After completing the first episode of After the Storm, a short vacation was a logical option so I could return to work later with fresh ideas and more energy. By ‘vacation’ I don’t mean a traditional Wesbreak as most people do, though — quite the contrary, in fact.

For a long time I’ve been bothered by the haphazard-looking design of the Editor Settings dialog. This (already GUI2) dialog’s main focus is a bunch of lighting options intended for map or terrain authors to test what their creations look like under different Time of Day lighting presents, or even custom lighting, which is also useful for campaign designers trying to come up with an atmospheric feel within Wesnoth’s rendering engine limitations.

→

I don’t claim to be a UI design expert — I’m fairly certain I’m not — but I feel my vision of the dialog is better than the original author’s, and for this reason I recently committed to trunk these changes along with a couple of fixes for related long-standing bugs that were definitely not introduced by me. I think. I hope.

I am not keen on having Title Case on checkboxes, either, but for some reason the wiki says it’s what we should use, so I’m going to stick to that for 1.10 as it’s already used in most places anyway. I hope we can clear that up during the 1.11.x development cycle since even GNOME’s Human Interface Guidelines recommend sentence case for such elements.

(Note to self: rephrase the MDI option label again since “allow having” doesn’t sound proper at all.)

→

The item selection menu triggered by the Starting Position tool in the editor was a generic GUI1 dialog, until now. I decided to tackle this conversion task and add a feature in the process: existing starting locations are shown in the second column of the player list, in the form of map coordinates. This is not too helpful since we already had keyboard shortcuts to reach starting locations in the map editor (1-9 number keys), but in my opinion looks nice. The giant help tip in the dialog description had to go though, but don’t worry, for the tooltip on the editor palette already provided the exact same information in a more consistent fashion with regard to the other editing tools.

→

And finally, something more useful for the large majority of the userbase: removing multiple add-ons at once without having to return to the Uninstall Add-ons menu. I have not committed this to trunk yet, though, and I’m not even sure I’ll be able to merge it before the feature freeze in preparation for the final lap towards 1.10 comes into effect.

As I previously reported, reicore’s hard disk might be dying. This is not surprising in the least, since I have been hearing loud noises from the drive during high activity since a long while — playing vanilla Minecraft is apparently the most straining task for it for some reason. Considering reicore didn’t present any such issues at the beginning, it’s possible the person who gave her to me when bluecore croaked did something bad to her while I wasn’t looking. He’s unlikely to confirm such a thing, though.

A short drive self-test last night revealed that one of the bad blocks is currently part of the very root filesystem. Since I started to consistently hit a bad block while logging into KDE, I decided to run e2fsck -c on all partitions from a Grml live CD system (also Debian-based).

(Yes, I just realized I inadvertently left the swap partition out of the emergency check procedure. I just ran badblocks on it in read-only mode and it appears to be clean.)

Scanning a 466 GiB hard disk for bad sectors isn’t a quick task, but it took just as long as it did with the 1.18 GiB disk on my first computer back in 1998 — about two hours and some minutes — and here are the good news: there are only two damaged sectors, both of them within the root filesystem, and only one file was lost: /usr/lib/libQtDesigner.so.4.7.3, provided by the libqt4-designer package in Debian wheezy.

Why the dynamic linker felt it necessary to access this file while launching Akregator and KMail during the login process is beyond me, but it’s good that nothing was lost, as I promptly reinstalled the package. Either way, I had a fresh pre-upgrade backup in my external 2 TiB hard disk drive ready just in case.

I’ll certainly have to get used to making backups more often than my previous, sloppy biweekly n-weekly schedule. Thanks goodness for rsnapshot!

The last time I tried to switch from Debian stable to testing I was hit by a disease known as X.org Server 1.10, and more specifically, fd.o bug #31017, which made my KDE experience less than worthwhile, to say the last. The solution I devised was not particularly productive either.

However, X.org Server 1.11.1 hit Testing a while ago, and it’s what I am using right now — I successfully switched to “wheezy” again, today, and this time it would seem a massive rollback won’t be required, since the aforementioned bug is finally fixed.

I don’t think I can claim the upgrade was smooth, though.

The idea of continuing and developing the Invasion from the Unknown storyline further was in my mind from the beginning, and I apparently started to work on a sequel on May 2008, if the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Registry is anything to go by.

After the Storm’s development has been repeatedly impacted and put at risk by various “real life” issues.

