Older News
December
November
Wesnoth 1.12.5: Maintenance Release
Tuesday, November 10 2015
Wesnoth 1.12.5 is now available. This is a maintenance release for the stable 1.12.x series and, as such, it delivers an assortment of bug fixes and other improvements over previous releases in this series. The bug fixes this time around revolve around more conventional issues than 1.12.4 or 1.12.2, so there is no need to panic and rush to download the new release. Still, we recommend you check the forum thread for a list of the most notable fixes and changes in this version.
As on previous occasions, we also offer two versions of the changelog: a trimmed-down players changelog including only those items considered to be relevant in regular gameplay, and a more technical full changelog for enthusiasts and content creators. There are a few items relevant for multiplayer games that were not added to the changelogs in a timely fashion, though; those can still be found in the forum thread for your convenience.
The source code, Windows, and Apple OS X packages are already available on the downloads page. You may also find packages for other platforms there as they become available.
You may comment on this release in the forums.
July
Wesnoth Needs Your Help!
Saturday, July 25 2015
Twelve years ago, David White sat down over a weekend and created the small pet project that we know today as The Battle For Wesnoth. At the time, Dave was the game’s sole programmer, working alongside another person, Francisco Muñoz, who produced the first graphics. As more and more people began to contribute in the years that followed, the game grew from a tiny personal project into the extensive one we know today. If you read the credits, you will find hundreds and hundreds of names who have dedicated tens of thousands of hours contributing toward Wesnoth’s continued development. To all the people on that list, especially those who are still active to this day, a sincere thank you.
Sadly, a hard truth must be faced: Wesnoth, as a project, is understaffed. At this time, there are fewer than half a dozen developers working on each new version of the game, and even fewer of them are able to work on the engine itself. We do not collectively have the time or skills to fix bugs as quickly as we should, or implement features as rapidly as we would like. The game itself suffers from an aging codebase and old software. As the gaming industry marches on and even the simplest games become more complex, Wesnoth has begun to feel outdated. Our internal organization is in need of improvement. The long length of the 1.11.x development cycle was caused less by us working on fixes or features than by an inability to successfully do these things in a timely fashion.
To put it bluntly, this ship is sinking.
Wesnoth has always had an incredibly dedicated and creative community of fans. Your bug reports and testing have been incredible in helping us polish off rough edges; without you the game would have died a quiet death years ago. But now we need your help for something more.
This is an official call for help to anyone, from within or outside the community, to assist us in the further development of the Battle for Wesnoth. Especially required are:
- C++ programmers with intermediate to advanced knowledge of the language, preferably with prior experience in maintaining a large codebase. Having experience working on computer games on Wesnoth’s scale would be a plus. We are in particular need of more people able to help with development on Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X, both platforms where Wesnoth suffers from long-standing bugs that greatly impact the game’s usability.
- Python programmers able to take over and maintain, and hopefully improve, our mainline maintenance toolchain, including wmllint, wmlindent, and wmlscope.
- WML coders able to take over maintenance of any of the following unmaintained mainline campaigns: Heir to the Throne, Dead Water, Delfador’s Memoirs, Liberty, Legend of Wesmere, The Sceptre of Fire, The Rise of Wesnoth, The South Guard, Eastern Invasion, and Son of the Black Eye.
In particular, Legend of Wesmere is in dire need of people willing to invest additional time testing and fixing its multiplayer port for both 1.12.x and 1.13.x, as it risks being removed in a future stable series otherwise. - Please note that any willing volunteers should have good communication skills and preferably be experienced with working alongside fellow members of a large project. We aim to maintain a friendly and open relationship between the development team and the community.
It is our hope that with your help, we will be able to take Wesnoth higher and expand its fanbase. We already have plans to release Wesnoth as a free game on Steam once we have an active enough team to quickly fix any reported issues as they come in. We hope to make that a reality, and possibly go even further. But again, we need your help to make this happen.
Anyone interested should join the #wesnoth-dev IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (either with your IRC client of choice or your browser via freenode’s webchat) and get involved with us in the Developers’ Discussion forum thread, which also contains helpful pointers for getting started.
