Observer:Profiles

An Interview With Sapient

Hi, Sapient, and welcome to The Observer. We have five questions we would like to ask you, today.

1) How did you find wesnoth, and why have you stayed with the project for two years? What pull keeps you here, Sapient?

I found wesnoth from a long and winding path. I used to hang out a lot on Radio Rivendell forums, then one day a guy posted a link in there to some video game music. The website led over to some free video game reviews, then that led over to Wesnoth. I was a Wesnoth player a long time before I touched the source code. I played around a lot with WML and had a lot of fun with it, As you can see from my old map pack, which still gets a lot of downloads I see. Then my relationship with Wesnoth changed a lot when I started getting into the C++. At first I just wanted to improve the MP Timer controls, then Soliton talked me into doing some UI improvements. He's a real good proponent for the project. I never read a book on C++ or officially studied it in a class, but I knew a lot about C and Java. It was fun learning the new language and I enjoyed it a lot; Xan was a good tutor when I had a question. I've never actually completed an official campaign to this day, unless you count the tutorial, So I guess you could say I'm a bit odd in that I like coding more than playing. I used to actually be addicted to video games such as MMORPGS so I try to keep a tight tab on how much time I play

2) You dedicated to improving the WML. Are you coding in any new features at this moment? Is it difficult to manipulate WML at the source level?

Yes, as you have noticed improving WML is one of the areas that I find the most fun. I have more plans for improving the language as well. Currently, I'd like to give the WML author a way to store all locations that are reachable by certain unit(s), and a way to use the pathfinding algorithm to store the path a unit would take if it can go from A to B. As for crazy ideas, maybe WML should have support for functions/calling. I recently refactored the Standard Location Filter code, but that was an internal change. The WML authors won't notice it, just C++ coders. Before that I made the C++ for WML variable lookups / modifications much cleaner. Again, an internal change; but one that will help future coders. These were difficult changes, yes, but they will make future work easier. As for creating WML events/additions, some of them are very very simple. But it requires a lot of foresight and planning so that you are adding value to the language and you don't have to go back later to change the way something works. I remember from my days as a WML Author that losing backwards compatibility is a real nuisance and a deterrent to development.

3) Have you ever been tempted to misuse your power? (even if you have not, in the end)

Honestly, no; I'm a pretty humble soul. I never wanted to give myself uber powers through manipulations. Although I do try to think up such scenarios sometimes. I think like a criminal mastermind sometimes, but this is more to put myself in someone else's frame of mind. Then you can anticipate their moves.

4) What sort of computer do you use, and what OS? Why do you use it?

That's an interesting question. Maxy used to be the dev with the lowest end computer, but now I'm pretty sure I have that distinction. I'm running Windows XP Professional, on a Pentium 4 with 256 MB Ram. I have a 16MB video card. I intentionally had them downgrade it from a 32MB video card when I ordered the laptop just so I could get more work done in college and graduate. (Let that be a lesson to you college students, heh!) As for why I use this OS, well I'm a creature of habit I guess. I got everything set up the way I want it over a process of many years and I don't have enough drive space or spare computers or backup devices to really experiment too much with it. One of these days, I'll do that, at least, that's what I keep telling myself anyways.

5) Sapient, does your dodging ninja avatar on the forums have any deeper meaning? What does it represent, symbolically?

Yes, my avatar does have a deeper meaning. I'm not sure I want to give it away, though! I used to play a lot as Northerners and I would have some really lucky assassin strategies sometimes - I developed the saying "You can't kill a true ninja!" I have an appreciation for bounty hunter fiction stories, too. I was once contemplating creating a campaign based on the story of a bounty hunter during the beginning of Ashveire's reign. He would basically be tasked with rounding up dissidents who were still loyal to the previous ruler. And the game play would be focused on using the fewest number of units possible, rather than the usual bonuses.

An Interview With Jetryl

1) As the art director for Wesnoth, where do you plan to take us, graphically? Do you have any 'big project' under way at the moment?

First, I intend to see the team-coloration project to fruition; to give the drakes, naga, and mermen the same recolorable patches (and general cleanups to their sprites) that all the other races have.

