[Widelands-announce] Widelands Build 16 released

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

The Widelands Development Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of build 16 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.

Some of the highlights of this build are:
   * a new scripting Engine that allows for complex scenarios.
   * a new watch-me-do tutorial and a new scenario for the Atlanteans
   * win conditions for multiplayer games which add variety 
   * OpenGL renderer
   * improvements to the user interface in many places
   * more control over which wares are stored in ware houses
   * team support in multiplayer
   * shared kingdom for multiplayer, more than one player can control the same kingdom
   * new maps
   * new sounds
   * extremely many new graphics and animations: there is no concept graphic in widelands anymore.

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

Widelands is currently translated to 100% into the following languages: German, French and Dutch. It is > 80% translated into the following languages: Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, English (United Kingdom), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Galicia, Italian, Finnish, Czech. You can help out translating directly in your web browser: http://translations.launchpad.net/widelands .

The new scripting engine makes it impossible to load scenario maps from build 15 or earlier. If you are in the middle of a scenario (like a campaign map), finish it in build 15, then upgrade to build 16 and continue the next map in build 16. Loading of non scenario games from build 15 is supported.

Widelands uses SDL as graphics and input library and is currently available for Windows (32-bit) and Mac OS X (Intel, PPC) and in source code. We no longer ship binary Linux packages because of the poor compatibility between Linux distributions. Instead, we try to make compiling for Linux users as easy as possible. Also, most distributions will pick up build 16 into their repositories very quickly. Both binary and source packages are available from http://launchpad.net/widelands/build16/build16

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 or meet us in the forum.