Wyrmsun
Patch 4.1.1
- 4.1.1 Changelog
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* Items
- Removed Potions of Decay and Potions of Slowness from dungeon maps, replacing them with traps.
* Miscellaneous
- Fixed potential crash on start.
Patch 4.1.0
- 4.1.0 Changelog
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* Graphics
- Instead of being loaded on startup, icons are now loaded on demand in the main menu (e.g. for the encyclopedia), with the remaining ones being loaded when a game is started. This was done in order to improve startup speed.
- Font graphics are now loaded on demand, instead of all of them being loaded on startup.
* Miscellaneous
- Fixed issue which caused the name of the player's current age not to appear after loading a saved game.
- Fixed a potential crash which could occur soon after loading a saved game.
* Sounds
- Reworked the game's audio decoding and output code, as well as that for music support.
- Added death sounds for the Skeleton Warrior.
* Units
- Fixed issue which could result in units autocasting spells they didn't have, e.g. Germanic Gudjans autocasting the Infusion spell.
- When a unit exits a building which has a rally point, it will now be dropped at the adjacent tile closest to the rally point.
- Added Clay Golem unit.
Patch 4.0.5
Happy New Year!
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- 4.0.5 Changelog
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* Buildings
- Fixed the variation conditions for Germanic and Teutonic Docks.
* Miscellaneous
- Fixed a potential crash when exiting a loaded saved game.
* Pathfinding
- Fixed a resource-gathering pathfinding issue which occurred if e.g. wood piles were adjacent to the building to which the resource would be returned, and one of the adjacent wood piles were unreachable.
Patch 4.0.4
- 4.0.4 Changelog
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* Maps
- Fixed issue which caused a crash when starting the Italy custom map.
* Miscellaneous
- Fixed a save game load issue which occurred if a reference was held to a destroyed unit.
- Fixed crash which occurred when right-clicking the portrait of e.g. stone piles.
- Fixed issue which allowed the Anglo-Saxon civilization to be chosen for custom games even if they started at the most basic technological level (the bronze age), even though the Anglo-Saxons are an iron age civilization.
* Pathfinding
- Fixed a pathfinding issue which could cause minecarts to get stuck when looking for a place to return goods to.
* Quests
- Fixed issue which caused the defeat to be triggered for certain quests when a required hero died only after their corpse had completely withered away.
- Added side-quests for producing furniture for the Anglo-Saxon and Norse civilizations, as well as for some Teutonic factions.
* Scenarios
- Added several mini-forts with neutral hostile Gnoll Warriors, randomly-placed on the Earth map in areas where there were historically werehyena myths (i.e. North Africa).
Patch 4.0.3
- 4.0.3 Changelog
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* Miscellaneous
- Fixed issue with saving workers assigned to a resource (resulted in a crash when loading a game).
* Quests
- Fixed issue which caused a defeat on start for the The Tomb of Durahn Eikinskjaldi quest.
* Scenarios
- Fixed issue which caused the Westward Migration introduction trigger to fire for the The Settlement of Scandinavia scenario as well.
- Fixed issue with no speaker being assigned to dialogue messages which should pertain to a Dwarven Miner for the The First Dwarves Scenario.
- Fixed issue in the The First Dwarves scenario which caused other kobold tribes to be at war with you when the Grafvitning Tribe became hostile.
Patch 4.0.2
- 4.0.2 Changelog
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* Characters
- Added "Mboytata" unique wyrm to Nidavellir, based on the fire serpent of the same name from Tupi mythology.
* Items
- Christmas Hats can now drop during the second half of December (in the real world), even if it isn't winter in-game.
* Scenarios
- Fixed an issue which caused some of the triggers for the Westward Migration scenario to not work properly, making it uncompleteable.
* Units
- Added the Skeleton Warrior. This unit can only be placed via the editor or obtained via a cheat for now.
Patch 4.0.1
- 4.0.1 Changelog
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* Miscellaneous
- Fixed a potential crash when starting a map.
Patch 4.0.0
This patch implements a great number of changes. There have been substantial technical improvements done to the game's engine (such as parallel sound loading), as well as new additions to the game itself.
