Looking for some background information...

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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jonadab
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Looking for some background information...

Post by jonadab »

Okay, I'm thinking about maybe putting together a campaign and I'd like to avoid contradicting other material as much as possible. I'm only really completely committed to not contradicting mainline campaigns, but when possible I want to accommodate add-on material as well, especially if it's well-done and well-known.

So to that end, I have some questions about what is already known. Feel free to just say "see [name of add-on]", or to explain in more detail, whichever you prefer.

All these questions pertain to the time before Haldric, especially about a hundred years before Haldric.
  • Is anything known about Burin the Lost other than what is revealed in The Rise of Wesnoth?
  • Besides elves, dwarves, and trolls, are there any other races or units that are known to have lived on the main continent? I'm especially interested in the southern portion of the continent, south of (what later came to be known as) Wesnoth. I'm particularly interested in the subtropical and tropical regions, where there's no freezing in winter.
  • What if anything is already revealed about the geography of the southern portion of the main continent, south of the region later known as Wesnoth? Again, I'm particularly interested in the tropics and subtropics, particularly coastal areas therein. If there are maps that show the southern coast, I need to see them. (If this area has not yet been explored, then I'll just make things up, of course, but if it has been explored, I want to know.)
  • What is known about the geography and inhabitants of the eastern ocean (east of the main continent, west of the Old Continent whence came the orcs and the great undead hordes) and the islands and coastal regions that border it?
  • Finally, what races (other than the mainline ones) are known to have lived on the Old Continent? I'm particularly interested in the coasts, but inland information may also prove relevant, particularly if it reveals races and factions and unit types that are different from mainline. (I already know about the Unstoppable Legion.) I'm particularly interested in seafaring peoples from the Old Continent, especially if they are known to enslave members of other races.
I write Bible School materials:
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uncleshelby
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by uncleshelby »

http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Timeline_of_Wesnoth
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Geography_of_Wesnoth
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/WesnothFigures
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Races

I think this has a lot of information about Wesnoth and the races, history, etc., etc., although I don't think it has much related to add-ons.

Hope it helps.
Timshel
jonadab
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by jonadab »

That timeline starts at the time of Haldric I. Did I not specifically say that all of my questions are about the time a century previous to that? Similarly, the Figures and Races pages are strictly limited to mainline stuff, so they really don't tell me anything I didn't already know.

The geography article, however, does contain a brief section of information about southern lands. It's exceptionally terse, but I imagine I can use words like Serrul, Varrant, Kesh, Azen, Azgar and Ashland as search terms. (Update: That's working very well, and has also yielded additional words to search for, such as Meridia. Speaking of which, isn't that a trade name for weight-loss medication?) So thanks for that pointer.
although I don't think it has much related to add-ons.
Add-ons are the main thing I was asking about. I'm already pretty familiar with the core stuff.
I write Bible School materials:
http://bibleschoolmaterials.blogspot.com/
Groggy_Dice
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by Groggy_Dice »

Well, there is a History of Burin scenario on the addon server. Not sure how much information a single scenario contains.

I'm just starting with addons, now that I've played almost all of the mainline campaigns, but there is a 1.6 campaign, The War of the West, that is supposed to be about the fall of the Wesfolk homeland. As far as I know, it did not get very far, and has been abandoned.
Ports:
Prudence (Josh Roby) | By the Sword (monochromatic) | The Eight of Cembulad (Lintana~ & WYRMY)
Resources:
UMC Timeline (Dec) | List of Unported UMC (Dec) | wmllint++ (Feb)
jonadab
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by jonadab »

