While working on Wespal 0.4.0 I ran into many regressions, some of them caused by code refactoring, others by behavioural changes I didn’t entirely foresee, including a particularly annoying one involving the XCF plugin and embedded colour profiles that took me about three nights to have an eureka moment about.
My future self is gonna be thankful some day that I finally added a CI workflow and test suite to Wespal, built and run on Linux, macOS, and Windows for each push via GitHub Actions, so I can promptly find out if I accidentally break some of the more crucial components, or cause the whole thing to stop compilling on particular platform because of a missed #ifdef or unusual typedef difference. Or, you know, because while I require Qt 6.4 as a minimum, my development environment actually uses Qt 6.4, so one day I may slip up and add code that does not compile against the 6.4 API.
Now if only I could have CI coverage for the static Windows builds as well...
After a very long hiatus, I finally got around to dusting off an old tool I wrote yeaaaars ago for previewing recoloured Wesnoth assets. Over the past month, I ported it from Qt 4 to Qt 6 (and C++17), cleaned it up, and hopefully properly ensured that this time around everything works 100% fine on macOS — except for the lack of app signing, at least.
Wespal (formerly Wesnoth RCX) version 0.4.0 is out now!
Maintaining open source software can be quite a chore. The bigger something becomes, the greater the chances are that people find bugs in it and that those bugs interfere with their user experience. After a while, you end up with so much work to do – often for free – that you start to wonder if it was even worth embarking on that endeavour in the first place.
Now, what I am about to talk about is my own experience as an open source game developer. The magic of OSS manifests in wildly different ways depending on what the software’s purpose is, but I think some of these feelings are relatable for those who work on anything meant for use by a non-technical audience, such as desktop environment components and apps, image editors, media players, and so on.
Effective as of today the 22nd of February, I have officially resigned from the Wesnoth, Inc. Board of Directors.
The post wherein I inform of this to the Board and the Project Council is not currently public, but I am including its full contents below for reference.
Due to recent changes in my life, I can no longer adequately dedicate time to unpaid activities such as Wesnoth-related work in the way people are probably accustomed to, which is why I have decided to officially step down from my position as member of the Wesnoth Inc Board of Directors. I do intend to continue to be around to help out with server administration and maintenance of the add-ons server software until someone else is able to commit to the same tasks in a more reliable fashion, although my presence on Discord and IRC is going to remain scarce and prompted primarily by direct tagging/highlighting of my username.
It is my hope that the Board will be able to find an adequate replacement and/or expand its membership further so it can continue to uphold the 2/3 requirements stated in the Project Constitution.
Regards
Iris
Just to be clear, there are no ulterior motives behind my decision and this is purely something that I needed to do in order to better prioritise other work outside of Wesnoth.
Hello again and welcome to my increasingly infrequent round-up of Wesnoth-related activity for the past number of years. Although the sparseness of my schedule in this case might actually work to my advantage — Wesnoth 1.14.0 went gold on May 1st 2018, and its feature release successor is version 1.16.0, released on October 25th 2021 merely two weeks ago!
This time around there are no big life-changing events in between — well, sort of — so I’m gonna spare you the pain of reading through an overdramatic intro and just skip straight to the nitty-gritty.
It’s been quite a while since I last properly talked about The Battle for Wesnoth in here — years, really. Some people know that at some point in 2016 I mostly stopped contributing to the project, aside from some server-side stuff such as maintaining the multiplayer games server (wesnothd) and the add-on content server (campaignd).
Since then, a lot of people new to Wesnoth, as well as people not familiarized with Wesnoth, have heard about me, and they don’t really know what it is I’ve actually done over the years. So, I thought it would be a good idea to write about my involvement with this game since I happen to feel like writing walls of text stuff right now.
Oh hi there. Long time no see. Apparently I haven’t posted since February 2017, huh. A lot of things have happened in the meantime, it turns out. Some of those things are to blame for my general inactivity elsewhere, but when it comes to this blog I just can’t seem to come up with anything to say worthy of my trademark text walls, at least not ever since I joined Twitter several years ago— wait, wasn’t that in 2010? Time sure flies. I feel old. Okay, let’s face it, I am old.
“Iris” version 1.1.0 as of earlier today
In addition to it having been a while since my last post in here, it has also been a while since the last time I gave the website an overhaul, for what little use it sees nowadays. Because of that, plus some of my experiences designing the new website theme for The Battle for Wesnoth last year, I decided to try to modernize my own a little bit so it looks more in tune with my current practices. I also decided to spruce things up with a new colour scheme, like last time, taking things in a different direction to what I’m used to.
An attentive reader who’s been around for long enough might be able to tell that the “Iris” design last year did undergo a slight revision incorporating Font Awesome in order to make icons not look awful on high-DPI screens. This was a natural conclusion of my work designing and testing the Wesnoth.org theme on devices with higher pixel density. Plus it was precisely last year that I actually caved in and got a smartphone given to me by a relative, further highlighting all the inconveniences of designing things on/for 96 DPI these days. Other than that, though, the design remained mostly unchanged from what I made in 2014.
“Iris” version 1.2.0, aptly codenamed Amethyst for reasons that should be blatantly obvious, is mostly the same as before under the hood, but on the surface it hopefully looks shinier and more elegant and modern. Even though I am not using the site much right now like I mentioned above, I have a faint hope that the new look will motivate me to post more again.
Since there wasn’t a New Year post last year, or even the year before that, or uh... the year before that as well... actually I guess there haven’t been New Year posts in here since January 1st 2013. Oops. Anyway, I guess it’s time for a short summary of what I have been up to in recent times. Let’s see...
Nearly 11 years ago, I was checking out some of the free and open-source games included with the openSUSE distribution when I came across a fantasy turn-based strategy game called Wesnoth. I vaguely remember taking a quick look at it and dismissing it for some reason. It wasn’t until an OS update later the same year that I would actually give version 0.9.5 a proper try. Immediately upon doing so, I was enthralled by the game’s sheer quality and its surprisingly accessible gameplay.
There is nothing noteworthy about AtS 0.9.16 whatsoever, but IftU 1.99.0 constitutes the first public codename Reconstruction release after several years of work. That is, not counting this year’s April 1st release (which apparently everyone simply assumed to be a hoax instead of actually downloading it from the trunk add-ons server).
I’m cutting this post short since — as should be painfully evident — I don’t really feel motivated to update this blog nowadays. Still, the announcement over at the Wesnoth forums has some more details about this first IftU 1.99.x/2.0 RC series release that are worth checking out if you are planning on installing or updating to this new version.
