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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

$ ffmpeg -map 0.1 -b 2000000 -i Videos/capture/achievement.ogv Videos/capture/achievement-trans-2000.ogv

All just in time for a little personal milestone:

The video is silent, though, for a reason:

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.
• Featureless GUI front-ends like recordMyDesktop or VLC.

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.