Version 0.8.0 is finally out, 16 days after the original deadline. Oh well. At least it didn’t take half a year like the last time I failed to meet a release schedule.

This version will most certainly not be exempt of flaws. It introduces the first three playable scenarios of Episode III (Final), plus two cutscenes; the playable scenarios haven’t been tested very thoroughly by my dedicated QA team or myself, and thus might be full of balancing issues, especially on difficulty levels other than Normal.

I guess I might as well take this opportunity to mention that Normal is, in fact, the only difficulty level I actually test.

There’s also a few bug fixes in this version, but nothing too important other than a voodoo fix for crashes affecting Mac OS X users at the end of Episode II (previously described in the forums). Somehow, I managed to forget to mention this item in the changelog this time; I feel this isn’t the only thing I forgot to do before releasing. Ah well, it probably isn’t my fault seeing as how I have to take care of so many things (cough art cough) for this campaign.

UPDATE: The immediate implication of this fix is that you will need to run Fate (the final cutscene scenario of Episode II, not the whole episode) again if you want Anya’s and Durvan’s stats to carry over to Episode III.

The changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.8.0:
--------------
* Scenarios:
  * Mal Hekuba now wears purple TC as he did in IftU.
  * E3S0 - Opening (Within):
    * New scenario.
  * E3S1 - Beyond her Smile (A Light in the Darkness):
    * New scenario.
  * E3S2 - Return to Raelthyn (Reckoning):
    * New scenario.
  * E3S3 - Amidst the Ruins of Glamdrol (A Path to Follow):
    * New scenario.

* Units:
  * Balancing:
    * Increased Chaos Hound's recruit cost from 18 to 20.
    * Increased Shaxthal Razorbird's recruit cost from 18 to 19.
    * Decreased Shaxthal Runner Drone's ranged attack strength from 8-3 to 7-3.
  * Fixed invisible Chaos Longbowman and Heavy Longbowman units due to missing
    graphics.
  * Fixed Elvish Trapper and Elvish Prowler disappearing during animations.
  * Fixed NPC bird code deleting the previous on-map unit when moving a
    bird to an occupied hex (i.e. worms in E2S9).
  * Removed Kri'tan.

I’ll start by admitting that there was a severe schedule slip again, induced by both personal and technical difficulties. After the Storm: Final scenario 3—which was supposed to be the last scenario introduced by the 0.8.0 update—was only completed a couple of nights ago, despite scenario 2 being completed well before the last week of April.

That said, E3S0 through E3S3 are complete in SVN trunk as of this writing. The problem is that I might still delay 0.8.0 for a while so I can deal with two pending artwork issues (for E3S0 and E3S2, respectively) and perhaps do some additional balancing.

In the meantime, Mac OS X users need to be aware of a certain crash issue affecting the last release currently available, 0.7.4.

I might delay 0.8.0 even more in order to include E3S4 in it. That scenario, however, requires more new artwork that the previous ones combined, and—since I’m not an artist—I can’t guarantee an output rate that would allow for a prompt release this month. I advise patience for the time being.

That is, assuming anyone still cares about this thing!

It’s only been a week since version 0.7.3 of After the Storm came out. As I said some time ago, I’m not announcing minor releases in my blog anymore since they can get on occasion a little too noisy for my taste. However, today’s release, version 0.7.4, is special in a few ways.

I expect this to be the last release of the 0.7.x series unless something major comes up later. The next release should be version 0.8.0, scheduled for May 1st assuming everything goes the way I planned in the meantime. 0.8.0 will contain the first three scenarios of After the Storm: Final (otherwise known as Episode III).

It’s perfectly evident at this point that it won’t be possible to achieve the version 1.0 goals very soon, which is why I decided to go ahead with the development of the third and final episode of the campaign immediately and turn it into a 1.0 target as well.

However, the importance of version 0.7.4 goes a little further than this minor change of plans.

In order to allow a faster release cycle and quick deployment of critical bug fixes, I have split the add-on in two packages. The first, original package contains all resources except music files, which are now provided by a separate add-on creatively titled After the Storm Music in the Wesnoth 1.10 add-ons server. Since neither the server nor the 1.10 client appear to have a problem with it, both add-ons are mutually dependent; this should minimize the chances of people installing the music package without the campaign.

