[Wesnoth-dev] Wesnoth 1.0

[David White]

Since it seems that most everyone who has an opinion on the issue wants 
me to lead Wesnoth to 1.0, and since I would really like to see it get 
there, I am going to accept continuing leadership of the project with 
the explicit aim of trying to reach 1.0 as soon as possible.

There are going to have to be some changes in the way we do things 
though, to achieve our goals. I understand that many contributors might 
not like all or agree with all the changes. If there are contributors 
who want to continue adding new features we can investigate creating a 
'feature development branch' that can be later merged into the main 
branch after 1.0.

Firstly: feature freeze. I think Wesnoth is feature-complete for 1.0, 
and we don't need any more features. If there is some feature that you 
really really wanted in, well, there has been the last 18 months for you 
to implement it or convince another developer to implement it, so 
apparently it's not that important; we will have to live without it 
until 1.0.

Changes to C++ code should be made only to fix bugs. At this stage 
obvious usability/interface issues and unnecessary slowness will be 
considered bugs, but this definition will narrow as we progress.

Now, I'm going to define a new term: 'Isolated Change'. An Isolated 
Change is any change to game data which doesn't add any new strings and 
which has no real chance of causing instability. Thus, adding unit 
animations or music or sound effects are Isolated Changes. Adding units, 
scenarios, or even maps are not isolated changes because they add new 
strings. Changing C++ code is of course definitely not an Isolated Change.

For the moment any isolated change is fine to work on.

Maps: Doc Paterson is working on a new set of interesting multiplayer 
maps for us.

Unit balancing: I'm going to accept Dragonking and Noy as developers who 
are going to concentrate on unit balancing. Based on discussions with 
them I think they will be able to do a very good job on it. Importantly, 
they are very conservative in their outlooks, which is crucial so close 
to 1.0.

If any of the unit balancing changes require changes to the game engine 
I will personally review the changes, how necessary they are, and will 
consider making them.

There are a few more areas which it would be really very nice if people 
could work heavily on:

- polishing up campaigns. In particular, I would love it if someone made 
some of the mainline campaigns much easier on 'Easy' level. This is 
probably the MOST crucial thing to the success of 1.0 in terms of 
popularity.

We're probably going to have to remove campaigns that aren't complete or 
are low quality. TDH in particular. It'd be great if someone could make 
a list of proposed campaigns for 1.0. A big barrier to some otherwise 
good user-campaigns would be the possibility of them being translated in 
time for 1.0.

- translations: we obviously want as many complete translations as possible.
- sounds. Currently our weakest area.....if anyone would like to make 
some new sounds, that'd be great. In a special request from Lisa, if 
nothing else could someone please make the sound of the Wolf Rider 
getting hit not sound like someone is torturing a puppy? :)
- music: some new music was posted on the forum recently; we could 
review it and consider where to use it.
- animations: a complete set of death animations would be great.
- storyline images: I'm not sure if we will get any more, but if we were 
to, that would also be great.
- documentation: the speed of the help system has been fixed....now we 
just need some good documentation to put in there

Bugs and release procedure: I think we should go through and close any 
bugs which we can't still reproduce in the bug tracking system. This 
will give us a fresh start for bug tracking and fixing. Then we should 
ask users to report as many bugs as they can find. I hope we can make a 
release every few weeks. As we go I'm going to announce cut-downs in the 
areas that we allow changes in.

Now, let's remember that the next stable version after 1.0 doesn't have 
to be 2.0. It can be 1.2. That is, after 1.0 the team can spend 3-6 
months making 'moderate' improvements, and then release 1.2. There 
doesn't have to be an earth-shaking re-write that happens after 1.0 to 
produce 2.0 which takes another 2 years.

Finally, please remember that this is still actually meant to be fun. :)

David