was sweet. Very few people know this, but I have been working on getting Wesnoth onto Desura for a few months now. And by "working" I mean talking. Lots of talking. Talking to Desura, talking to other Wesnoth developers, and talking to other FOSS games using Desura. Finally though, on Monday the 16th, I got the green light to stop talking and start doing!
And then I ran straight into a brick wall. Ow. Wesnoth has some dependencies that Desura's system doesn't have available for games yet. Yay! More talking. Specifically we need libfribidi and parts of libboost.
If I succeed in getting Wesnoth on there, the big plus is automatic patches. Supposedly Desura automagically generates patches of my uploads. This means that you, the users, will not have to redownload 300mb every time there's a Wesnoth update (assuming you use Desura). Sadly I still have to upload 300mb every time, but that's a small price to pay for your undying love and gratitude. The number one complaint I hear about the development branch is how frequently people have to redownload the entire game. So this should also get us more beta testers.
Also on Monday, I invented This Week in Wesnoth. Oh... you know that already don't you?
Now if you hang around IRC, or Shadowmaster's blog, you know that I have no love for Kyle Poole. So when a fan asked @Wesnoth if there would be an iOS port update this year (That's right. The time since the last update is measured in years.) I jumped at the opportunity to flip Kyle the bird. Because that's the horrible kind of guy I am. I let this poor fan know that he could try asking Kyle via the support email for the project that Mr. Poole abandoned Wesnoth in favor of: shadowera. And I encourage all of you to do likewise. He took your money, and then abandoned you to sell digital trading cards. As far as I can tell, he's completely ignoring Wesnoth, so try contacting him at support@shadowera.com
Ivanovic (Wesnoth's friendly neighborhood release manager) plans to announce Wesnoth 1.10 on the 28th (Though IIRWIIR still applies). In preperation for this I scheduled a series of @Wesnoth tweets — one per day — about everything fans have to look forward to in Wesnoth 1.10.
Valkier is back! Sadly nothing new for Wesnoth (yet).
Tuesday
Tuesday morning I experimented with building Wesnoth so that as many dependencies as possible are statically linked. This was my plan B for Linux/Desura. I managed to eliminate everything except libfribidi, libpango, and libpangocairo. My good friend and Linux Expert™ Shadowmaster tells me that the last two are pretty much required for any Linux user with a graphical desktop environment. I can probably ignore them. I'll keep you posted on how this goes.
Tuesday saw the release of GambCiv 1.0. That's exciting right? Gambit's Empire Builder has been missing from the add-on server for over a year now. Finally fans of GEB will have the update they've been waiting for. Hopefully they all still play Wesnoth.
Judging by the forums… not one rat's hat was given. Hopefully the giving of rodent head-coverings — and possibly rodent posteriors — will increase when Wesnoth 1.10 is released.
After that I got back to work on Desura when I noticed something odd. Thirty-six people had already downloaded the game. Some Desura employee had built Wesnoth 1.8.6 and uploaded it as an example. And then another one (supposedly) saw this and released it to the general public (without testing and seeing that the builds were broken). I quickly marked the game as "invite only"/beta, fired off an email, and the problem was solved at around midnight.
After a long discussion with someone from Desura, the plan was to ship libfribidi and parts of libboost with the Wesnoth download until Desura can add those to their library system.
Wednesday
On Wednesday I finally got some 1.9.14 builds uploaded to Desura. Late Wednesday night the Linux branches got approved.
I also learned that I actually won't have to reupload 300mb to Desura every release! The patching goes both ways.
Thursday
Unfortunately the next day started with bad news. Since the 1.9.14 Windows upload was not approved overnight, it couldn't be tested.
Then I started getting reports of dependency problems on Red Hat based distros, and older versions of Debian based distros. It was time to put my full effort into that plan B.
My script for static linking isn't working in my 32-bit chroot. I plan to download a 32-bit version of my current OS (Linux Mint 12 Lisa) and install that along-side Windows 7 and the 64-bit version.
Friday
The Windows upload of 1.9.14 on Desura finally got approved.
It kind of sucks that I have to wait for beta versions of the game to get approved by Desura before I can send them to beta testers. It's understandable that they want to make sure their system doesn't get filled with broken stuff. And during regular releases this would be fine. But right now I'm still just sending tests to a few people; trying to get something that works. I wish I could bypass the authorization; at least for this beta period.
This afternoon I was told that indeed the Windows 1.9.14 build works fine apart from some minor issues. It was made by loonycyborg who has been doing this a long time and knows what he's doing. All I had to do was install and upload the thing. The Linux builds will take longer because we don't have an expert for that. It's just me slowly learning what's required one error at a time. Shadowmaster and loonycyborg have been a big help.
While working on promotional material for the Desura launch, I created some comparison screenshots for Wesnoth 1.8 versus Wesnoth 1.10. I released those today over twitter.
I also started working on a persistent RPG add-on. I'll let you know more about that as it evolves.
P.S. Keeping track of everything that happens during the week and then writing this sucks. Next week I'll write in present tense at the end of each day.
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