After that, there are a few possibilities - completing these would put us above the graphical level of quality seen in commercial games like final fantasy tactics, and because our graphics could (and have already) made other, radically different games possible, it would be a win for OSS as a whole. These include: - Giving our units a set of northeast facings similar to our current southeast facings. This would solve most of the graphical cheapness that happens when one of our units plays an animation that depicts him swinging his weapon in the opposite direction of his opponent.

- Giving our units walking animations. Far more difficult than the job I just mentioned, but this could well launch our content into being suitable for an RTS - something which open source has already finished code for in the form of the Stratagus Engine. It would also make Wesnoth itself look incredibly good - there are many similar games like FFT, Disgaea, and Tactics Ogre that demonstrate that walking animations work in a game of our type, and greatly enhance the visual experience. When the time comes, I'll probably be leveraging a lot of community help on this.

- Providing our game with a single set of high quality, consistent portraits.

- Cleaning up a few loose ends in the terrain department - coming up with a better solution to dirt tiles/transitions and snow transitions. Coming up with better bridges, replacing the desert hill/mountain tiles, and also finishing a start that freim made on snow mountain tiles.

2) When you first joined, nearly four years ago, the art was quite different than it is now. How do you feel about the changes since then? Do you ever want to go back, and play the pre 1.0 releases?

I really don't have any nostalgia for the old graphics, mostly because (at least ideally) the new graphics have preserved everything that was good about the old ones, and discarded everything that was bad.

If nothing else; looking at the old versions really offers a sense of accomplishment. I feel that we've made as much of an improvement between the days of 0.6 and 1.3.x as was made between many sequels of commercial games. We still have plenty of things to do, but what has been done so far is very encouraging.

3) What is your favorite program to draw with?

Photoshop. It's a good "jack of all trades" program, and I've found it strangely better at pixel art that a lot of the programs out there that are dedicated solely to making pixel art easier. I think a lot of this has to do with depth in other features that photoshop developed to make general image editing easier, but which are equally applicable to sprite art and which are missing from a lot of the simpler "made for sprite art" programs.

These include things like photoshop's extensive history support, not only being able to "undo" as far as 50 steps back, but also being able to "save the state of the document", so that you can explore a certain direction with a work, but are still able to roll back to the old one no matter how much further you progress into the work. The 800lb gorilla in the room is probably layers - I can place elements which would obscure things behind them, but which I'm unsure of the right position of, in a separate layer. For example, I can put the shield of a sprite in one layer, and his mostly-complete body underneath. As the balance of the sprite's pose changes during the drawing, I can shift his shield to accommodate with almost no drawing whatsoever. Photoshop's color manipulation tools are also useful for quick previews of radically different color schemes.

The GIMP is another program that a number of our artists use. I'm not terribly fond of it's interface, since it makes certain basic operations that I do in photoshop take more time (such as selecting a range of pixels and translating their position without cutting and pasting them). I believe a few of these things came from an attempt to better position the gimp as a "photo editor" than Photoshop, which has some bias in its interface conventions that it inherited from older programs like Silicon Beach's SuperPaint - these programs had an interface for basic editing (drawing, selecting, moving) that was more like what the program MS Paint now has. However, I suspect that this might just be my acclimation to photoshop's style of interface, and I know that the gimp can be very powerful when a person becomes experienced at using it. It also has the benefit of being "free software" in both senses of the term.

4) What do you think of the new animations that the 1.3.x line introduced?

The centerpiece of the new animations has been the idle animations, and I think they really help with a major flaw that wesnoth used to, and still does have. In many older games, even games within our general category, there is a considerable amount of visual action on the screen even when no gameplay interaction is taking place. I strongly suspect that this visual motion, this "liveliness" to the whole screen has a considerable and natural psychological appeal to players; in much the same way that vibrant, lively colors do. If you look even at the classic game civilization, it had animation of its water terrain through palette cycling, which often resulted in a while third or more of the screen having some sense of motion to it. Simcity (especially 2000 and thereafter), went to the length of animating many of the building tiles. Our idle animations don't completely solve this problem, but they do a lot to help with it.

Boucman, as well, has done a number of changes and major cleanups with our animation WML which will really ease a number of future additions; mostly what I mentioned in the answer to question #1. He, and zookeeper who helped him with the content end, really deserve a standing ovation; they're the people who really made these improvements possible.

