Under the Burning Suns

[quartex]

Madmax, Dave thanks for the kind words, it's really encouraging. Makes me want to rush back and start writing more scenarios.

Interesting idea MadMax, but falling spaceships isn't quite what I'm going for. I'm definitely stiking to the fantasy genre, but rest assured I have the whole story all planned out in my head. The characters know very little about their world at the start of the campaign, but by the end you should have a pretty good idea of what this future is like. Now I'm not trying to create an "official" storyline, and so I'm keeping the timeline intentionally vague. This could be 500, 1,000 or 10,000 years in the future. And this is merely my idea of a possible future, I don't want to argue with people about if this is the "correct" future or not. Originally I was going to make it a different land entirely, but then I thought it would be more fun to connect it to the Wesnoth we know, and give people glimpses of how the world became the way it is today.

[MadMax]

Or possibly the distant past? The transition between desert land and fertile land would happen when one of the two suns goes nova (or is knocked out by some magic spell).

Anyway, the spaceships idea was sarcasm.

[Elvish_Pillager]

Nothing happens when Nim dies.

[Elvish_Pillager]

Well, the first scenario is *great*. I'm amazed you got a scenario with that sort of plot to work so well, especially without running into the "where the heck are those remaining elves?" problem.

Thing is, I was playing on Hard, and it wasn't hard enough. So, either you haven't adjusted sufficiently for the difficulty levels, or I'm officially too skilled to playtest levels for difficulty anymore. Besides losing Nim early on (I'm going to have to stick another version of him into my scenario 2 savefile ) I had an easy time of it.

[Invisible Philosopher]

P.S. Currently there is a bug with the terrain transitions on the desert rubble tile. I added the line:
{TERRAIN_ADJACENT -191 z !z desert}
to my campaign terrain.cfg file, which made the transition between this new terrain type and other terrains work fine in 0.8.8, but not in 0.8.9. Because of this, the desert rubble tiles look rather ugly. You can fix this by adding the above line to the file terrain-graphics.cfg in your main Wesnoth data folder, but it may screw up other campaigns that use the letter z for a custom terrain. I'm not sure which (if any) other campaigns use this letter.

Wesnoth has a bug and an extremely annoying thing about custom terrain graphics that I know of. I don't know whether they're what you're experiencing here (I haven't looked at your campaign yet). I also don't know what's changed from 0.8.8 to 0.8.9, except that a bunch of terrains were added and presumably something was done with their images.

The bug.
The annoying thing is that no matter what you do, they have their effect after the standard terrain graphics, so you can't change the flags that are in effect at that point. Effectively, if you want to redefine what a terrain looks like, you have to make sure to draw over every part of the standard graphics.

[Elvish_Pillager]

These lines should be in the opposite order, even though they cause no problems:

team_name=good
[/unit]

[Elvish_Pillager]

The second scenario, however, is terrible.

Turn 3:
Kaleh: "Hey look! There's a bunch of scorpions who just appeared and killed Zhul! At least I didn't lose..."

EDIT: The Ogre ambush is fine, though, since you actually get a chance to defend your units.

[turin]

I'll play this campaign (eventually). But before I do, can you explain how the world of Wesnoth suddenly has two suns when before it had one?

[Dave]

Thing is, I was playing on Hard, and it wasn't hard enough. So, either you haven't adjusted sufficiently for the difficulty levels, or I'm officially too skilled to playtest levels for difficulty anymore.

It's not very hard....but I don't think it needs to be. We already have enough hard campaigns floating around.

We don't want to get to the stage where every campaign that is added gets heckled for not being hard enough...

David

[Elvish_Pillager]

The difficulty levels are labeled "Normal","Challenging", and "Hard"...how hard is "Normal" supposed to be?

[Dave]

The difficulty levels are labeled "Normal","Challenging", and "Hard"...how hard is "Normal" supposed to be?

That is true. The difficulty levels might need to be re-labelled, but....we'll see how the campaign progresses and what quartex's intentions are

---

Btw I think this campaign would be a great place for an aspiring artist to jump in and start collaborating with quartex on making a whole new bunch of units, starting with the desert Elves who would probably dress in khaki, not green

David

[scott]

This is a cool campaign. It's like Dune meets Wasteland meets Wesnoth. The dawn and dusk pictures have moons in them that you might want to take out. In the scenario 1 dialogue, when you see the necromancer the unit says "I shudder to thing what has become of them". There are also some instances of "it's" that should be "its" (a new one will grow in its place and woken from its sleep). Edit: re: scenario 2 I think you want oases in some places as a plural of oasis.

Great job!

[quartex]

Okay, everyone should go to the campaign server and download the campaign again. I just fixed the death bug last night. Now when your main heroes die you actually lose the scenario. I'll probably make a second update by Monday with more changes.

EP, I'm glad you like the first scenario so much. Thanks a lot.

The problem is that I'm not the best Wesnoth player, I've only played the official campaigns in Easy difficulty. So I've tested my scenarios to prove that I can beat then in Normal difficulty, but I haven't tested challenging or hard. Thanks for testing the scenarios in hard EP, right now the game balance may be a bit off. But I will look at your replay, and try to make things harder.

Sorry about you not liking the ambushes in the second scenario. I guess people don't like monsters appearing out of nowhere and slaughtering your units?

It's a design question. On one hand once you know what's coming you can bunch up your units so that instant ambushes aren't that bad. But I suppose this requires the player to play the scenario at least twice, which is a bad thing. Technically I should be writing scenarios that anyone can beat on the first try, without knowing what's coming. I think I'll change the scorpions so they just appear, and give you a chance to respond before they attack.

Turin, when I first started this campaign, I imagined it as a completely different world, a world of deserts and dual suns. I hope I won't get people mad by saying that this is "Wesnoth". No, I won't answer your question, the fact that there are two suns instead of one is an important plot point, and if you want to find out how Wesnoth came to be tbe way it is you'll have to play the campaign.

P.S. I've heard that some players haven't been able to see any of my custom graphics. Has anyone else had problems seeing the elvish hunters, or the rubble I use?

[quartex]

This is a cool campaign. It's like Dune meets Wasteland meets Wesnoth. The dawn and dusk pictures have moons in them that you might want to take out. In the scenario 1 dialogue, when you see the necromancer the unit says "I shudder to thing what has become of them". There are also some instances of "it's" that should be "its" (a new one will grow in its place and woken from its sleep).

Great job!

Thanks scott! I'll fix those typos today. My new time of day pictures are just quick edits. Originally I just repeated the same images over for the new time peroids, but I wanted to make it so the player could have some idea what time it was by glancing at the images. In the Long Dark the moon does disappear and then reappear at dawn, I'll fix that.

If any artist out there is interested in creating new time of day pictures for a world with two suns, feel free to pm me.

[quartex]

The difficulty levels are labeled "Normal","Challenging", and "Hard"...how hard is "Normal" supposed to be?

EP, as I said above, as someone who isn't the best at playing Wesnoth, I'd ratgher have my campaign too easy than too hard. If no one can beat a scenario then I've screwed up. I consider EASY to be difficult at times, which is why I took turin's idea of renaming the difficulties. I'll work on making challenging and difficult harder. I just don't want to go overboard.

P.S. The first scenario is designed to be easier than later ones. If someone can't beat the first scenario they tend to get frusterated, I want to get them hooked into the campaign before I make things difficult.