Wesnoth 1.5.9 is out!
This is the first beta release for 1.6. By now we are basically feature complete and the changes happening from now on are meant to polish existing stuff and wipe out the bugs that are left. So you as user can already consider updating to this new version since it should be basically usable. You should expect a stable 1.6 rather soon, maybe in Q1'2009...
What is new in this release, you might ask now. The most impressive change is probably the completion of the conversion to the new dialog style. The new style should now be used for all the dialogs ingame.Many portraits were update to at least have the black background removed, or to receive a complete overhaul, so that they look really stunning in the soon to come 1.6.
Users preferring fighting human opponents over battling the AI might welcome the option to use their forum accounts on the multiplayer server to have registered names. The feature was already there in the last releases, but it is by far more polished now and should work a lot more reliable.
Authors of add-ons should really consider porting their work over to 1.5.9 since the API is basically stable by now. That is add-ons working perfectly in 1.5.9 will most likely also work nicely in 1.6, too.
Translations have made huge progress, too. Two more translation teams managed to complete the translation of Wesnoth: Czech and Spanish are now complete and several others are nearing completion but help is of course still needed and welcome. If you want to help translating Wesnoth into your language of choice, have a look at this page and contact the translations maintainer. The maintainer will tell you how you can help best.
Some other important things to mention:
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From this version onward, the development team will only focus on bug-fixing. The WML API will probably have very little changes.
Thus, now is a good time to port all User Made Content to 1.5.x
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The image path functions (~RC(), ~TC(), ~FL() et al) parsing has been heavily modified. Now all functions in a path are stacked in a left-to-right order, with the sole exceptions of ~RC() and ~TC(), which continue to be non-accumulative.
Additionally, a new note-worthy image path function, ~SCALE(width,height), was introduced; it scales graphics, of course.
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The conversion of the old message dialogs to the new message dialogs is mostly complete. The code needs some more polishing. WML authors who use advanced features of the [message] tag are encouraged to test their add-ons with the new engine and report bugs if they find them.
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The defaults for "fog of war" and "random start time" have been changed to on. Add-on maintainers may want to explicitly set those properties if they're important to the way the scenario works (like for survivals with specific chaotic/lawful waves etc.) so that they have the right values when played with "use map settings" on.
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Of course there is also the full changelog listing (almost) all the changes since 1.5.8. A changelog with changes that might be visible to most users (and only includes these) is the players changelog.
Downloads
Sources:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.5.9.tar.bz2?download (203.2 MB) md5sum
Here is the xDelta for the sources:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wesnoth/wesnoth-1.5.8.tar-wesnoth-1.5.9.tar.xdelta?download (1.5.8 to 1.5.9, 26.2 MB)
Check http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7034 for info on using xdelta.
The Windows package is available on the download page.
The MacOSX package is available on the download page.
The OpenSolaris package is not available yet. Once it is, you can find it on the download page.
All known packagers have been contacted. Information about where to get the respective binaries or how to get them work you get on the Linux binaries site for the Linux binaries. Download links for the other supported systems will be listed at the downloads page once the binaries are available.
As a fallback you can also get the sources from http://files.wesnoth.org/ - you should first try to get files through SourceForge to help us save bandwidth. Please get the files from sourceforge.net if possible.
The multiplayer server for 1.5.9 is already up and running. This server can only be used to play with 1.5.9. If you do encounter problems, please report them.
If you find any bugs don't hesitate to report them, but please read the instructions on how to post bugs first. Instructions for bug reporting can be found at http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/ReportingBugs.
Enjoy!
PS: Within the next seven days anyone asking when the binary for xyz will be ready will be banned and the post will be deleted. Such questions just distract the developers and packagers and don't do any good, so better not ask them...
Bugreports in the forums tend to get forgotten. You will get better results by following the guidelines and report them in the bugtracker.