5) Is it difficult to deal with the different art styles brought to wesnoth? How do you reconcile the different artist's work to produce a 'Wesnoth' style?

It is difficult, and it's resulted in a lot of wasted work. By far, the leading cause of "lost work" has been poor work that wasn't up to snuff, rather than bits of good work done in separate styles. Our sprite art, our terrain art, and our attack icons have all stabilized in style, and no one that was good enough to do them the right way has been so wasteful as to make images blatantly in the wrong style. Our portraits have not quite stabilized in style; we have more than one body of work in disparate "styles", and this is a problem we'll need to resolve to get a full set (consider the difference between the drake and saurian portraits, and the human portraits).

This lack of quality would be an issue with a commercial company, but they deal with it in a different way - they simply end or never begin an artist's employment. I have to make the same judgement that a commercial company would make, but on a piece by piece basis - often I can work with someone better to bring them up to par (like leonhard, who did some great work on the attack icons), but even with my own work I have to carefully judge if a piece is of the right quality to fit in.

One of the problems we've run into is that it's far more attractive to most players to try to expand our content horizontally, than it is to expand it vertically. It's far more appealing to try and make a new monster, than to make the same number of images for an existing unit to improve its animations. A lot of this, I think, has to do with "authorship" - when someone makes a whole new monster, they can call it their own. The upside of this is that this phenomenon can be turned to our ends, but only if the person is willing to do enough work that whole units' worth of images can be done by them. People like Eternal and Neoriceisgood have done some excellent work on our team-color redesign, and have probably been spurred by the fact that by doing all the work necessary for the new imagery of a unit, they could really call it their own. We've had success by giving people like that "artistic license" over a major area if they're willing to do all the relevant work; I've certainly been a bit motivated by this myself. It's darkly ironic, because if the people who do UMC were willing to work on core content, their work would be seen every time someone played wesnoth - far more often than it would on UMC, and vastly more so than on content that never got finished; that was just left to die in a forum thread for some pipe-dream campaign/era. I think that a lot of this phenomenon is similar to what ESR described here: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_10/raymond/index.html

How I reconcile the art is simple - if it's even directed at something useful to begin with, I make a judgement of whether it would be economical for the game if I spent my time editing it into shape. Sometimes something is far enough off-base that my time is simply better spent recreating it from scratch. At those times I either do exactly that, or just ignore the piece and continue working on what I was doing at the time. A lot of the time, I try to offer advice to people on how to improve their work - it's actually spurred a number of people to continue helping for quite a while, and has improved some to the point where they're independently able to do mainline work. The mechanics of how I actually fix an individual piece are probably beyond the scope of an interview like this - I'd probably have to explain a lot of "how to draw".

An Interview With JW

1) What is your favorite feature of Wesnoth?

Truthfully? I have to say that I have two: 1) The ability to play multiplayer matches online. 2) The ability for users to create content for the game. If the game did not have multiplayer matches, I would probably not have kept playing it after I had learned how to use the units to their maximum potential and beaten a few campaigns. If the game did not have the ability to create content, I would probably have only played it for a few months! Being able to creatively contribute to a project does many positive things for the player: 1) It gives them the ability to say "I made that!" and feel a sense of accomplishment when their content is used 2) It gives them the feeling that the developers of the game care about their ideas 3) It gives them the knowledge that the game will continue to grow and change, providing a different experience with time. I'm sure it does more, but I've spent enough energy on this question already!

2) Your era, the Era Of Myths, is quite nice, but is not played as often as Noyga's Extended Era. Why do you think that is?

To be fair, the Extended Era (EE) is far more complete than the Era of Myths (EoM). Noyga has had the blessing of having many contributors help with the era's art, including some incredible spritists known as Neoriceisgood (Chaos faction) and Shadow (Aragwathi), and Turin is also become quite good at the task! I have had the blessing of having Eternal creating some unit sprites, though he has been busy working on mainline units lately, which I believe we can all agree is more important than creating sprites for a usermade era. Other than Eternal's work, most of the sprites in the EoM were already created before they entered the era. I would mainly pick factions to include that were mostly done with art for the main reason that the era had very few art contributors. Yes, there have been a few submissions from others here and there, but they have few and far between.

