Battle for Wesnoth

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

Mailing List: http://gna.org/mail/?group=wesnoth

Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).

Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned, 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 great deal 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 (1.10.6) happened in March 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is 1.11.2 which was release earlier this month. We're later in our development cycle, but there are some good projects out there that students can work on.

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

• According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects
• We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players
• More than two thousands downloads a day
• 4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions
• Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome
• Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 at LinuxQuestions.org
• 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
• High quality artwork: both original graphics and music
• Well­-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters
• Fun, unique gameplay
• Even after six years of development and with a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing
• 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.

Projects

• AI: Refactor recruitment algorithm A AI opponent have to decide in a separate phase which units to recruit. Right now the default recruitment algorithm is very simple and can be improved in many ways. I want to make the AI recruiting better, more fun to play against and more configurable by a scenario editor.
• Multiplayer campaign improvements The current multiplayer campaign support from both UMC developers/maintainers and players perspective is far behind comparing to singleplayer support. I propose a project to improve overall quality of multiplayer games by enabling singleplayer campaigns to be used as multiplayer campaigns and fixing most of the well known issues. The old multiplayer campaigns and scenarios should remain supported.
• Rethink the addon server from scratch The Wesnoth addon server is currently a monolithic block of code. In addition of rethink the architecture we would like to add internationalization support, synchronization with Wescamp (add-on translation), and code it with the powerful and modern Boost.Asio library.