In order to improve playability under higher resolutions, there is now a 2x scaling option in the video options menu. The scaling primarily uses the xBRZ algorithm, which is specially made to upscale pixel art.
The game also supports using prescaled graphics instead, which is made use of, for instance, for the icon of the Eagle Eye ability:
The way player territories work has also undergone an overhaul. Whereas previously a player obtained territory as a range around their buildings, territories are now preassigned to a given settlement site, and when a player builds a town hall there they acquire the entirety of that territory (so that only they can build there).
A number of performance improvements and bugfixes have also been made.
Many of the scenarios set on Earth now make use of a new 384x384 map:
Which units and factions are applied to the map depends on the start date of each scenario. This map will also be used as the foundation of future Earth scenarios.
And there have been many more changes as well. For the full changelog, see below.
Please note that for the time being this update is only available under Windows on Steam.
Enjoy!
Merry Christmas to you all!
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- 4.0.0 Changelog
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* Abilities
- Added the Infusion ability for dwarven Runesmiths, Runemasters and Arcanisters. When used, this ability increases the arcane damage of the target unit by 4.
- Fixed the tooltip of the Barkskin ability to correctly reflect that it increases armor by 4.
- Improved the performance of autocasting.
- The hotkey for Inspire is now "p", as its previous hotkey ("i") was the same as that to open the inventory.
* Ages
- Norse players now require not only the Spatha upgrade, but also Sailing and either Shield Wall or Svinfylking to enter the Viking Age.
* AI
- The AI now goes to the aid of its attacked buildings, rather than only its units.
- The AI now purposefully builds units/buildings to complete its quests.
- The AI now only declares war during scenarios after 20 minutes of playing, so that main quests can proceed more smoothly.
* Buildings
- All Germanic buildings now have snowy variations.
- The Teutonic Mason's Shop now correctly uses its active animations.
- The Germanic Stables graphics now use semi-transparent shadows, as the other buildings do.
- Teuton buildings now have snowy variations.
- Copper, Silver, Gold, Iron, Mithril and Coal Deposits and Mines now have snowy variations.
- The Mercenary Camp, Settlement Site, Yale Cave and Yale Hunting Lodge buildings now have snowy variations.
- Added the Elven Town Hall, Stronghold, Farm and Barracks buildings.
- Added the Latin Dock building.
- The construction of town halls over settlement sites now possesses two additional (generic) construction frames.
- Added notes in the encyclopedia for deposit/mine buildings, describing their conversion rates to copper.
* Characters
- A character's father, mother and children are now delineated in their encyclopedia entry.
* Deities
- A deity's father, mother and children are now delineated in their encyclopedia entry.
* Editor
- Fixed crash which occurred when creating new cave and dungeon maps in the editor.
* Items
- Bows now have specific graphics for when they are on the ground.
- Added meat food item.
* Miscellaneous
- Reduced the time of day color effects, so that the graphics aren't too dark during night.
- Instead of tiles being owned by a player based on an influence range expanding from the player's buildings, tiles are now assigned to a settlement, and when the player builds a hall on the settlement site ownership of all its tiles are gained.
- Added 2x scaling option.
- Removed the "Use OpenGL" option, as OpenGL is now always used for rendering.
- Reworked the random number generator to provide better results.
- Improved the performance of resource gathering pathfinding.
* Modding
- Added instructions (in the game's "documents" subfolder) on how to create a mod in the game's new database format.
* Multiplayer
- Fixed possible source of desyncs related to hiring units at mercenary camps.
* Quests
- Quests can now be accepted in a sub-menu in the town hall interface.
- Added dozens of new side-quests for gathering resources, building structures, researching upgrades and hunting predators. These quests are available for the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Gothic, Norse, Suebi and Teutonic civilizations, and provide flavor based on each civilization's language.
- The quest pool is now updated each minute, instead of each half-minute, to give the player a bit more time to pick a quest before the pool changes.
- The Master of Metal quest no longer grants 2 Buras on completion, providing just the copper reward now.
- The House of Seven Fathers quest is now available only for the Norse civilization (previously it was also available for the Germanic civilization).
