In good RERO tradition, After the Storm 0.4.2 is now available in the Wesnoth 1.9.x add-ons server addressing a few bugs reported today.
Unless something major arises again, 0.4.3 will feature the eleventh scenario in Episode I, whose map I have already finished.
The changelog for this version follows:
Version 0.4.2:
--------------
* Scenarios:
* Removed player income in scenario 6 and 7 cutscenes.
* 06 - Quenoth Isle/Elves of a Different Land:
* Fixed gold carryover for scenario 07.
* 07 - The Search for the Past:
* Remove poison/slowed/ambush status from units at the end to avoid recall
issues in later scenarios.
* 07 - Resolutions:
* Fixed gold carryover for scenario 08.
* 09 - The Triad (part 1):
* Fixed undead and faerie units in the recall list being killed in turn 2.
UPDATE: version 0.4.3 is on its way to the server due to a severe case of savegame corruption as a consequence of my half-assed fix for the poisoned recalls issues. Since I seem to be producing new releases faster than I can announce them, I’ll only be posting about major releases (such as the future 0.5.0) in here. For now, use the forum topic and the add-ons server to keep track of updates.
After the Storm version 0.4.1a is now available in the Wesnoth 1.9.x add-ons server. This version adds the tenth scenario to the first episode.
The current plan is to have 0.5.0 out with the first episode finished before December. I am not going to make any promises this time since I didn’t have much luck with the original schedule that required 0.4.0 to be released in April of this year.
Behold the changelog:
Version 0.4.1:
--------------
* Scenarios:
* Added custom flag styles for various AI sides.
* Minor wording changes, some of them contributed by tr0ll.
* 10 - Tears:
* New scenario.
* Units:
* Renamed Chaos Lore to Chaos Lorekeeper.
As for the “a” suffix in the version number, it’s because I originally tagged version 0.4.1 in SVN and then realized the scenario count in the campaign description still read 9/13 instead of 10/13.
After a record break of 6 months I got back to work on scenario 9 of After the Storm and completed it, in a fairly different fashion than I originally planed. Still, it’s another step towards completion of Episode I. Version 0.4.0 is available for download now in the 1.9.x add-ons server and SourceForge.net.
I think I have avoided to spread many spoilers about AtS’ plot since day zero; there were, of course, some early storyboards circulating around the forums and IRC at the beginning, but as I’ve been saying for quite a while, they are no longer canon and I am departing from the original plan on purpose.
I am fully aware that some people will not like my choices in 0.4.0, and they may even seem blasphemous, but the truth is I scattered enough foreshadowing everywhere to prepare them for the time being. What are these choices I speak of, anyway? Too bad, you’ll have to play the campaign to find out!
I figured that fixing the recordMyDesktop breakage in my Debian installation would be worth the extra effort after all, so I made a complete backup of my system and switched all installed packages I could to their debian-multimedia.org counterparts. That is not to say that this road is covered with rainbows and populated by puppies; dm.o’s version of the mplayer package conflicts with Debian’s mplayer-gui package because of one icon file provided by both, so I had to remove mplayer-gui to complete the “upgrade”.
Based on what I’ve heard about dm.o this is par for the course, though.
This repository does not provide custom versions of rMD or its Gtk+ GUI, so I had to stick to the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) version of gtk-recordmydesktop (link) to be able to do some configuration again.
The outcome? Success. recordMyDesktop’s videos finally work with both YouTube and ffmpeg, which I had to use anyway to reduce the output’s size from about 250 MiB to 50 MiB so it wouldn’t take hours or days to upload:
It turns out that ALSA doesn’t expose a hardware loopback capture control for me for some reason and that is exactly what I need to be able to capture audio from ALSA applications! I haven’t figured out whether it’s possible to intercept the crap sent to the sound card in software so I’ll just settle for silent captures for now. I could use the laptop’s builtin microphone if I wanted, but I tend to be in really noisy environments where anything can happen in the background while I’m recording.
It’s a real shame that ALSA can’t detect (or reicore’s onboard sound controller doesn’t expose) a loopback control. If anyone knows any method to do the aforementioned interception without using PulseAudio (or Jack, which Minecraft/LWJGL does not support), I’d really love to hear about it.
Recording screen captures/screencasts in Debian GNU/Linux (and as far as I know, Ubuntu as well) is not trivial.
It’s really frustrating that even though Linux enthusiasts generally place special emphasis on the ecosystem’s vast array of choices for various software application classes, a simple and ubiquitous field like screen recording applications appears to be mostly empty, only populated by a few rare specimens that attest to fundamental flaws in Linux architecture which seal its place as a non-mainstream operating system that’s not suitable for the average Joe.
Proprietary solutions to this seemingly trivial problem appear to be scarce. There’s Wink, but it doesn’t produce actual videos in any of the most popular video container formats, so it’s useless for capturing clips to upload to everyone’s favorite “lols” repository.
The free/open-source solutions can be divided in two major camps:
Horribly complicated command-line applications or clever tricks, such as convoluted ffmpeg options.
As a mobile broadband user with a very restrictive monthly transfer quota (6 GiB download + upload) I am not really keen on videos as a medium, but there are cases where they really are the only format that makes sense in situations like sharing gameplay footage. Multiple times I have tried to use recordMyDesktop to capture some bug-hunting action in games like SuperTuxKart or Frogatto to no avail; the application itself won’t produce output in any format but Ogg/Theora/Vorbis (presumably by design), and in Debian squeeze in particular, it is affected by two bugs:
The Advanced dialog won’t come up (bug #630664, solution is either to take the risk and use the Ubuntu 11.04 gtk-recordmydesktop package, or have someone figure out what patch needs to be applied to fix it in Debian (not sure if I can be bothered to work on that since I’m not really happy with rMD either way, see further below)).
Sound capture doesn’t work by default because of a case-sensitivity issue regarding the device name (thanks Gambit for noticing this), that can only be fixed by changing the audio device name in Advanced preferences (see above) or hand-editing the config file in ~/.gtk-recordmydesktop.
There’s another two or three bugs affecting me that are apparently not recordMyDesktop’s responsibility:
YouTube won’t recognize the Theora videos produced by rMD for some reason, apparently due to some library/backend bug that still affects Debian squeeze (but apparently not recent Ubuntu versions). The result is a static green picture in most cases.
Similarly to the above, ffmpeg is unable to recode rMD’s output correctly regardless of the target format (even Theora to Theora), producing unreadable garbled videos.
VLC and ffmpeg can see an unidentifiable “zeroth stream” with no valid associated codecs in rMD’s output.
Linux’s audio architecture is fucked up.
Regarding the last “bug”, all I know is that I’m unable to capture audio from ALSA applications’ output as opposed to a real physical capture device like my laptop’s built-in microphone or an external microphone. I would not be surprised if I’m missing something in my mixer configuration that I need to make it work — given the huge amount of chipset or manufacturer-dependent options that can be seen below:
All this is using Linux 2.6.39.3 and the HDA Intel (snd_hda_intel) driver on some onboard controller identified as “00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)” in lspci’s output.
The closest thing I get to actual internal audio capture is a lot of random, stuttering noises mixed with application sounds that definitely doesn’t come from the built-in mic.
I personally can’t be bothered to research much about using ffmpeg tricks to capture footage of my awesome Minecraft world since, after all, I only want to capture footage of my awesome Minecraft world rather than learn a lot of crap that no sane average desktop/laptop user should ever need to touch. Furthermore, I’m using a graphical desktop environment for a reason!
So the only viable solution for me, at this moment, turns out to be rMD. Without sound. And with a very messy workaround for that mysterious library bug that causes ffmpeg and YouTube to choke on my videos.
I really think that, as a graphical desktop environment user I deserve a working solution out of the box, not a crapload of hacks working around some developers’ lack of interest on usability matters. I’m currently hoping that things won’t look so utterly grim after I switch to Debian wheezy (current Testing), once certain major bugs are addressed upstream or downstream.
When I prepared the final draft of the October 2010 revision of the Wesnoth.org Forums Posting Guidelines, I deliberately skipped clarifying a specific point regarding posting rate conducts, more specifically, point 1f, in order to see what the community would make out of it.
That’s not to say I didn’t alter it in any way whatsoever since the previous revision, which was basically a left-over of Turuk’s administration:
Before:
Think and Read.
Read the entire thread before you post. And when you post, explain your reasons. Nonsense may be deleted without warning, especially in a working topic. Posting the same thing after it has been deleted will get you a warning. Doing it again will get you a ban.
No Spamming.
Post a single idea/question/comment in only one forum. Do not double post, edit your previous post if you have something new to add but no one has posted yet.
After:
No spamming — think and read
Post a single idea/question/comment in only one forum. Do not double post, and instead edit your previous post if you have something new to add and no one has posted yet. Technical support requests may be bumped after a while in case they have been forgotten and sink past the first forum view page. Read the entire thread before replying to it. Nonsense may be deleted without warning, especially in a working topic.
I introduced the support requests bit with the intention of giving users in the support forums (Technical Support, Release Announcements, Compiling & Installation; WML Workshop, Coder’s Corner, Lua Labs, Scenario & Campaign Development) special protection as bumping topics in there is usually a legitimate and reasonable course of action. But in reality, there are other cases where bumping by means of double-posting should be allowed. Those are not described or explained in the Guidelines because I felt that elaborating on a specific point would derail the whole post.
One of those cases applies to campaign development topics, where the OP may post the announcement for a new version of the campaign and only a few hours later find himself or herself in need of another announcement because of a quick update fixing some important bug.
Another case, more technical than practical, is the maximum number of attachments per post, which exists to discourage and limit senseless spamming of unwanted content by automated and non-automated agents, and encourage use of compressed containers like tarballs, zip files and rar archives to keep our overall disk usage relatively low. Users exceeding the attachment limit will need to continue posting their content in consecutive posts.
Generally speaking, users reporting double/multiple posting according to section 5 of the Guidelines have enough common sense to understand that sometimes exceptions need to be granted and that this is one of the reasons we don’t call them the “Forum Rules”. Rent-a-modders occasionally lack this common sense, however, and they make their intentions evident through this mechanism. I imagine one can never be too anvilicious while reminding them what this entails.
Apparently, Battle for Wesnoth is already out in the Android Market! There’s no official announcement about it right now, but I got these tasty links (posted in Twitter as @WesnothOrg as well) a few minutes ago from the maintainer, cjhopman in the forums and IRC!