Earlier this year, I decided to go back to work on the campaign after a long hiatus — so long I don’t remember how long anymore — but my attempt ultimately failed anyway. I promised a delivery, but the delivery did not happen.

Until I rediscovered the fun in video games with VVVVVV, Minecraft and Portal. Then, magic ensued.

I said I would try to finish the first episode of the campaign before December. I am glad to say that mission has just been accomplished. After the Storm 0.5.0 is out in the Wesnoth 1.9.x add-ons server, with the first episode (that’s 13 scenarios) complete!

For those who’d rather read a terse piece of text with no emotive speech in it, the changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.5.0:
--------------
* Scenarios:
  * 09 - The Triad (part 3):
    * Fixed problems with the final cutscene on Wesnoth 1.9.8 and earlier.
  * 11 - Return to Wesmere (part 2):
    * New scenario.
  * Completed episode I.
* Units:
  * Removed Skirmisher ability from Elynia.
  * Spawners have a small chance of deactivating themselves after spawning a
    unit.

I have tried to make sure AtS remains playable on Wesnoth 1.9.8, but my primary development target is still 1.9.9 and support for 1.9.5, 1.9.6 and 1.9.7 is mainly theoretical at the moment. If you encounter any “Invalid WML errors” or such, and you are using Wesnoth 1.9.7 or earlier, try with Wesnoth 1.9.8 or 1.9.9 instead if you can, and give me some feedback in the forum thread so I can address any such issues as soon as I may.

I take this opportunity to remind you that you can also find and follow me on Twitter as @ShikadiLord or join my personal channel ##shadowm in the freenode IRC network.

Have a lot of fun!

Wesnoth.org appears to have DNS issues at the moment, resulting in the site’s address being impossible to resolve to a numeric address (IP) for most people. We are doing everything that’s possible at the moment to restore it.

UPDATE: Apparently, it’s been solved already. However, the new records could still take some time for some people to have an effect due to DNS caching.

UPDATE 2: My own evidence indicates that it’s not solved yet.

UPDATE 3 (Oct. 3rd): It’s solved now. Some DNS servers could still claim wesnoth.org doesn’t exist, so just give them a few more hours.

If you trust me (since I’m the forum administrator and all), you can follow these simple instructions to fix your access to Wesnoth.org’s services in the meantime. If you don’t feel comfortable editing system files or don’t have admin access, you can try connecting directly to Wesnoth.org’s current IP, 65.18.193.12, but this will not work correctly with the wiki and forums which use the wiki. and forums. subdomains.

Do note that what I describe should be considered a temporary workaround. If Wesnoth.org’s IP changes in the future, you’ll need to remove any hosts file entries you added.

Linux, BSD derivatives

Note: make sure to backup your /etc/hosts file first in case you accidentally delete its previous contents, which could cause some applications to behave incorrectly.

• Edit the file /etc/hosts with a plain text editor such as gnome-editor, Kwrite/Kate, vi/vim, Emacs, and such.
• Add the following line to it and save:

  65.18.193.12 wesnoth.org www.wesnoth.org forums.wesnoth.org wiki.wesnoth.org add-ons.wesnoth.org server.wesnoth.org coc.wesnoth.org replays.wesnoth.org bugs.wesnoth.org
  

• Done!

An alternative is just issuing the following command as administrator. Notice that it uses >> instead of the usual > in order to append rather than replace the file!

# echo "65.18.193.12 wesnoth.org www.wesnoth.org forums.wesnoth.org wiki.wesnoth.org add-ons.wesnoth.org server.wesnoth.org coc.wesnoth.org replays.wesnoth.org bugs.wesnoth.org" >> /etc/hosts

Windows

• Login with an account with administrator access.
• Edit or create the file C:\WINDOWS\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts with a plain text editor such as Notepad (replace C:\WINDOWS with the correct installation path of your OS if necessary.
• Add the following line to it and save:

  65.18.193.12 wesnoth.org www.wesnoth.org forums.wesnoth.org wiki.wesnoth.org add-ons.wesnoth.org server.wesnoth.org coc.wesnoth.org replays.wesnoth.org bugs.wesnoth.org
  

• Done!

Other

Unfortunately, I have no idea about Mac OS X since I’ve never had an Apple computer. If anyone knows more than I do, feel free to post a comment explaining the steps.