This design will allow faster uploads at my end, and faster downloads at the players’ end (when not using Xdelta, anyway). I expect the 0.8.x release cycle to be fairly long and lively, assuming artwork and plot development go as expected. Given the nature of the music add-on, odds are it won’t see a lot of updates in the future; at the very least, it won’t be updated as often as the approx. 4.6 MiB campaign proper. People who don’t play with music or sounds enabled, or who simply cannot afford the separate 12.3 MiB download are not required to install the add-on, although the campaign menu entries will include a small warning accordingly.

Current users of 0.7.3 and previous versions will be asked to install the music add-on when upgrading or installing After the Storm for the first time.

Because of the aforementioned splitting and some other internal changes, I decided to fast-track this update instead of holding it until 0.8.0. The more testers, the better.

The changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.7.4:
--------------
* Graphics:
  * New or updated unit graphics: Shaxthal Warlord Nar-Hamoth

* Music:
  * All current music tracks have been moved to a separate add-on,
    imaginatively titled "AtS Music". This add-on is now an optional dependency
    for those who can't afford downloading it or don't play with music enabled.
    When absent, the AtS campaign menu entries for each episode will include a
    notice stating so.

* Scenarios:
  * E2S5 - The Eastern Front:
    * Added a time-over dialog sequence.
    * Added an additional dialog sequence focusing on a specific
      player character.
  * E2S6 - The Voyage Home:
    * Added a time-over dialog sequence.
  * E2S7 - Proximus:
    * Added a time-over dialog sequence.
  * E2S8 - And then there was Chaos:
    * Fixed elves not getting the Loyal trait.
  * E2S9 - New Hive:
    * Fixed Shaxthal Worms changing colors when moving.
    * Reduced starting gold.
  * E2S10 - The Betrayal:
    * Fixed multiple "invalid WML array index" warnings at the start.
    * Reduced starting gold.
  * E2S11 - A Final Confrontation:
    * Made the glyph guardians a little more competent.
  * Healing glyphs no longer render affected units unable to attack on the
    same turn.

* Units:
  * Balancing:
    * Increased arcane damage resistance for most Shaxthal units from -50% to
      -20%.
    * Decreased Demon Zephyr's movement cost on deep water terrains from 2 to 1.
    * Decreased Demon Zephyr's movement cost on unwalkable terrains from 3 to 1.
  * Reimplemented NPC bird behavior code in Lua.
  * Renamed "Shaxthal Warlord" unit type to "Shaxthal Warlord Narhamoth";
    this breaks old saved games of E1S9.1 (The Triad, part 1) during turns.

After some recent changes in Debian testing’s PHP 5 packages triggered an alarm—namely, breaking my laptop’s own Serendipity installation used for testing—I did some research, and found out that due to my severe laziness, when I originally configured the respective s9y installations I chose to use the SQLite 2 backend using some deprecated (now gone), built-in PHP functionality, instead of using the newer and better SQLite 3. Of course, given the situation when I did the configuration for shadowm.rewound.net it’s also possible I didn’t have a choice.

For this reason, I just finished casting some magic enchantments on this site to convert the blog database to SQLite 3. Evidence indicates that a mere dump suffices for this end, and the schema matches a fresh installation with SQLite 3 save for a few inconsequential bits.

None of this means there was an immediate problem, but I opted for not fixing tomorrow… later today, what I could fix this early morning.

Everything seems to be working fine, although I grabbed a backup of the previous configuration just in case. I’ve heard that SQLite 3 is faster and more space-efficient. The latter does seem to be the case, but since I’m limited to a crappy, high-latency mobile broadband connection to browse the web, I am unable to verify the former for the foreseeable future.

Should any problems arise for you (few) readers, you know what to do.

Gna! down...

Gna! server did not survive a reboot while upgrading its main OS. It should be fixed and replaced by new hardware if needed by Friday 10 feb.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Send support (jokes, beers, etc.) via #gna on Freenode.

I think this Gna.org system administrator puts it better than anyone else ever could.

From what I read on their IRC channel, an upgrade from Debian lenny (oldstable) to squeeze (stable) went wrong while there was nobody around with physical access to the host to fix the problem and make it boot again. Why one would perform an operating system upgrade in such circumstances is beyond me, but I can certainly say the Wesnoth bug and patch trackers, and the Subversion repository won’t be available until that’s fixed.

I for one am glad to use git-svn.

UPDATE (2012-02-11): According to the admins, the machine didn’t power on again after the upgrade, so it’s not just a software issue. Any needed repairs will have to wait until Tuesday, February 14th.

Maintaining Wesnoth add-ons of the size of Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm isn’t a small task by any means. Over the years, I have had to rely on user feedback to detect critical problems in a release, because testing becomes cumbersome and tedious as the scenario count increases.