Groggy_Dice wrote:Well, there is a History of Burin scenario on the addon server. Not sure how much information a single scenario contains.
Indeed, particularly considering Wesnoth refuses to actually load it. (I'll have a look through it anyway, via the tried and true text-editor method, and see if it has anything I should avoid contradicting.)
Groggy_Dice wrote:but there is a 1.6 campaign, The War of the West, that is supposed to be about the fall of the Wesfolk homeland.
That would've been interesting to me, but I rather doubt a version that old would compile against the libraries in my current OS. I suppose I could drag out my old PC, rummage around trying to find a spare hard drive that still works, and install, let's see... what version would I need... Oh. Haha. Apparently 1.6 wasn't very long-lived, because lenny shipped with 1.4 and squeeze with 1.8; so I would either need to hunt around for a distro that shipped a release during the time 1.6 was current (Ubuntu, maybe? Haven't used that in a while...), or go completely crazy, forget the old PC, and undergo the pain and indignity of closing all my applications and shutting everything down and rebooting my current computer into Windows for long enough to install the old version of Wesnoth and track down the add-on; I would be effectively without the use of my computer for other purposes for the duration of the experiment... I only do this in dire emergencies, like when I REALLY need to see how well some bit of HTML works in IE, but I do keep a working Windows install around (it's Seven, even), so the option is theoretically open.

Hmm... or maybe I could just teach myself campaign server WML and implement my own download client to fetch the add-on from the 1.6 server and look through it with a text editor. That might be less hassle, and also more educational...

I'll think about this.
I write Bible School materials:
http://bibleschoolmaterials.blogspot.com/
uncleshelby
Posts: 427
Joined: May 10th, 2011, 7:20 pm

Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by uncleshelby »

Or you could download the source and install it. It's easy.

Also, sorry my stuff wasn't informative. Sometimes it's hard for me to read stuff on a screen, so I think I just got your words mixed up.
Timshel
jonadab
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by jonadab »

I'm no stranger to compiling things from source, believe me. Over the years I've compiled and installed many things from source... Emacs, Mozilla, Sawfish, Courier, Evergreen (including OpenSRF), ... all manner of things. I've even done xscreensaver three or four times (which the maintainer disrecommends on the grounds that it depends on a lot of dev packages not all of which are detected by the configure scripts; but I needed to make minor customizations).

Wesnoth, however, is particularly problematic because certain of the libraries that it depends on are also used by a lot of other software, and Wesnoth is somewhat more particular than average about which _versions_ it needs, which creates conflicts.

Then again, my attempts to do this in the past have usually involved trying to get a more recent version of Wesnoth than the one in the stable OS distribution. I suppose it's possible that compiling an older Wesnoth might be less of a problem. I'll have a look at it, at least.
I write Bible School materials:
http://bibleschoolmaterials.blogspot.com/
jonadab
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by jonadab »

Hey, that actually worked. 1.6 is running.

As an added bonus, in addition to the War of the West, the History of Burin also runs in 1.6. (Oh, while it's marked "scenario", it is in fact a campaign.) However, the first thing I noticed about it is that the introduction appears to significantly contradict TROW on a couple of points. The second thing I noticed was that whoever wrote it either wasn't a native speaker of English or was about nine years old, and either way he didn't have somebody read through it looking for grammar issues. (Update: I appear to have been mistaken. After playing quickly through the first several scenarios and reading the dialog therein, it now appears that the introduction was in fact very carefully checked for grammar issues, at least by comparison. Also, my head hurts.) So I'll probably (update: definitely) end up treating that one as irrelevant fannon, but I'm running through it anyway (quickly, with superior gold and units to what I'm supposed to have, because it obviously doesn't deserve more time than that).

I'll look at War of the West subsequently.
I write Bible School materials:
http://bibleschoolmaterials.blogspot.com/
Groggy_Dice
Inactive Developer
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Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by Groggy_Dice »

Well, I didn't really expect those campaigns to be useful, I ran across them while looking for unported campaigns.