June
Wesnoth 1.12.4, 1.13.1, and Security Advisory
Monday, June 29 2015
Wesnoth 1.12.4 — a maintenance release for the stable 1.12.x series — and Wesnoth 1.13.1 — the second 1.13.x development release — are now available. Both include various fixes and improvements made since the previous releases, as well as a fix for an important security vulnerability which allows a malicious user to steal add-on upload credentials. We urge content authors using any previous version to upgrade immediately.
Check the respective forum threads for these releases for a list of the most notable changes in both versions:
- Wesnoth 1.12.4 — maintenance release
- Wesnoth 1.13.1 — development release
See also our security advisory for previous versions.
The source code and the Windows installer files for both versions are already available on the downloads page. You may also find packages for other platforms there as they become available.
About Add-on Passphrase Security
Thursday, June 11 2015
Content creators who have published user-made add-ons to the Wesnoth add-ons server are surely aware that we currently use a very primitive authentication mechanism that works on a per-add-on basis. An uploader-defined passphrase is provided in the add-on’s .pbl file and this is matched against the add-ons server’s records.
What is not necessarily obvious is that the passphrase is stored in clear text form not only on the client’s side, but also on the server. This means that any person with access to the server configuration can see every add-on’s passphrase in a human-readable format that makes it trivial for it to be stolen. Furthermore, it is also possible for add-ons to obtain add-on passphrases from the client and transmit them over the network. Because of this, we advise content uploaders to use unique passphrases for their content and never reuse an existing password that could grant a malicious party access to their systems or other sites. Also, in order to prevent vandalism, we suggest either using hard-to-guess passphrases, or leaving the passphrase field blank or omitting it altogether when first uploading an add-on so that the add-ons client will generate and save a random one instead.
People who suspect they may be using insecure passphrases for their add-ons should send a private message to the Forum Administrators group to request changing passphrases; or use the command-line add-ons client with the following parameters if possible, substituting the text within brackets and replacing 1.12.x with 1.13.x or 1.10.x if applicable:
wesnoth_addon_manager -p 1.12.x --change-passphrase <Addon_Folder_Name> <old passphrase> <new passphrase>
April
Wesnoth 1.13.0: Development Release
Monday, April 20 2015
The first release of the new development series, Wesnoth 1.13.0, is now available. Check the forum thread for a list of the most notable changes in this version.
As on previous occasions, we also offer two versions of the changelog: a trimmed-down players changelog including only those items considered to be relevant in regular gameplay, and a more technical full changelog for enthusiasts and content creators. Be warned that both changelogs are extremely long this time around, since this is the very first development release in the series and many changes have piled up since 1.12 beta 2 (version 1.11.11) was released.
The source code and the Windows installer are already available on the downloads page. You may also find packages for other platforms there as they become available.
Bear in mind that this is a development version — as such, it is likely to include a lot of new bugs, some of which are already listed in the release notes. If you encounter other issues, make sure to report them to us so they can be fixed for future releases.
You may comment on this release in the forums.
Wesnoth 1.12.2: Maintenance Release & Security Advisory
Saturday, April 11 2015
Wesnoth 1.12.2 is now available. This is a maintenance release for the stable 1.12.x series including a critical security fix, as well as an assortment of other bug fixes and improvements over version 1.12.1.
We urge users of all previous versions to upgrade immediately.
Check the forum thread for a list of the most notable changes in this version, and the security advisory for previous versions.
As usual, we also offer two versions of the changelog: a trimmed-down players changelog including only those items considered to be relevant in regular gameplay, and a more technical full changelog for enthusiasts and content creators.
The source code, Windows, Apple OS X, and OpenPandora packages are already available on the downloads page. You may also find packages for other platforms there as they become available.
You may comment on this release in the forums.
January
Wesnoth 1.12.1: Maintenance Release
Sunday, January 25 2015
Wesnoth 1.12.1 is now available. This is a maintenance release for the stable 1.12.x series and, as such, it delivers an assortment of bug fixes and other improvements over version 1.12.0. Check the forum thread for a list of the most notable changes in this version.
As on previous occasions, we also offer two versions of the changelog: a trimmed-down players changelog including only those items considered to be relevant in regular gameplay, and a more technical full changelog for enthusiasts and content creators.
The source code, Windows, and Apple OS X packages are already available on the downloads page. You may also find packages for other platforms there as they become available.
You may comment on this release in the forums.