My usual release procedure simply involves—at least since I acquired the habit of testing before releasing—running the game, starting each episode of the campaign with the medium difficulty level and making sure the WML preprocessor and parser don’t throw any warnings or errors. Before Wesnoth 1.9.x, the preprocessor didn’t abort when encountering a missing macro or file during a brace substitution, so I had to pay close attention to stderr to ensure nothing is wrong.

The WML preprocessor in Wesnoth 1.10 became more strict, aborting on the aforementioned situations. It was also exposed for command-line usage (for testing or debugging) through the -p or --preprocess switch, also explained in detail under PreprocessorRef in the wiki.

At first I thought that wasn’t very useful beyond diagnosing complicated preprocessor issues, but today I realized I can also do this:

This can be easily accomplished with a simple shell script (here embedded in the AtS Makefile). The only major shortcoming is that it doesn’t cover every possible problem because it’s merely running the WML preprocessor, which doesn’t consume and produce WML — all it sees is plain text mixed with some preprocessor directives. The task of reading actual WML (which is potentially found in the preprocessor’s output) is left to the WML parser proper, which creates internal objects in memory corresponding to the internal representation of WML handled by Wesnoth (config class objects).

UPDATE: After investigating the issue further with timotei (who exposed this functionality through --preprocess in the first place), it turns out the preprocessor output with --preprocess is indeed parsed — the real problem is that the preprocessor and parser use different logging facilities, and the former doesn’t even throw errors directly, so a preprocessor-only failure will make the game exit successfully (exit status of zero), while a parser error (potentially induced by a previous preprocessor error) causes a more appropriate non-zero exit status. This and other jarring inconsistencies make add-on test automation rather difficult, to say the least, so things have been simplified in the Makefile as a result.

It would be nice to be able to run the parser unit on the --preprocess output to detect syntax issues like missing end tags or unterminated string literals in the future, as part of a fully automated test suite. For now, it seems I’ll have to stick to my primitive and inelegant manual method before making new AtS releases, plus the unbelievably clumsy wmllint.

I think I rarely discuss the more subjective/emotional aspects of working with the crazy folks at the Battle for Wesnoth Project, so this might be a good opportunity to do so given we are currently on the threshold of the first release in the new stable series, 1.10.

Since a while after joining the project, I’ve been wanting to make deeper changes to the add-ons server software (campaignd, by legacy). Some of those desired changes would benefit me directly as a user-made add-ons maintainer myself (previously Invasion from the Unknown, now After the Storm); other changes simply seem very convenient to have, such as some kind of authentication support and the ability to ban people without dirty system admin hacks.

Yesterday, I unveiled aspects of my not-so-modest proposal to replace campaignd with new code. You can find the pastebin link within my post to the developers mailing list.

Even though I have some of the basic ideas and I’m still collecting previous information (such as Mordante’s proposal), I am terribly hesitant to proceed with the larger project because it will take time and dedication I cannot really promise at this point. But why?

Part of my worries stem from previous experience working on one-man projects. After the Storm is no small example — started in 2008, finished in early 2012 after many long breaks, and still ongoing. I don’t consider myself to be the most adequate person to work on large tasks alone, because of motivational issues. If I feel no-one is really using or approving of my work, I’ll quickly feel frustrated and seek new projects with different goals to distract myself for any amount of time. (In AtS’ case, the most significant one was Frogatto’s level design, which is partly why I ended up trading helping with Frogatto for finishing AtS.)

campaignd (or its potential replacement, umcd) is a particularly dangerous target for me because of the inherently minuscule audience to which I’ll have to cater: the Wesnoth.org system administrators. But not only is this audience composed of approximately four people (including myself), but it’s also a very exigent one at that.

The client-side audience is larger, but just as exigent, if not even more. You can’t really just throw half-baked changes at them and call it a day—and that wouldn’t be polite, in either case—and since these things have to be done within the project’s development cycle to ensure excellent compatibility and proper migration paths, I don’t really have a choice of schedule — it simply has to be completely done before the next stable series if it is to be done at all.

It could be said it all boils down to a personal sense of competence. I’m pretty sure I’m not the most competent people for this task, but the people who are don’t have the time to do it either, so unless someone comes forward, we’ll be stuck with the same stagnating piece of old crap forever. That isn’t to say there haven’t been any candidates before — I have previously mentioned Ilor was working on an add-ons server replacement, but RL ultimately claimed its bill and the branch in SVN is currently abandoned.

