At long last, 2011 is coming to an end. In a few hours, we’ll have to dump our old calendars to replace them with new ones bearing the number 2012 in a big font size. Then the people who believe 2012 will be the end of life on Earth will begin to panic as we approach December again. Those nutcases.

This was a relatively calm and monotone year in what pertains to my personal life, so I’m not going to delve into details in this opportunity. However, I made some resolutions last New Year and it might be worth it to review them and check why I didn’t accomplish all of my goals.

• Learning Japanese: I got severely sidetracked after a while. I may still try again in the future, just because.
• Losing weight: I may have gained some a lot of weight during the course of the year. Oops. I did, however, stop drinking coffee, because my stomach started to reject (read: try to vomit) it after a while for some reason.
• Wesnoth RCX: Still halted. Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be enough interest amongst the Wesnoth community nowadays for this kind of tool, and for my own purposes Wesnoth-TC serves well as it is.
• Relearning C♯: Also sidetracked. It doesn’t seem worth it, in hindsight.
• Learning Lua: Accomplished according to certain definitions. I haven’t really learned more about the language than necessary, but I have indeed committed some Lua code to mainline Wesnoth, and several tasks of varying difficulty are accomplished with custom Lua-backed WML tags in After the Storm and Invasion from the Unknown as of this writing.
• Rei 2 IRC Bot: Stalled, due to lack of interest. There are also seem to be a few Irssi-specific problems with Perl 5.14, which is in the operating system I’m using at the moment, Debian wheezy.
• Website: Accomplished. In fact, in a few hours I’ll deploy a few minor changes to the code to optimize the blog template processing a bit.

One particular resolution deserves separate analysis, though:

Then there’s Wesnoth. I intend to finish the Second Act™ of After the Storm Episode I as soon as I may, even through the means of placeholders — I’m willing to do anything to rescue AtS out of Development Hell before the end of 2011.

I didn’t resort to unlawful methods to accomplish this goal as I originally feared, but it still happened! Granted, rather late.

During September and October I had a rather unexpected creativity and productivity spurt which culminated with the release of AtS version 0.5.0 with Episode I: Fear complete with 13 scenarios. More recently in December, we reached version 0.6.1 with 7 complete scenarios for Episode II: Fate. As of this writing, E2S8 and E2S9 are also complete in SVN trunk in Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, although it’s been suggested that the latter could use some spicing up. E2S10 is a work in progress since yesterday, and part of E2S12 was written already back in October, just not committed.

Thus, it could be said that after many difficulties, After the Storm broke out of Development Hell. Whether I’ll consider Episode III: Final (expected to be shorter, around 6 scenarios) part of the required line-up for version 1.0.0 is a matter I haven’t settled yet.

Once After the Storm is finished, I plan to take a rather long break from campaign development. That isn’t to say I’m out of ideas, since there is one character I want to explore in further detail in her own campaign. However, I may have my Wesnoth time taken up by mainline work after 1.10 is released depending on the situation then, since there’s a rather large technology gap in Wesnoth that needs to be solved.

Other than that, I haven’t really decided on any resolutions for 2012, so I’ll leave you with the one resolution of the moment:

...
screen #0:
  dimensions:    1280x800 pixels (338x211 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch
...

(This information is utterly wrong. xdpyinfo reported the same screen dimensions on bluecore last year in spite of its screen being glaringly larger than reicore’s by a few milimeters.)

My friend just mentioned on IRC a rather unusual banner displayed during the installation of Sabayon Linux, somehow involving Debian. I didn’t pay much attention to his claims at first, but then he uploaded a screenshot he’s kindly authorized me to repost:

Isn’t it nice to know there are Linux distributions resorting to over-simplified, uneducated statements to promote themselves? And the banner design itself is ugly as well. I think this merits no further analysis.

A little more than two weeks after the release of version 0.6.0, After the Storm 0.6.1 is out! And just in time for Christmas Eve in Chile, too.

The last couple of weeks have been particularly productive, as I’ve continued to work on AtS Episode II with the help of my loyal assistants vultraz and Espreon, who have been a valuable help providing early feedback, play-testing, and proofreading. In order to keep people busy for a while, this release includes scenarios 4 through 7, and one cutscene-only scenario, adding up to five new scenarios in this version.

Version 0.6.1 was scheduled for this date immediately after 0.6.0’s release, but it was only intended to contain the finished scenario 4, which landed on SVN trunk on December 15th. Since I was left with plenty of time before the original deadline, I decided to continue working on as many scenarios as possible. E2S7 landed on the 22nd, 22:01 UTC. I would have continued working on E2S8 immediately, but since it requires one new unit baseframe, I decided to postpone it and aim for introducing all the final four scenarios in version 0.7.0 when it’s done (most likely by early to mid-January 2012).

