[Widelands-announce] Widelands build 15 has been released

[Holger R. <Hol...@gm...>]

The Widelands Development Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of build 15 of Widelands. Widelands is a free, cross-platform strategy game in which players control the fate of a small tribe that can grow into a big empire, in a style of play that is unique in the open source world. Please visit our homepage http://www.widelands.org/ to learn more.

Widelands underwent some organisational changes: SourceForge recently enforced certain US rules upon their projects which defies the idea and spirit of Open Source Software. The widelands team was therefore forced to move to another provider. See our news post [1] for more information about our move. Our choice felt on launchpad.net and widelands is now developed and can be reached under [2]. This move includes bug trackers, code hosting and downloads. We benefited from this move also from a technical perspective. For example, everybody with a launchpad.net account or OpenID can now translate widelands into other languages. If you want to help with this undertaking, please to so at [3].

[1] http://wl.widelands.org/news/2010/02/11/what-we-are/
[2] http://launchpad.net/widelands
[3] http://translations.launchpad.net/widelands

Some of the highlights of this build are:
   * Second carriers on busy roads: donkeys, oxen and horses.
   * Scouts that can reveal a big area around their house
   * Zoom inside the mini map
   * A new scenario part to the "The green plateau"
   * Statistics will now show the reason why a building is not producing anything
   * Random maps will now contain resources, immovables and critters.
   * Improvements to the messaging system
   * new sounds
   * new music
   * new graphics

As usual, there have been many more improvements to the usability and performance, as well as numerous game-play improvements and bug-fixes.

Widelands uses SDL as graphics and input library and is currently available for Linux/x86, Windows (32-bit) Mac OS X (Intel) and in source code. Both binary and source packages are available from http://launchpad.net/widelands/build15/build15

Simply download the binary package for your operating system and run the widelands executable! If your operating system is not supported, download a source package and try to compile it for yourself. See the homepage for the libraries you need to have installed.

If you like what you see, please visit our homepage, http://www.widelands.org/ You may also want to check the forums and our IRC channel, #widelands on Freenode, to arrange multiplayer games with other players.

We especially welcome every helping hand, even if you just want to contribute by helping us find bugs. Also translators for all languages are always needed. If you want to get even more involved in the further development of Widelands, you can subscribe to wid...@li... on http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/widelands-public to keep up with development on a daily basis.