Taking over this project would also get me stuck forever with it, unable to move on to more interesting things, especially if the worst case scenario presents itself before the end of the development cycle. I most certainly don’t want to be permanently required to answer every single question or implement every single approved idea for the server software. I’m pretty sure I can still be more useful doing UI usability assurance work or making more Wesnoth campaigns not-for-mainline. I know from other development areas that this “only competent authority” concept appears quite often, to the point of actually frustrating the targeted people.

For this reason, I really doubt I’ll actually undertake the server replacement, and just concentrate on the very specific points presented in my mailing list post. For better or for worse, people will have to bear with less significant changes until someone more capable and more willing appears.

After the Storm’s development began in 2008, some time after the completion of Invasion from the Unknown. Since then, the campaign’s development was repeatedly and severely hindered by multiple planning issues, partially caused by (borderline pathological) perfectionism on my part; plus many other personal problems.

During most of 2011, development was unofficially halted, with a half-baked E1S9.2 lingering around in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN trunk for months. Version 0.4.0 was released near the end of September, and from that point onwards, I decided to not stop working on the campaign ever again, until it reached completion.

That day, sadly, arrived sooner than I expected. Version 0.7.0 is here, presenting a complete Episode II with 12 scenarios, adding E2S8 through E2S12 to the line-up found in version 0.6.1.

AtS was always planned to have only two episodes, so as previously said I consider it to be 100% complete in terms of scenario count right now. The third episode (After the Storm: Final) is still in the planning stage and it will most likely be developed in parallel with the balancing, clean-ups and touch-ups leading to version 1.0.0, making it a target for version 2.0.0 instead.

Right now, AtS is in urgent need of portrait art for the new characters introduced throughout E1 and E2, at least two new unit baseframes for use in E1S9.2 and E2S11, plus a third baseframe for E3. While portrait art isn’t a version 1.0.0 target per se, I would really welcome any help at any time, as long as the art style stays consistent with Invasion from the Unknown. It’s very likely the missing baseframes will be provided by myself in the meantime.

Later, I’ll publish a more complete to-do list with the tasks remaining to be done for version 1.0.0, and I’ll try to make a more exhaustive art to-do list as well.

The changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.7.0:
--------------
* Graphics:
  * New or updated unit graphics: Dusk Faerie, Shaxthal Worm, Shaxthal
    Rayblade, Shaxthal Assault Drone, Shaxthal Protector Drone, Shaxthal War
    Drone, Shaxthal Runner Drone.
  * New or updated terrain graphics: Dark Hive Floor (transitions).

* Scenarios:
  * E1S5 - Bay of Tirigaz:
    * Rewrote shipwreck generator code so the message strings can actually
      be translated.
  * E1S8 - Fear:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S1 - By the Moonlight:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S2 - The Heart Forest:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S4 - Shifting Allegiances:
    * Fixed a local variable leak.
  * E2S6 - The Voyage Home:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S7 - Proximus:
    * Added a hint regarding the enemy leader's chance-to-hit override to
      objectives.
    * Fixed animation glitches.
  * E2S8 - And then there was Chaos:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S9 - New Hive:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S10 - The Betrayal:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S11 - A Final Confrontation:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S12 - Fate:
    * New cutscene scenario.

* Units:
  * New unit: Shaxthal Worm (replaces the Shaxthal Wyrm).
  * Balancing:
    * Reduced Nightshade Fire's ranged arcane attack strength from 12-3 to 10-3.
    * Reduced Nightshade Fire's ranged cold attack strength from 13-2 to 11-2.
    * Reduced Night Nymph's ranged arcane attack strength from 9-3 to 8-3.
    * Increased Errant Soul's ranged attack strength from 2-1 to 2-2.
    * Reduced Chaos Headhunter's ranged attack strength from 6-3 to 5-3.
    * Reduced Chaos Marauder's axe attack strength from 10-2 to 8-2.
    * Reduced Chaos Marauder's ranged attack strength from 7-3 to 6-3.
    * Reduced Chaos Soulhunter's axe attack strength from 13-2 to 12-2.
    * Reduced Chaos Soulhunter's ranged attack strength from 10-3 to 9-3.
  * Revised Shaxthal unit descriptions.
  * Shaxthal Runner Drones can no longer advance to Assault Drones.
  * Added a custom teleport animation for Nightshade Fire.
  * Added unit type descriptions for Night Nymph and Nightshade Fire.
  * Removed conflicting markup from the Sylvan Warden unit type description.