For this version, I decided to increase the Wesnoth version requirement from 1.9.7 to 1.9.10, which was already recommended in the campaign description. While there’s no WML code or maps enforcing the version requirement yet, I’ll simply ignore bug reports against AtS 0.6.1 on 1.9.9 and earlier versions since the engine behavior changed a lot between 1.9.8 and 1.9.10 in some areas — it’s simply impossible to keep supporting old development versions now that mainline is releasing 1.9.10 and later as betas for the upcoming stable 1.10. Besides, as a mainline developer I must also encourage people to test the game and report bugs before 1.10!

Should this inconvenience you, I may be able to provide support on a case-by-case basis given a good reason to do so. My general recommendation if your Internet service isn’t good enough to download the bi-weekly Wesnoth 1.10 betas is to just download the latest one and keep it around until 1.10 final is released. By the looks of things, odds are this won’t happen until January.

The changelog for this version of the campaign is unusually long, even though I deliberately omitted some specific additions in the art department — six new baseframes, all made by myself and awaiting revisions in the near future — and unit WML. Since those are tied to the new scenarios, I decided to not spoil it in the changelog.

Version 0.6.1:
--------------
* Increased minimum Wesnoth version requirement from 1.9.7 to 1.9.10.

* Graphics:
  * New or updated unit graphics: Sylvan Warden (chained).

* Scenarios:
  * Various prose grammar fixes.
  * E1S3 - Civil War in the North:
    * Removed deprecated flower terrain.
  * E1S5 - Bay of Tirigaz:
    * Removed deprecated flower terrain.
  * E1S6.2 - Elves of a Different Land:
    * Fixed a dialog line wrapped in double parentheses.
  * E1S9.1 - The Triad (part 1):
    * Don't set Elynia's initial status to slowed.
    * Fixed animation glitches.
  * E1S9.3 - The Triad (part 3):
    * Fixed animation glitches.
  * E2S2 - The Heart Forest:
    * Increased turn limit.
    * Reduced initial gold amounts for enemy sides.
    * Set initial gold amount for the player.
  * E2S3.2 - Revelations:
    * Corrected unit facings.
  * E2S4 - Shifting Allegiances:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S5 - The Eastern Front:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S5 C - The Eastern Front cutscene:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S6 - The Voyage Home:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S7 - Proximus:
    * New scenario.

* Units:
  * Increased Dryad's HP from 43 to 46.
  * Increased Forest Spirit's HP from 37 to 40.
  * Simplified Sylvan Warden's animations WML, making her less of a resource
    hog.
  * Removed Kri'tan.

Have fun, and happy holidays!

Since people keep saying WML is like XML, I decided to provide an example of what a standard WML snippet would look like if it had to be translated to XML.

WML:

[event]
    name=last breath
    [filter]
        id=shadowm
    [/filter]
    [message]
        speaker=shadowm
        message= _ "NO!"
    [/message]
[/event]

XML:

<event name="last breath">
    <filter id="shadowm" />
    <message speaker="shadowm" message:gettext="NO!" />
</event>

My knowledge of XML doesn’t go far enough, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of translatable strings being an integral part of the syntax, hence the funky-looking XML attribute name for event.message.message above.

This example only covers the basic WML syntax (i.e. no preprocessor directives, +nodes or embedded Lua) on purpose.

People using development versions or SVN trunk might find it excessively cumbersome to install Wesnoth’s binaries and data files whenever a new version is released (or commit made, for trunk). Since long ago (probably 1.3.x) Wesnoth supports overriding the data directory by providing its path as the last command line argument and, since 1.9.0, it’s also possible to use to use the --data-dir switch to avoid ambiguity with other switches taking path arguments.

Since version 1.5.4 (more specifically, r28934), Wesnoth will also try to locate a usable data directory by itself, by trying to locate data/_main.cfg in the parent dir of the executable file, which is resolved in Linux by making use of the /proc/self/exe symbolic link.

Until today, it had not occurred to me that this makes it possible to link to the Wesnoth binary from any directory, not just one containing the aforementioned WML file. The /proc/self/exe link points towards the final target if the process image is a symbolic link, so you can have a layout like this work as desired provided ~/bin is in PATH:

shadowm@reicore:~$ ls -l bin/wesnoth*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 shadowm shadowm  33 Dec 10 21:09 bin/wesnoth -> /home/shadowm/src/wesnoth/wesnoth
lrwxrwxrwx 1 shadowm shadowm  37 Dec 10 21:10 bin/wesnoth-1.8 -> /home/shadowm/src/wesnoth-1.8/wesnoth
lrwxrwxrwx 1 shadowm shadowm  40 Dec 10 21:10 bin/wesnoth-1.9.12 -> /home/shadowm/src/wesnoth-1.9.12/wesnoth

The Wesnoth 1.8 binary in this case is compiled with the scons prefsdir option set to .wesnoth-1.8 so conflicts with the development versions can’t occur — those use the custom .wesnoth-1.9 dir instead. Nowadays things seem to be a little more complicated in that regard, as seemingly the game will opt for an XDG layout if there’s no compiled-in preferences dir path on non-Mac, non-Windows builds. According to the EditingWesnoth article on the wiki, 1.8 builds default to .wesnoth1.8. Why the default doesn’t include a hyphen is beyond me.

