Battle for Wesnoth, one of the oldest and most polished open source games around is now available free on Steam.
The developers aren't just celebrating finding a new audience on Steam, they also just pushed out a big update to the game as well, what they're calling the "New Horizons Update".
They even made a shiny new trailer for the release:
YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences.
Direct Link
Direct Link
With this new release, they're now requiring you have a registered account on their official forum to play online. They say this is needed as a result of "issues with abuse of unregistered nicknames". They need to fix a tooltip that says it's optional though, which will be in the first point release 1.14.1.
You can see their update notes here, although they have this shiny page to go into a lot more detail about this release. Sounds like a huge amount of work went into it and it's looking really good.
Of course, you can still grab it from the official site, but Steam is very convenient.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: PatolaThis is one of those stupid smug comments that one sees a lot of in open source circles. Sure, I'll learn to code so I can check one thing on one game I've spent a bit of time playing. It'll only take 50 times as much time as I'll ever put in playing the game, what's the big deal?Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had a good deal of fun with this game. One thing that bugged me back when I played it though was that you were given a certain percentage chance to hit, and I noticed (became particularly obvious with powerful units with high chance to hit and lots of attacks) that the actual results seemed to average way below the given stats. So like, someone with 60% chance to hit seemed to hit around 40% of the time. Got frustrating.But this is an open source game. You can promptly check the code to see whether the statistics are done wrong, or you're just experiencing selection bias.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: PatolaThis is one of those stupid smug comments that one sees a lot of in open source circles. Sure, I'll learn to code so I can check one thing on one game I've spent a bit of time playing. It'll only take 50 times as much time as I'll ever put in playing the game, what's the big deal?Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had a good deal of fun with this game. One thing that bugged me back when I played it though was that you were given a certain percentage chance to hit, and I noticed (became particularly obvious with powerful units with high chance to hit and lots of attacks) that the actual results seemed to average way below the given stats. So like, someone with 60% chance to hit seemed to hit around 40% of the time. Got frustrating.But this is an open source game. You can promptly check the code to see whether the statistics are done wrong, or you're just experiencing selection bias.
One of the reasons this is commonly given is an answer is that every few months someone accuses Wesnoth of cheating the numbers some how, and people get into a long thread and crack it open and show exactly how the calculation is done, and then those people get called liars in the threads. So people just encourage others to look for themselves now. It's not meant to be downtalking or learning to code, it's really clearly marked in code and described pretty well.
Also, a 60% chance to hit doesn't necessarily mean you will hit 6 out of 10 times. The amount of rolls it takes before it averages out can be really high before it statistically becomes abnormal. I think part of this is due to many games that implement a "to hit" percentage actually adding increases if you fail many times. Games like XCOM would add little modifiers on subsequent missed hits in order to "balance out bad luck." Wesnoth doesn't do that. Ever. It rolls the D100 or D-whatever and that's that.
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: throghWow, another one goes there and let's celebrate that an open-source game is distributed throughout a proprietary platform. Wait what? Sounds like an error? Yes, it is. But nothing more to say, celebrate whatever you want, making your local distribution to another copycat of Windows, full of more proprietary services. Nothing learned!You don't have to get it through Steam. The game has supported Windows and Mac for a long time too, and you don't have to play it on those platforms. An open source game being successful on a proprietary platform is an improvement over only having proprietary games on that proprietary platform.
Last edited by hagabaka on 3 May 2018 at 7:19 am UTC
4 Likes, Who?
Quoting: throghWow, another one goes there and let's celebrate that an open-source game is distributed throughout a proprietary platform. Wait what? Sounds like an error? Yes, it is. But nothing more to say, celebrate whatever you want, making your local distribution to another copycat of Windows, full of more proprietary services. Nothing learned!
Yeah, we should be annoyed by the fact that we have yet another vector to get people who otherwise wouldn't to give one of the really solid pieces of FOSS software a try. I apologize about the snarky tone of that sentence, but it takes eons of baby steps to break people from the proprietary only model (been trying with various friends over the last two decades) and every little foot in the door like this is another tool to break down those barriers and hence does indeed warrant some celebration.
3 Likes, Who?
Quoting: throghWow, another one goes there and let's celebrate that an open-source game is distributed throughout a proprietary platform. Wait what? Sounds like an error? Yes, it is. But nothing more to say, celebrate whatever you want, making your local distribution to another copycat of Windows, full of more proprietary services. Nothing learned!You're so amazingly shortsighted it's quite a feat.
As others have pointed out, it pushes another FOSS game out to the masses, to people that perhaps would have never even heard of it before or tried it. On top of that, if they end up getting more donations as a result of possibly thousands more people enjoying it, so they can further improve it, what's not to like? I'm only scratching the surface of why it's a good thing.
Having more FOSS games on Steam is a good thing. I personally hate having to directly update direct download games, I personally prefer a system like Steam that can keep it all up to date for me.
8 Likes, Who?
I've tried this a few times and always ended with me realizing how I suck at it.
Even save-scumming does not help my most precious units survive. Forget about leveling up new ones. *shrugs*
Even save-scumming does not help my most precious units survive. Forget about leveling up new ones. *shrugs*
0 Likes
FutureSuture May 5, 2018
I would find it fantastic if they had donation options as purchasable downloadable content on Steam like Zero-K has. That would certainly bring in additional funding for a deserving open source game.
2 Likes, Who?
Avehicle7887 May 5, 2018
For those who need it, I uploaded a portable version of 1.14. I also included some libraries which the game was compiled against (may help with some old distros), delete or rename the "lib64" folder if you don't wish to use those.
Download link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_iPl01Y0QQOZs5eKsPi5h7fSjv2i5p9j
Download link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_iPl01Y0QQOZs5eKsPi5h7fSjv2i5p9j
0 Likes
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me