Also, I must say that even though I am the maintainer of the era, the era is not "mine." So many people have helped in the creation and development of this era that it would be selfish of me to claim ownership. Sure, I change and upload the data and do most of the balancing changes, but I have created perhaps 2 sprites for the era personally, and have only been the ideator for 2 of the factions the era currently uses. Also, many of the balancing changes - especially lately - have been discussed with multiple people to come to a joint conclusion. It may be a time saver to say that the EoM is "my era," but just remember that it is everyone's era that I merely maintain!

Oh, another reason why it is played less is because there were no updates in the era from like May until November. Also, the additional damage types made it incompatible with default units. Now that the damage types are removed I believe it has seen more play because of that decision.

3) What were some major chalanges in developing the Era of Myths?

Ah....well, I touched on some of them above. A lack of sprite artist's with the time to work on unit sprites has been the #1 biggest challenge for the era. A lot of sprites without homes have found a temporary one in the EoM!! Another challenge has been balancing... and rebalancing... and balancing off of those changes... it is truly a difficult task!!! We should all be thankful that the default era is so well balanced now, because balancing 6 factions is not an easy chore!

Lately my biggest challenge has been time. Since I go to law school, I don't have as much time to spend on Wesnoth as I used to. I've finished with my finals now though, so I have some time from now until the 21st of January to work on it!

4) What do you plan to do with EoM in the future? Do you have a 'grand vision' for it?

My ultimate goals for the era are to completely balance the era both within itself, but also against mainline factions! This is going to be incredibly difficult, and will surely take months, if not more than a year to achieve. If the era can achieve this, then it will surely be played more by the Wesnoth community. The main reason people won't play with eras or specific factions is because they are unbalanced. An unbalanced game is no fun. Balancing is my #1 goal for the EoM for this reason.

Secondly, I have a few grand campaign ideas that I hope to make for the era, which would also boost its popularity. Currently there is one campaign in the works (slowly), but I don't want to talk about this too much because they would be better as a surprise!

5) What inspired you to create the (really nice) How To Play series?

Ah. Well, at the time I believe I was just starting with the entire Era of Myths project. I knew it would take lots of effort. I knew that, the way it was going, it wasn't going to be played much by other people, so it wasn't going to be of much use for a while. I felt the need to contribute something to the Wesnoth community that would be a benefit to everybody.

I have an extremely extensive gaming resume. I've played video games for 21 years. One thing I'm good at is figuring out how to find the tiny little differences in things that you can use to your advantage in games. Things that some people might overlook or undervalue. Fro example: in Super Smash Brothers (for N64) Captain Falcon has no ranged attack and has a very slow power attack (falcon punch). For this reason people may choose not to use him. He is however, along with Fox, the fastest character in the game. If you don't get hit (and you don't run off the edge of the map) you can't lose. Both Falcon and Fox had an attack that gave them an additional jump. The difference is that if Fox were hit during his, he would lose it and fall. If Falcon was hit during his, he could use it again for another jump. He could also use it again if he successfully grabbed someone with the attack. He could potentially jump without end! This gave Falcon the greatest survivability in that game, which I abused against my friends with much satisfaction!

I wanted to use this gift of finding the little things in games and give it to the Wesnoth community. The only way I could think of successfully doing this was a strategy guide. I set out around 1.2.1 to create an comprehensive guide of how to play as each faction against each other faction. The original installations met with much positive feedback! Unfortunately, the task was extremely time-consuming and mentally draining. I became burnt out after completing, I think, 2 and a half guides (I forget). From what I've received in posts, PMs, and in-game chats, the guide is still widely used today, even though it is out of date with respect to the unit statistics!

Some day I hope to get back to the guide and finish it up. I'm quite disappointed that I could not finish it at the time. I don't plan on working on it at all before 1.4 is released however, as it surely is close, and I would want the unit stats to remain stable for a while for the advice to be applicable for the longest period of time (so I won't have to rewrite it again!). Even after 1.4 is released however, do not expect me to begin work on it. The project really demands that a person want to sit down and go through every possibility with exacting precision. I may not have that desire for quite some time, and have no ability to predict when I will. Also, I will still have law school demands for the next 2.5 years, on and off, so that may also prevent me from working on the guide. Oh, plus there's the EoM.