Just like the previous release, AtS 0.7.0 requires Wesnoth 1.9.10 or later. The presence of the Rotten Bridge terrain in several scenarios (mentioned in the changelog) really enforces this requirement in this opportunity.

So... yeah, the campaign is complete now. Go forth and play.

commit 9f6bd04ec405d3987a513ae490fcfef7fad6a034
Author: shikadilord <shikadilord@87cc232e-6748-0410-ac04-a3fa75566414>
Date:   Mon Jan 16 03:22:28 2012 +0000

    AtS E2S12: completed epilogue scenario
    
    This makes After the Storm 100% complete in terms of scenario count.
    
    git-svn-id: https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/After_the_Storm@12917 87cc232e-6748-0410-ac04-a3fa75566414

I never thought this day would come.

Before anyone asks, yes, I have been working on AtS 0.7.0 all this time since the last release (0.6.1). It will include the last five scenarios of Episode II, that is, E2S8, E2S9, E2S10, E2S11 and E2S12.

Determining what the colors stand for is left as a proposed exercise for the reader.

Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 was released. Go test it, kids. You really must help us.

Besides that, I said in my previous post that I’d be releasing a separate announcement for the Crazy MP People. I wasn’t joking.

It might seem weird to perform such a purge of old forum accounts, and it might even confuse some MP users. A few times I’ve had to provide support to players who, despite having gone through the process of registering a new account—requiring them to visit the forums, no less—they had not fully realized that the forum and MP servers share the same user accounts database!

The truth is, the purge has become—in part—a marketing ploy I devised in order to have people try the last 1.9.x version before 1.10 becomes the current stable. If this angers you because you have been avoiding the new series like the plague, then think again. Give 1.10 an opportunity, because 1.8 is going the way of the dodo. 1.10 is much better, has better features and terrains, and even if you dislike some of the changes (i.e. the feral trait), I’m sure you will eventually find it worth of your time once you grow past the They Changed it, now it Sucks/Ruined FOREVER stage.

Regardless of that, the plan of purging unused accounts came to me much earlier while dealing with a major flaw in the wesnothd (the MP server software) forum user handler code. It seemed worth it to try to keep the database tidy by removing old, entirely unused cruft from it, and unconfirmed, 0-post accounts that have never been on the MP server since the introduction of forum accounts integration count as overly unused cruft.

A purge like this isn’t a new thing either. The previous forum administrator performed a larger purge of unused accounts right when the aforementioned integration was introduced, but it was never announced or discussed anywhere.

Purge.

Hi! I’m shadowmaster. You might remember me from such type of campaigns as Invasion from the Unknown, After the Storm and Flesh and Steel (tentative name). As some of you may have heard, Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 has been tagged in the mainline Subversion repository today, marking the start of the final stretch before the final (but by no means definitive) release of Wesnoth 1.10, the new stable series for this year.

If you are interested in the changelogs, they can be found at the following two locations:

• Players changelog (shorter, always incomplete)
• Full changelog (longer, harder to read, less incomplete)

In general, after a development (odd Y number in X.Y.Z) release is tagged in SVN, 24 hours must pass before it is announced, in case the primary packagers (Pandora, Windows, Mac OS X and Debian) detect critical bugs that could require immediate fixing, and to give them time to catch up since not all of them have a lot of time in their hands or enough resources — at one point, a packager was constantly running out of hard disk space thanks to Wesnoth’s sheer volume.

If you are tech-savvy enough to be able to determine which package is the one that corresponds to your platform—or you just prefer to compile from source—you can skip the wait for the announcement and head directly to the SF.net project files and locate your download. For example, these are the Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 files; at first there’s only the source code tarball, but more files will appear as the primary packagers finish their work. Of course, during the first few hours, not all SF.net mirrors will be able to provide the files. Again, Wesnoth is very large and takes a while to transfer over the net.

(Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 internally calls itself 1.9.14. This is intentional.)

With the first Release Candidate for 1.10 tagged and later announced, all commits in SVN trunk from now on will be only fixes for bugs reported in the bug tracker following our instructions, and translation updates, until 1.10.0 is ready. If too many major and complicated bugs come up, 1.10 RC 2 will be released before 1.10, but that seems unlikely right now since the release manager has a plan.

I have an announcement to make in the forums tomorrow that is strongly related to Wesnoth 1.10 and may upset the Crazy MP People a bit since I’ll be encouraging forcing them to test 1.10 RC 1 like the Crazy MP People they are. We shall see.