With things set up like this, I can start Wesnoth from any directory without having to provide my own command line arguments. Of course, you could say this is a rather archaic approach as it’s also possible to create desktop/panel shortcuts instead, depending on the desktop environment. Since I spend more time looking at a terminal emulator with my hands on the keyboard than staring at the wallpaper and desktop icons with the mouse in hand, my own approach turns out to be more efficient for my purposes.

Finally, there’s an even less known feature introduced in r31261 (before 1.5.7) that also makes it possible to omit the --editor or -e switch to start the map editor if the game executable file contains “editor” in its name. This was added as a replacement for the old wesnoth_editor binary that provided the map editor before it was replaced with the built-in version (“editor2”) as part of GSoC 2008.

After the Storm 0.6.0 has just been released, despite the original deadline I set for myself just a few days ago being Christmas Eve. As a consequence, that day will be the deadline for AtS version 0.6.1 instead, which should include a working scenario E2S4 (i.e. fourth scenario of the second episode). Of course, if a major bug arises in the meantime, that tentative version number will have to change.

Apparently, I work faster when I feel the need to deliver within a specific time frame. In this case, the need stems from fear of public humiliation. Probably.

The changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.6.0:
--------------
* Increased minimum Wesnoth version requirement from 1.9.5 to 1.9.7.

* Scenarios:
  * Reworked character recall logic.
  * Episode 2 (Fate):
    * Scenarios 1 and 2 completed.
    * Scenario 3 completed, consisting of two cutscenes.

* Units:
  * Reduced Sprite's required XP to advance from 70 to 40.
  * Reduced Fire Faerie's required XP to advance from 100 to 70.

Regarding the version requirement increase, it’s not so much because of changes in WML syntax but rather because of a new terrain added in 1.9.7 that’s used in E2S2.

VVVVVV is a fun retro platformer which features gravity flipping instead of jumping, and some ridiculously hard rooms (the hardest ones are usually optional). It was part of the Humble Indie Bundle #3 earlier this year.

For a good while I've been trying to get the optional trinket in “Doing Things The Hard Way”, and apparently I got the hang of it at last. This is the first time I succeed in this little side-quest after something around 1000 attempts. Two (unexpectedly) failed attempts are also featured in this footage:

Sadly, for technical reasons I couldn’t record any sound, hence I decided to keep it unlisted in my account. The chiptune music and sound effects are, in my not-so-humble opinion, an essential aspect of the game and they may well be the only reason I accepted the challenge and completed all the main levels (back in August, granted, but there is replay value).

Years ago, I donated my TV to someone else at home who needed it, just so we didn’t have to buy a new one and give up on buying the laptop that came to be Bluecore. More recently, everyone at home decided to buy new TVs for their own use to replace the old CRTs we’d been using for the last decade — so I was finally left as the one TV-less denizen of this fortress of insanity.

That’s no longer the case.

I have a TV of my own again, decidedly cheap as we didn’t buy it for ourselves, and it works — not that I couldn’t watch TV when I wanted already, since my desktop computer (Blackcore) does have an analog TV capture card that works nicely on Windows (Linux, namely X.org, on VIA IGPs is an atrocious disaster). Most notably, this is the only TV that came with VGA and audio cords, so I can also connect my laptops (or my desktop) to it, although I can only wonder why there’s no HDMI cord when that appears to be what cool kids use nowadays.

It’s not too useful either way, for the maximum resolution such a setup can handle is 1360x768 (albeit the manual claims 1366x768) — compare against Reicore and Bluecore’s native LCD panel resolution of 1280x800. I don’t care much about its purportedly actual function of serving as an entertainment device since local TV kind of died for me circa 2006, when it stopped broadcasting anything of my interest. I spend more time on computers doing work than watching videos or movies anyway.

As an aside note, it appears KDE SC 4.6.5 or X.org server 1.11 (in Debian wheezy right now) don’t handle display output switching very gracefully in regards to window geometries, and windows tend to become 0x0 (when plugging in the TV) or get tossed offscreen (when unplugging the TV). I won’t claim KDE’s window manager is perfect, but in my experience X.org is not the best piece of software found in current general-purpose Linux distributions and it could as well be literally made of explosives and still do its job in the most basic configurations.