The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

I respect that the Wesnoth community may not want to go this route, and wouldn't blame anyone for that at all. My suggestion was more along the lines of "here's an option which won't be nearly as painful" than anything else.

While Unity3D is conditionally free-as-in-beer, it definitely isn't free-as-in-speech. Unreal Engine has recently gone kinda free too, but not really.

In any event, best wishes to the Wesnoth community and continued fun to be had by both those playing it and those progressing it.

The last few news items on http://nethack.org indicates the code is still being worked on and NetHack 3.5 is in the works.

I regularly play Wesnoth over the internet with a friend. Though we sometimes explore other games, we always come back to Wesnoth because it's compelling. However, and I say this as a fan, this game has severe issues - it's not just a few bugs and maintenance:

Wesnoth makes current hardware sweat to the point where my relatively new MBP sounds like it's taking off, as is my friend's ThinkPad. It's also the only game capable of slowing my current-generation iMac down to the brink of operating system usability and beyond.

The game itself is slow, UI actions, moving units across the battlefield - pretty much anything happens only after a noticeable pause. There is no apparent reason why a largely static, 2D, tile-based, pixel game should be this slow.

The network code and its underlying model are an unmitigated disaster, by design. If you experience any network glitch during play, including short wifi disruptions, the connection collapses. But it doesn't do so right away. It can take up to a few minutes for the game to notice that a player has disconnected. There is no automatic re-connect, all players have to save, exit, and rejoin. While playing Wesnoth it's advisable to stay in contact over email to coordinate.

Sometimes, the game state gets out of sync between players and the server. When the game notices that, you get the option to cancel the game or ignore and continue. If you do the latter, in-game causality breaks down completely (with hilarious results). If you opt for the former, once again, everybody has to save, exit, and re-join, and hope anyone has a non-corrupt save game. The game state isn't large or complex by the way.

These are not merely bugs; they are deep, architectural problems.

Isn't this a textbook case for crowd sourcing?

> If you can't justify that, then don't contribute. It's that simple.

So tough? You're a disciplinarian huh? Just world enough for ya?

Have a bit of sting and a zing, with pure truth:

LLVM and Clang are healthy and GCC is becoming obsolete.

Then there's gems like cocos2x-x, chromium, .NET and such. Very hearty with all those commits. :^)

> The license wasn't chosen randomly

Do you understand the ramifications of the GPL? Even lawyers don't. Courts don't. There are no precedents to speak for. You read law? You are saying that for this project, someone sat on the stone about this?

Mid-2000's, everyone tacked GPL on code. I was part of it. We were fighting the war against greedy M$, IBM. We were the heroes then.

People tack on GPL all the time not understanding the license, let alone the ramifications it'll have downstream.

For instance, let's say you're a hardened GPL zealot in college (as I was, I was just like the lot of you, my heart was set. Then I had a baby and a mortgage.

If I don't pay child support, I go to jail. I can't use any of my code from back when I was in college since it's GPL'd.

I guess it looks ok on a resume, but you have to admit, I feel totally cheated. It's like no one cares about my contribution or wellbeing. I am left with the impression over a decade of using the GPL, it's a freeloaders license.

I used to be apart of the cult of Stallman. I was saved by Theo De Raadt and Thomas Sowell.