Live data from Hacker News

The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

wesnoth.org

71–80 of 155 posts

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#71

Why does the game need to keep advancing? Most games in the industry are written, released, and finished. The best have a timeless nature, still excellent even though they haven't been changed for decades. Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?

I think it's somewhat the nature of open source games. It reminds me of the AoE clone 0 A.D.[0] which has been in development for over a decade and still considered in alpha.

[1] http://play0ad.com

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this website I am not at all surprised that people want it to be rewritten in javascript or to be relicensed from the GPL.

There has been some recent discussion with moving the art and music assets away from GPL into a CC or similar license. The developers understand GPL was never really designed for those media. (You’ll have to remember, Wesnoth started in 2003; back then, Wikipedia was using GNU FDL for everything.) The tricky thing would be contacting all the music and art contributors to get their permission first, which is not an ea…

The GPL was designed for non-code media. It is one of the reasons that GPLv3 has more broad language that does not refer specifically to code. Having the same license for the software and media has obvious advantage: it's a lot simpler to interact between the two of them.

Some artists just get huffy about having "their" art modified, as if their artistic integrity should not allow modifications. They would have the same problem with any free license, though, so just teaching artists how the GPL works has worked ok so far.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#73
post #44

So far we've had one major thread calling for a rewrite in a new language, one calling for a new license, and one insinuating the devs should accept the project is done and move on with their lives. Is it any wonder open source gaming struggles with this kind of broad negativity?

Put this another way: lots of people don't have a second thought about telling this /extremely successful/ project how it really should have been run.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#74
I'm not much of a game player but I find the mechanics of building a game engine indescribably cerebral. I'm probably a bit rusty with C++ but my years (and years and years) as an embedded systems programmer taught me a lot about optimizing software to minimal resources. I'm going to take a look at the engine and see if it warrants some of my kind of love.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#75

I am trying to download the latest release (1.12.4a) but I am caught in a never ending loop http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/ . Edit: okay, sourceforge is broken for me for any download, no matter the browser. Let's consider that my sourceforge rant of the week.

Was trying to diagnose this for KeePass last night...

Between this and the adware scandal, it's like someone slammed the door on an era.

What's the download service everyone's going to move to that won't have these problems?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer...

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#77

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested i…

Isn't Battle for Wesnoth looking for C++ programmers to maintain their codebase?

It's not that I don't have significant programming skills myself, nor that I don't work on side projects, nor even that I don't really like Battle for Wesnoth... I've just sworn off every working on a C++ legacy codebase.

So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to a legacy C++ codebase.

Ed: I went back and read, and they're looking for people to add Python code to their toolchain. My answer is thus amended: I dislike trying to interface toolchains for building data to legacy codebases, and I do that for my job. I have no interest in doing ugly hacky things on legacy codebases for free, because it's honestly sort of soul crushing work.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#78

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested i…

rdegges obviously has a lot on their plate already.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#79

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested i…

Isn't Battle for Wesnoth looking for C++ programmers to maintain their codebase? It's not that I don't have significant programming skills myself, nor that I don't work on side projects, nor even that I don't really like Battle for Wesnoth... I've just sworn off every working on a C++ legacy codebase. So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to a legacy C++ codebase. Ed: I went back and read, and they're look…

"I'm not interested in that kind of work" is a fair answer, but it seems pretty rude to dismiss it as an ugly hacky legacy code base without reviewing it first.
Post reply on HN