Wesnoth Evolution: “Strategy”

Some may recall that during my review of Wesnoth 0.1 I found a mysterious package inside the 0.1 distribution named strategy-source.tar. On closer inspection, the contents turned out to predate the sources of the first version of Wesnoth released to the general public by at least four days. However, I didn’t try to compile or run the mysterious application in that opportunity.

We are now going to take a route back in time to codename “Strategy”, which is a prototype version of the same engine powering Wesnoth 0.1. For readability purposes, we’re going to dub it Wesnoth-00 and proceed with the review.

In this article, I use a Win32 build running on Wine (1.3.6), with a single patch applied on it to not make the game go 1024x768 fullscreen. The data files are those belonging to Wesnoth 0.1, since the prototype archive only contained the source code.

This is an even worse wreck than 0.1, with good reason — the terrain definitions, like pretty much everything, are hardcoded into the game engine instead of being provided by WML. Plus, there may have been changes in 0.1’s data files after Wesnoth-00 was last modified or archived.

However, it gives us a glimpse of a possibility never mentioned before. Where the owned villages counter should be, in the sidebar we see a “Towers” counter. And yep, that does stand for the amount of owned villages as we know it. It sounds like the gameplay was originally heading towards the management of cities, fortresses or castles which could be owned by a player to increase their income, but that idea was scrapped and villages took their place instead.

It’s not apparent in the screenshot for obvious reasons, but the UI elements look even worse in this version — pop-up dialogs have no visible borders or background. From this it also stems the lack of an initial objectives/story screen in Wesnoth-00.

The AI does work and it can already recruit units. Movement is animated, and the gameplay mechanics are the same as Wesnoth 0.1 aside from the ownership of “towers” rather than villages. However, it’s possible for the enemy units to get stuck in an infinite loop moving between adjacent villages like in the northwestern corner of the first map. Maybe there was no movement cost across villages at this point. Due to the user interface’s primitiveness, the only way to stop that cycle is killing the Wesnoth process.

Overall, this isn’t a very interesting prototype like I expected, but it’s certain proof that it doesn’t predate Wesnoth 0.1 by much, considering Dave’s coding skills and speed as I have witnessed while working with Jetrel and him in Frogatto. Besides what has been mentioned in this post, Wesnoth-00 was quite ready for a public release on that fateful July in 2003.