Wesnoth 1.9.0

[Kymille]

I tried the new MP scenario Elensefar Courtyard and I noticed that both the whirlpool and the sunken ship are "Impassable," even to flying or swimming units. Is that deliberate? It's not very intuitive.

[tr0ll]

can the new ToD lighting trigger reverse effects, such as only turning on lamps or fires at night?

[Eleazar]

can the new ToD lighting trigger reverse effects, such as only turning on lamps or fires at night?

I don't know what you mean by "reverse", but if you defined a ToD area around a lamp or a fire to always be day, then it would look the same as any other hex by day, but the area would appear bright at night and dawn/dusk.

[Boucman]

hmm, I think there is a feature in the terrain WML to replace the terrain depending on ToD

this was specifically done to have lights turn on at night...

[Alink]

hmm, I think there is a feature in the terrain WML to replace the terrain depending on ToD

this was specifically done to have lights turn on at night...

It's ToD [variant] see http://wiki.wesnoth.org/TerrainGraphicsWML

And indeed, it allows to change the sprite itself depending of the ToD. For example, only show fire on torch during night. Note that it assumes that someone lit the torches everyday (but most fantasy world work like that)

[beetlenaut]

What kind of equipment does it take to get a nice responsive game (like it used to be) using an animated map? This is a honest question, not a complaint: I have a 3GHz machine, but by graphics card is a little old, and I might be willing to upgrade it if it would fix the lag.

This is a complaint: It takes five times longer to load a campaign than it used to. I timed it. What's the deal there? That can't be the new terrain, can it?

It is beautiful though! The new terrain is a huge improvement, and the new animations are great. (It's nice to see my campaign in the list, too. )

[Eleazar]

This is a complaint: It takes five times longer to load a campaign than it used to. I timed it. What's the deal there? That can't be the new terrain, can it?

The first time you load the campaign, or every time you load the campaing?
The first time Wesnoth encounters some new WML (like starting a campaign for the first time), it takes a lot longer to build the cache or whatever. Subsequent loadings (assuming no WML is changed) are generally much quicker.

[Pentarctagon]

What kind of equipment does it take to get a nice responsive game (like it used to be) using an animated map?

atm I don't think it is possible. My computer has a 2.66GHz duo core, 8GB RAM, and a 1GB graphics card and the lag is still rather noticeable even on small animated maps.

[ivanovic]

What kind of equipment does it take to get a nice responsive game (like it used to be) using an animated map? This is a honest question, not a complaint: I have a 3GHz machine, but by graphics card is a little old, and I might be willing to upgrade it if it would fix the lag.

Sorry to tell you that the graphics card makes zero difference for Wesnoth. Currently *everything* is done in software by the CPU. This won't change till we got some way to eg use OpenGL for displaying things. But this will take a whole lot of work and time before it is done (was not even started so far!).

This is a complaint: It takes five times longer to load a campaign than it used to. I timed it. What's the deal there? That can't be the new terrain, can it?

One reason for this is that when starting Wesnoth *itself* it should be a whole lot faster. Since at that time almost nothing is loaded at the moment, which makes initial gamestart a lot faster. Instead it takes more time when getting into a "real" match. And yes, the largest potion of this is related to terrain stuff and will be a little better in 1.9.1.

[Alink]

Small precisions to what Ivanovic says:
- Yes GPU power is mostly irrelevant. But one thing which may play a role is screen resolution and these days screens grow fast. Bigger screen means more animated things visible at the same size and more things to redraw when scrolling. Using low color depth (<24bpp) may also slow SDL but nobody uses that anymore, I think.

- Yes, more WML in terrain rules slowed 1.9 loading. We tried to optimize that for the 1.9.0 release but it was still a bit slow.

- The title screen should load fast(maybe even faster than 1.8) because we now skip terrain rules there. This doesn't mean that it takes more time to load a campaign, because we always needed to reload/rebuild the cache of each campaign, regardless what was loaded for title screen (where we don't know yet which campaign you will play)

- 1.9.1 should be better. There are probably OS differences but rebuilding a cache should be several times faster (~4x here), reloading a cache a bit faster (~2x here) and "building terrain rules" some times faster (don't remember how much)

- I am hoping that animated water will be less expensive. In trunk, at some point after 1.9.0, water tiles were better (several times cheaper, even if that doesn't mean that fps was improved that much). But then we changed something about water transitions and that part don't have yet the same optimization, which mitigates the previous gain. Not sure what will be the 1.9.1 state.

PS: Don't forget that it's only first 1.9.x. We will optimize some things during dev cycle. Continue to report performance problems (so we know what need improvements) but don't take current performance as final.

[IPS]

About the workaround part: How do I use it?

1. Click the "Multiplayer" button
2. Select "Connect to Server"
3. Click the "OK" button
4. Enter in the text box (after "Server:"): server.wesnoth.org:14997
5. Click the "Connect" button

Arggg this doesn't work for me .... it keeps always in 0% ... I can't enter in the official server or in an alternative server =(

[beetlenaut]

This is a complaint: It takes five times longer to load a campaign than it used to. I timed it. What's the deal there? That can't be the new terrain, can it?

The first time you load the campaign, or every time you load the campaing?

It's only the first time, but it makes testing a campaign painful, because it's always the first time after you reload the cache.

PS: Don't forget that it's only first 1.9.x. We will optimize some things during dev cycle.

Ok. I won't worry about it for now.
Thanks for all the responses! I realize you guys are busy and have real lives as well.

[sw_emigre]

I don't know if there is a separate thread for Dead Water bugs, but in the first scenario, IDK if I missed it, but a dialogue saying that henever the enemy takes a village they get a few undead to use would be helpful. Also, the description of undead merfolk says "walking corpse" in the unit description tab.

[Iris]

Scenario & Campaign Development » Mainline Campaign Development » [1.9.x/1.10.x] Dead Water

The forum search tool is also helpful.

Your complaints are really a Feature Request, and a non-bug, respectively. Players familiarized with the undead faction would know that walking corpses have several variations, some of which fly or swim. Whether that's a good thing or not is subject to individual interpretation (YMMV).

At this particular time (since we don't have a formal maintainer for DW yet) it may be a better idea to post FRs for Dead Water in the main development thread instead of release announcements or the Feedback forum threads, so they aren't forgotten.

[IPS]

I could enter to the lobby from 1.9.0 after I did played a game againist the AI.

I got only a importantless problem ... I were alone in the lobby xD