Battle for Wesnoth

License: GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)

Web Page: http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

Mailing List: wesnoth-dev@gna.org

Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a Free, turn-based strategy game with a high-fantasy theme that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).

Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a vast amount of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.

The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.7) happened in August 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is at version 1.11.9, released at the beginning of February 2014. We are currently working towards another stable release which should be out in Q2 2014.

Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:

• We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players
• More than a thousand downloads a day
• more than 6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions
• Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 at LinuxQuestions.org[2][3]
• In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games

Wesnoth's most notable features include:

• A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development
• High quality artwork: both original graphics and music
• Well­-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters
• Fun, unique gameplay
• Even after a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers
• Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.

For our Ideas page, please have a look at [4]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.

[1] http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy
[2] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/
[3] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/
[4] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

Projects

• Improve AI by implementing global attack/retreat decision A rule-based expert system style solution utilizing dynamic programming to make decisions
• SDL2 transition I propose to help with the transition to SDL2, with special focus on implementing hardware accelerated rendering.
• Unifying Single- and Multi-Player Code Paths Differing code paths cause some user-made content to only work in single- or multi-player games. The goal of this project is to reconcile the code paths so that all content works across game modes.