There's another campaign on the 1.9 server, "The Wesfolk Prince." Don't know what timeframe it covers or anything about it other than what's in the description.
jonadab wrote:The second thing I noticed was that whoever wrote it either wasn't a native speaker of English or was about nine years old
Well, the author's name is given as Maciej Piechotka.
jonadab wrote:Hmm... or maybe I could just teach myself campaign server WML and implement my own download client to fetch the add-on from the 1.6 server
If you want to learn server WML to download addons for old versions, I suppose that's fine, but you could just use HTTP to download the files through your browser or a client like wget. Or you could use the Python wesnoth_addon_manager, which will fetch them, automatically bunzipped and untarred. (I think it's under data/core/tools.)[edit:data/tools]

Also, it's probably a moot point now that you've already compiled 1.6 (which Ubuntu did have, incidentally), but you could also try converting 1.6 files with wmllint. I ran it on several 1.6 campaigns, and while it barfed on a few files, all the campaigns showed up in the campaign list. I fired up a half-dozen of them to see if they would at least load, and they all did. That's not to say that there wouldn't be problems down the line, but I've ported one of the campaigns (albeit a fairly short and simple one), and most of the bugs I dealt with were inherited from 1.6, rather than products of an imperfect conversion.
Last edited by Groggy_Dice on September 27th, 2011, 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Ports:
Prudence (Josh Roby) | By the Sword (monochromatic) | The Eight of Cembulad (Lintana~ & WYRMY)
Resources:
UMC Timeline (Dec) | List of Unported UMC (Dec) | wmllint++ (Feb)
jonadab
Posts: 148
Joined: October 7th, 2005, 2:33 am
Location: Ohio
Contact:

Re: Looking for some background information...

Post by jonadab »

Well, I didn't really expect those campaigns to be useful
That's okay. I want to be thorough. I don't want to be guilty of "did not do the research". I don't feel bad about contradicting "Burin History" (because it contradicts TROW on several points and, depending on how you read it (some of the prose is rather confusing) appears to be internally inconsistent as well), but I'm glad I at least reviewed it.

I'm hoping the author is indeed a native speaker of a language other than English (from the name, I would guess maybe some Eastern European language). I would just feel a lot better if this campaign were the product of someone struggling through a language barrier. Among other things, some of the maps are quite good (and very _compact_), especially if you don't mind having impassible terrain absolutely prevent any flanking from occurring on either side. Frankly, I wouldn't mind having him do maps for some of the scenarios in the campaign I'm working on, or maybe even for mainline campaigns. There's also some interesting and well-done terrain art, although I suppose it's conceivable that it could've been copied from other user-created content. It's really only the writing that's poor (and the lack of consistency with TROW, but that really falls under the category of writing too), but it's extreme. If the author is working with limited knowledge of the language because it's foreign, that would just be a lot less depressing to me than if it's a native speaker, with enough talent (evident if nothing else from the choice of maps) to do much better, being so incredibly sloppy with the writing that it beggars the imagination.

It's still kind of sad that he couldn't get a native speaker to collaborate on at least basic copy editing. It's not like the Wesnoth community has some kind of dire shortage of native English speakers with nothing better to do than work on user-created content. But, you know, maybe his social skills are about the same as mine. Aggravate that with a language barrier, and there we are: the campaign languishes in obscurity mostly because nobody has polished it up and made the writing presentable.

Anyway, the second one, War of the West, looks better. Okay, it needs some copy-editing too and by its own admission is not play-balanced, but it appears at first blush (at least what I've seen of it so far) mostly consistent with what is known from mainline, and it appears to tell a coherent story (at least the first part -- I haven't played through very much of it yet).
There's another campaign on the 1.9 server, "The Wesfolk Prince." Don't know what timeframe it covers or anything about it other than what's in the description.
Ah. I'll add it to my list. 1.9 has dependency issues on stable, but since you said the files on the campaign server can be retrieved via HTTP (a most convenient feature of which I was not aware), maybe I'll just look through that campaign with a text editor. (Update: actually, I think I might've found a way to get 1.9 to compile.)

I'm going to play through The Unstoppable Legion again as well. I've been meaning to anyway (last time I played through it was still under development and incomplete), and it may provide some useful information about the Old Continent. If I'm going to tell the tale of how Burin wound up lost in the caves beneath the Green Isle, I'll need to wind it up with a significant story arc (the longest of three, I think) covering how they crossed the Old Continent, partly above ground and partly below, and wound up going so deep they ended up passing beneath the ocean. That's gotta be an interesting story.
I write Bible School materials:
http://bibleschoolmaterials.blogspot.com/
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