An Interview With esr

1) esr, you have seen a lot of the open-source community - I have heard you are rather famous for it. How does The Battle For Wesnoth fit in to the movement?

As an enjoyable game! Not everything has to have earth-shaking significance in the greater strategic picture, It's kind of relaxing for me to be working on something that's just plain fun.

Yes, I could talk a lot of babble about how Linux needs high-quality games to attract end users. But the truth is that the big market-share numbers are in either MMORPGs or relatively mindless twitch games with glossy 3D graphics; I think Wesnoth attracts a more sophisticated and smaller user base, not the kind of numbers that could make a difference in the operating-system wars.

2) Why do you like Wesnoth? What is your favorite thing about it?

What initially drew me in was the music. I enjoy classical music, and the original high-romantic style music in Wesnoth is really quite good.

I like the tactical-puzzle aspect of the game, both solving them and composing them. I'm mainly interested in campaign play rather than MP. I've just recently added my first campaign, The Hammer of Thursagan to mainline; I don't expect it to be my last.

There are also many attractive aspects in the game's design. It has the one huge negative of being written in C++, which I learned for this project and have come to dislike strongly as a result. But there are lots of other really good things; the amount of stuff that would be code in a less-intelligently-designed game, but is here pushed into WML, is remarkable.

3) How long have you been contributing to the Battle For Wesnoth? How did you first find out about it?

I've been a Wesnoth developer for just shy of a year now. Yep, I just checked; my first commit was April 2007. I originally tripped over Wesnoth in somebody's comparative review of strategy games for Linux, I think.

Sirp gave me dev access himself. Neither of us expected that I would become the project's most prolific committer over the next nine months, but that's what happened so I guess he made a good call there.Smile

4) What do you think of the community that has formed around the game? How does it compare to other communities you have seen?

The Wesnoth community is amazingly healthy and effective. I continue to be impressed by Sirp's success at attracting not just programmers but artists and composers to contribute high-quality work. It's also remarkable that we function so well without much in the way of formal project leadership; Sirp hangs around and says encouraging things occasionally but think I've never seen him make a decision as such. Instead we have a group of senior devs who run forward in parallel and make decisions by consensus, which probably shouldn't work nearly as well as it actually does.

I've found myself reporting to other people the way we weave together all of our communications channels (IRC, email, bug tracker, web forums, svn hook scripts, monitor bots) as an example of good practice for other projects to emulate.

5) Where do you think Wesnoth is going to go in the long term? Do you have any plans for it?

I've already executed most of my big plans for Wesnoth, actually.

When I started, my main goal was to reduce the time and hassle cost of maintaining WML so the devs would be willing to carry more campaigns in mainline. I accomplished that by writing wmlscope and wmllint and wmlindent; nowadays we have thirteen mainline campaigns, more than double the six campaigns when I joined, but the total WML maintenance loud is actually lower than when I joined because I automated out most of the tedium. I expect to continue improving wmllint as the WML maintainers think up more things it can mechanize.

I did all that because I wanted more campaigns in mainline -- so I lifted six from UMC and wrote a seventh. Lifting the best user-maintained campaigns to mainline is something I expect to continue doing; rignt now I'm working on Delfador's Memoirs, and I've got my eye on two other UMC campaigns for later this year.

Somewhere in there I rewrote a significantly large part of the surface UI of the game, especially around dialog and message boxes. The translucent buttonless message windows were mine; I got that idea from a game called Iron Dragon and had to fight a bit of initial resistance to implement them in Wesnoth (happily that resistance melted fast once other devs actually saw the effect I had been aiming for). Also I got rid of a lot of the obnoxious popups and checkboxes at end of scenario in 1.2. My overall goal was to make the interface lighter, less modal, more Macintosh-like. I continue to keep an eye on possible UI improvements but don't have actual plans to do anything major there in the future.

My longest-term dream is to translate this game out of C++ into some language that is non-horrible. I've actually got in my head a design sketch of a rough-cut C++ to Python translator that I might write for this purpose, building on my program ctopy code (http://catb.org/~esr/ctopy/).

An Interview With kitty

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