* Scenarios
- Other kobolds will no longer attack the Grafvitning Tribe, to prevent it from being destroyed too soon in the The First Dwarves scenario.
- The Nidavellir scenarios now take place in a single map layer. The underground portions of the map are now in the same layer as the surface portions, but retain their peculiar characteristics, e.g. cave walls being non-passable by air units and missiles.
- Reduced the size of the Aurvang and Joruvellir map templates.
- The Settlement of Scandinavia scenario now requires the player to build a Chieftain's Hall in Copenhagen instead of Leidre.
- The scenario screen now shows the year in which the scenario starts.
- Moved the start year of the The First Dwarves scenario from 3000 BC to 25000 BC.
- Made it so many Earth scenarios now take place on a new 384x384 map.
* Sounds
- The "work complete" sound now correctly plays when an upgrade has been researched.
- Sounds are now loaded in parallel, decreasing audio loading times.
* Terrain
- Units in underground terrain tiles (cave floor and rockbound cave floor) are now treated as if they are at night for sight range bonus purposes.
- Units in underground terrain tiles are now have the night-time color effect applied on them.
- Terrain feature tooltips now only appear after one second.
- Destroyed rocks and walls now disappear after some time.
* Units
- Dwarven axe infantry units now have +10 HP and -2 evasion.
- Dwarven spear infantry units now have +5 HP and -2 evasion (they already had a free +5 HP bonus before).
- Added Elven Worker unit.
- Dwarven Miners can no longer equip axes.
- Priest units now have a slower attack rate.
- Frogs and crows now have their own icons, and are selectable.
- A unit's type name will now have its civilization prefixed to it if the type's civilization is different than that of its owning player. For example: a goblin "Swordsman" which is recruited as a mercenary by a dwarven player will then be called a "Goblin Swordsman".
* User Interface
- Replaced the main menu background with a new one made by Jinn.
- Removed the "Larger Popup Font" option, as its purpose is largely fulfilled by the 2x scaling option.
- Added "Territories" minimap mode. Press TAB to toggle through the minimap modes.
- Added minimap mode with the territories of each settlement.
- Added support for zooming the minimap for maps with tile size larger than the pixel size of the minimap (e.g. 256x256 maps if the minimap is 128x128). Press Shift-TAB to zoom/unzoom the minimap.
- Simplified the appearance of terrain on the minimap. Each terrain type is now represented by a particular color (with seasonal variations).
- The player's population number can now be seen when hovering the food icon on the top bar. The number is based on the number of organic, non-fauna units the player possesses. The population number is for flavor only, and has no gameplay effect.
- The (human) player's name in the player list is now shown in green.
The Path Forward
After much consideration and practical experimentation, I took the decision to keep using the Stratagus engine, while reworking and modernizing it to enhance code quality and productivity.
For the UI, the plan is to gradually make use of the Qt Framework to replace the old, brittle Stratagus UI code with an UI based on Qt, which is more flexible and contains more features than Stratagus' inbuilt UI code. A crucial advantage of Qt in this case is that I can use it as a library (which I could not with Godot), and am able to gradually replace the old UI, without needing to do it all at once for it to work.
During the last few months, I have done much progress in improving the game's engine. I have posted a new update to Wyrmsun's development branch (accessible through the beta options on Steam), which contains a plethora of improvements, such as a 2x scaled mode (using the xBRZ algorithm), parallel audio loading and a host of other engine changes which may not be immediately perceptible when playing the game, but which are crucial for its further development.
I wish a good weekend to you all!
-- Andrettin
Goblin Greetings
The first one I would like to show to you is the goblin "victory" background:
Travelling through one of Nidavellir's dark forests, a dwarven warband was ambushed from the shadows with goblin fury. Their heads were mounted on stakes, and left as a dire warning.
Next, we have the background for dwarven victory, depicting a stonelord in his war-glory:
And finally, there is the new main menu background, which brings together the variety of elements contained in the game. A human bronze age warrior watches warily, as a deadly battle proceeds before his eyes. A dwarf seeks to avenge his fallen kin who fell prey to a great wyrm, while the sun shines above the beast's head:
