#wesnoth

[shield-of-wesnoth]

Wishing that the changelogs of Wesnoth’s development between versions were really complete... a lot of development/unstable versions’ specific update features aren’t on the official changelogs that are currently online.  It doesn’t sound like a big problem, but it really adds up in terms of digital media history preservation!  It really gets to me since I was there when the changelogs were truly comprehensive-- I remember reading them as a kid-- it just so happened that nobody bothered to archive those pages before the website hosting them at that time went down.  Makes me sad!

[exhaustthebones]

Trying digital art now that I have a tablet. This is a Battle for Wesnoth unit.

[who-do-i-know-this-man-s4]

⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️

[videogamepolls]

Requested by @waddle-dee-unmasked

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

This might be a bit of a strange ask, but has anyone here heard of weznoth? It was a turn-based strategy game similar to fire emblem but without the story. (At least, I think it didn't have a story. I was a little kid when my childhood best friend and I played it in the early 2000's, so maybe we just ignored any potential story mode.) Anyway it's so old that my favorite unit (an undead wolf rider) isn't even on the wiki!

When I saw that there were wolf riders in Engage I could have cried. They're my new favorite class, hands down. Now if only knife proficiency wasn't so hard to get…

First time I've heard of it but apparently its open source, free to download and available on most computers

seems cool, would love to check it out

[salixalba8]

Фанарт по "The Battle for Wesnoth" на junicorn этого года - единорог из Эры Мифов, в которой единороги служат целителями для фракции элементалей.

[Fanart on "The Battle for Wesnoth" for this year junicorn - unicorn from the Era of Myths addon, where unicorns are healers for the Elementals faction.]

[da-riya]

I'm being mega picky about what game I wanna play

[nikuknight]

what do you think about Battle for Wesnoth?

Oh dang, I dunno! I haven't played it in at least 15 years? I was a little kid when I played it last. I have fond memories of it, but I didn't really know how to play very well. I liked the undead wolf riders, which if I remember right were only obtainable by playing the undead army and taking control of an enemy non-undead wolf rider?

Honestly I brought it up at Real-Fire-Emblem-Takes because I wanted to make sure it wasn't a fever dream ^^;

[best-female-villain-tournament]

A villain is someone who is evil and has ill intent

most villains are antagonists but not all antagonists are villains

[doyoulikethis-videogame-song]

Song: Still Another Wanderer Artist: Timothy Pinkham From: Battle for Wesnoth

Listen on Youtube:

[shield-of-wesnoth]

Really wish I could get old-- as in really old-- version of Wesnoth to run on my PC.

I have a Windows 10 computer that’s almost a decade old now, and though it runs Wesnoth 0.1 (the very first one), in terms of other ancient Wesnoth versions, I can’t get anything older than 0.9.7 to run.  I used to have a Windows 7 laptop, and it could run Wesnoth 0.8.4!  I don’t know what happened between Windows updates, but when I try to open 0.8.4 on my PC, it just doesn’t work at all. The only thread I have to go on is that maybe Windows 10 comes with different .dlls, and stopped including certain older ones that older Wesnoth needs..?  Because I got a popup about a missing one when I tried opening 0.8.4′s map editor, and when I installed that .dll there-- though it still didn’t work-- it suddenly was able to make the screen black for a second before giving up, which was more than before.  But having gotten no more error messages since then, and having no luck with running it in compatibility mode, I’ve been stuck ever since.

A lot of my 1.2 and earlier Wesnoths experience bugs that they don’t on older hardware, too... can’t think of a single one that doesn’t crash if I try and change the screen resolution.  Many also experience awful graphical errors if I switch between windowed and fullscreen mode that don’t go away until I restart the program.  There’s also some annoying flickering effects with the monochrome cursor set (my favorite one...) that are only lessened-- not fully gone-- if I use the color cursor.  And in one of the most mysterious and sad glitches of all, in pre-1.2, Delfador’s sprites are prone to inexplicably not appearing in the game where he’s present!  All of this simply did not happen on even slightly older hardware. Some older Wesnoths I’ve been unable to try at all, since they’re based in Linux, and you have to “build” and “compile” them rather than simply double-clicking an executable... and sadly, I am not that much of a nerd yet to do such things easily.  But even then, Wesnoth 0.3 has an executable, but it merely brings up a command prompt window, turns the screen black, then closes before I can read anything clearly... and running compatibility mode has only made that one worse.

This isn’t even all limited to just ancient Wesnoth, either!  Right now, and even on my Windows 7, I’ve experienced a terrible issue with versions of Wesnoth 1.8 where they simply do not register manually installed add-ons.  This is kind of a huge deal, since the manual way is now the only way to install its fanmade content, since its server no longer connects in the program!!  This is perhaps due to the fact that holding add-ons outside the “campaigns” folder was a new feature at the time, and it had some unforeseen issues (even when it still could connect, for some reason, I never found out where they’re stored?).  This is an absolute travesty, since 1.8 was one of the highest points for UMC creativity and output, and now all of that can’t really be played on its intended software. In 1.12, sometimes the names and descriptions of most of my installed add-ons, and all of the text inside them, simply will not display.  I spent hours trying to pin this down to one add-on by removing and replacing them, to no avail.  Because it impacts multiple campaigns at once, and sometimes seemed to impact different ones, I couldn’t figure it out.  I have several dozen add-ons for 1.12, and I have no idea if it’s one add-on in particular causing the issue, or the fact that I have a ton of them by itself.  1.12 isn’t even that old!  It’s a relatively new one, already showing wear and tear for mysterious unknown reasons!!  The only comfort is that it doesn’t always happen, but I don’t know how much longer that may be the case.

Responses on the forum to modestly bringing up these issues seem to usually be “just play the latest version instead”, but I don’t always want to do that!  I shouldn’t have to do that!  The older versions still have their charms, and their unique style, lots of minor differences that build up, and sometimes I don’t want to have to wait for some kind soul with plenty of time to port it for me.  I don’t know how to use wmllint to port them myself (why can’t anyone explain it concisely?!), and even if I did, a lot of old UMC is buggy even on its intended version, and wmllint apparently struggles with things like custom terrains.

I guess I just wish there was more maintenance and advice out there for running older versions of this game in the modern era... advice that’s accessible and so on... I’m unsure if anyone else still cares about older versions of Wesnoth, but I certainly do.  Wesnoth's older versions were a big part of my childhood!  And even the versions that were so old that I never tried them as a child still fascinate and charm me.  I just wish I was skilled enough to support them myself.

[hukidamari-sketch]

Li’sar from the battle for wesnoth

[mothtowers]

me after playing OTT, super tux, freeciv, nethack, battle for wesnoth, openarena, minetest and flightgear

[seventhconsumedsigil]

This is absolutely beautiful, but I can't help the immediate association with Battle for Wesnoth and think "Wow, must be a nice change of pace for the poor souls to be leaving the forest peacefully instead of at breakneck speed with the intent to never return"

For context to those who didn't spend weeks of their youth playing a niche open source game, cavalry has an awful time in forests even before combat starts. And then the trees start speaking elvish. Or moving.

“Knight’s Odyssey”

Sometimes you just feel like painting some glorious knights in a colourful, magical setting. That’s how this came to be at least :)

[miloscat]

[Review] The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance: Tactics (PC)

A decent tactics RPG if a bit buggy.

The spinoff prequel show to Jim Henson's 1982 fantasy adventure The Dark Crystal was, like the film itself, a brilliant showcase of puppeteering, production design, and worldbuilding. Like many shows on their service, Netflix did not renew it for another series to follow up on its lingering plot threads, but they did at least commission a tie-in game from American studio BonusXP, who had previously made two Stranger Things games for them before shutting down mid-last year. The only other Dark Crystal game was a Sierra text adventure, which got a highly abbreviated browser-based remaster around the time of the show's broadcast.

As an adaptation of the show, the large cast and themes of rebellion and questing lend themselves well to a tactical RPG, although the reality of this game feels a bit restricted, with compact maps and characters usually limited to four or five per stage. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as I appreciated the manageable scope; I don't have a huge amount of experience with this genre but I know how bloated Wesnoth scenarios can get. The setup for this game is square grids with no zone of control, turn order dictated by a dynamic action timeline, and experience and gear gained between levels. On top of equipment customisation, there's a job system where you can shuffle anyone into any role, although they need to get experience in that job to unlock skills and advance to new sub-jobs.

The character roster again could be considered limited, with a final total of 14 selectable characters (although others join as temporary allies in various scenarios). About half are from the show with the others being OCs who fit in well enough. Most of them are Gelfling, who have the most developed job system with three broad categories of soldiers, scouts, and mages who get further specialised as you progress. Apart from them there are two Podlings and two Fizzgigs, who all have a smaller job pool but can usefully fill niches on your team.

The key art depicts the urRu urVa, but they only appear in one mission as an NPC, and the game's store blurb mentions "familiar faces from the classic film" which is just an outright lie, unless they mean broadly the races and creatures of Thra seen in the film... but I won't concede that. Lacking these kinds of surprise bonus characters, a broader array of the show's cast, or other types of creatures for the playable cast like Arathim or Lore, was a disappointment but I have to accept the realities of a likely budget development and to be fair I had loads of possible characters lingering on the bench anyway given the scale of the battles.

My core team was Deet, for me a versatile offense/healing caster, Brea, a strong healer with other utility spells, Hup, who ended up a beast-summoner/debuffer, and Kylan, a dependable rogue-type. In the mid-late game I tried to switch them all into new basic roles to level into the high-end hybrid jobs, but starting from scratch at that point made them all too weak to get by so I just reverted to their existing specialities and went from there. I played on Normal and found the difficulty to be highly variable, some levels being a walk in the park where others kicked my arse. A few missions had specific objectives or required keeping plot characters alive such that they required quite a few restarts, and that's without the crashes...

I do have to mention the state of the game, which will likely never get an update thanks to the shuttering of the studio. At first I tried to run the Mac version, but it crashed on launch without fail. The PC version at least runs, but had a tendency to crash repeatedly during certain missions. This would lose my progress in that level, since there is no ability to save mid-level (which would also have helped in the more demanding scenarios). A couple of times the game also went into a state of intermittent hanging or stuttering, and for a few of the character jobs it would reliably fail to remember my skill choices, so that I would only be able to fill two out of three available ability slots. Pretty frustrating!

The plot of the game broadly follows the show, although it skips quickly through the first half and the pace slows down for the later episode events. But this is fine, as the two mediums are very different and this works for the pace of the game. I liked when things opened up late in the game and there were a lot of sidequests and scenarios that expanded on events unseen in the show, like doing requests for each of the various Gelfling clans to win their support. The enemies consist of other Gelflings who use the same job system you do, Arathim, and Darkening-afflicted creatures, with a few Podlings and Skeksis boss fights thrown in for good measure... I was kind of expecting Garthim to show up, but I guess they really only appear in a late cliffhanger in the show.

In some senses the game works well as a tie-in to the show, but there are limits to how one is able to capture the charms of the puppetry and production design in a budget 3D video game. Apparently the range of movement of the in-game models is accurate to the puppets themselves, but rendering the characters the way they have, while necessary, does lose something, not to mention the world being built of square tiles for gameplay purposes gives the environments something of an artificial feel. You also sadly lose the show's all-star voice cast, as the game is entirely unvoiced. There are nice hand-drawn cutscenes from time to time which I would compare favourably to the better Dark Crystal comics, but they're few and far between.

Given the technical issues I had in my playthrough I find this game hard to recommend, but I did enjoy the customisation, the strategy of the battles, and the little expansions on the show's story. This definitely works best as a supplement to the show though, as it doesn't do much to flesh out the characters, assuming that the player is familiar with them. It's something to treasure in that it's a rare game based on this marvellous but niche Henson property... just don't expect too much.

[salixalba8]

А на skullyjuly в этом году у нас дракон-скелет, которого можно заполучить в соратники в аддоне "Flight to Freedom". (Ну и главгерой сего аддона на переднем плане - узнаваемости для).

[Loyal skeletal dragon which you may acquire in Wesnoth addon "Flight to Freedom" (and main hero of that addon in the foreground), for this year skullyjuly.]