What's New in Wesnoth 1.4
For players, the 1.4 version brings you no fewer than seven new mainline campaigns, a redesigned user interface, an amazing variety of high-quality new game music, and a refresh of the game artwork including improved portrait images for many unit types. For designers, the map editor and WML have been enhanced to significantly increase your creative options in writing scenarios.
Just as importantly, it is probably our most solid release yet. We retired over 300 individual bugs during the 1.3 development period, and introduced several new tools that prevent entire classes of bugs by sanity-checking Wesnoth's data files before they ship to you.
Here are 1.4's new features in more detail:
For Players
Seven new campaigns now ship with the game
We have more than doubled the number of campaigns we ship. In addition to one brand new campaign, The Hammer of Thursagan, we now also ship polished, upgraded and improved versions of the following well-known user-written campaigns: Descent into Darkness, Liberty, Northern Rebirth, Sceptre of Fire, An Orcish Incursion, and Son of the Black-Eye.
Parts of the user interface of the game have been redesigned
The 1.4 Wesnoth user interface has a cleaner look and feel, with lightweight semi-transparent transient windows replacing many of the old-fashioned opaque modal dialogues with buttons. Subtle new graphics effects when you select a unit and target an enemy help you keep track of what is going on without getting between you and the gameplay. The game now displays owned and total villages in the status bar. Interface actions and day/night changes now have unobtrusive cue sounds. You can use drag'n'drop to move units. Mousewheels are supported.
You can now review scenarios, chat, and set options after victory
You'll no longer get two modal dialogues full of checkbox options immediately after victory in a scenario and then be instantly returned to the lobby (or, in campaigns, jumped to the next scenario). Instead, there's just one summary popup, after which you'll be in a 'linger mode' that allows you to chat with friends and foes, use normal commands, change your options, and in general do anything except more battle actions.
The multiplayer collection has been revised and extended
New maps and multiplayer scenarios: Auction-X, Dark Forecast, Hamlets, Mokena Prairie, The Manzivan Traps, Xanthe Chaos.
Revised maps: Alirok Marsh (formerly Triple Blitz), Amohsad Caldera, Blue Water Province, Castle Hopping Isle, Caves of the Basilisk, Crusaders Fields, Cynsaun Battlefield, Den of Onis, Fallenstar Lake (formerly Meteor Lake), Forest of Fear, Freelands (formerly Charge), Hexcake, Hornshark Island, Island of the Horatii, King of the Hill, Lagoon, Loris River, Merkwuerdigliebe, Morituri, Paths of Daggers, Sablestone Delta, Siege Castles, Silverhead Crossing, Sulla's Ruins, Waterloo Sunset, Weldyn Channel (formerly Blitz), Wesbowl.
Changed and rebalanced units
The Footpad, Poacher and Thug units can advance all the way to level 3. Many units have been tuned and rebalanced, including Ancient Lich, Elvish Sorceress, Fugitive, Ghost, Hurricane Drake, Lich, Mage of Light, Mermaid Diviner, Mermaid Priestess, Merman Warrior, Naga Myrmidon, Necromancer, Orcish Assassin, Ranger, Royal Guard, Sky Drake, White Mage, Wraith, and all the Saurians and Bats.
Also, the "holy" damage type has been changed to "arcane" and is now a general anti-magic attack useful against more than just undead: elves, drakes and trolls are among the units now vulnerable against it.
Many portraits have been revised or added
Many unit and hero portraits have been improved or added. We now have a particularly beautiful set of new portraits in a uniform style for the Elvish units.
New uses of animation
Many more units have full combat animation. Many unit also have idle animations which fire periodically when they are not doing anything specific. Some units and items also have standing animations that a constantly active; bats flap their wings and campfires flicker. There are improved base frames for many units, including Mages and Ghosts, and many special effects such as magic attacks have been improved as well.
Multiplayer lobby improvements
You can set a list of user nicks to be ignored (you won't see chat from them). You can also set a list of friends; their nicks will be highlighted and shown at the top of your user list.
Miscellaneous other improvements
You can now select a female leader in multiplayer. The in-game help has been revised, reorganized and expanded. There are five new all-original symphonic music tracks, and many new or improved sound effects. Savegames are automatically compressed to save you disk space.
For Campaign Developers
The map editor is much more capable
Maps can now be opened directly from a scenario file and saved back to it. Starting positions no longer need to be on keeps. The terrain palette is divided into groups of like terrains, so you'll scroll it less often. And there are many new terrains; farmland, Elvish castle, and windmill have been added to the basic set, and there are bridges for crossing swamp, deep water, or chasms. Treatment of map edges has been changed to eliminate some terrain distortions at map edges and make small maps look better on a large display (and these changes apply to the game display too).
WML is considerably more powerful
Animation WML has been completely redesigned in a much more flexible and general way. Complex variable substitution is now used in all action WML. There is safe random-number generation in multiplayer. A [set_menu_item] tag allows scenario designers to create custom right-click context menu items which perform arbitrary WML actions. The Standard Unit Filter and Standard Location Filter elements have new capabilities (including completed boolean expressions) that make them much more powerful and can replace most of what used to be done with special-purpose filters.
Multiplayer campaigns
The game engine will now support multiplayer campaigns, though we don't ship any yet. This is an opportunity for designers to explore a new frontier in Wesnoth play.
