Re: [Wesnoth-dev] The problem with Knalgans....

[Richard Kettering]

On Feb 28, 2005, at 5:41 PM, James Spencer wrote:

> > For campaign purposes, and for those of us who have always wanted a
> > balanceable classic era, the dwarves need this unit.
>
> This begs the question(s):
> -What campaign would that be?

Several that have not been written.  Several that have.  I could see 
him being used as one of the dwarf leaders in any of the existing 
campaigns, instead of the same-old-dwarf-lord that everyone uses 
because we don't have anything else.

We have a problem in some of our developmental mindset regarding units.
Personally, and this is based on comments I have gotten from different 
people regarding the mermen, I think we should adopt a policy of "Build 
it and they will come."

Our number 1 problem is in getting art.  A lot of people can build 
custom units, but few of them are well drawn, and even fewer have good 
animations.  I think we should plug in most things with decent art that 
don't conflict with our fantasy world.  Unless the unit branches from 
an existing unit - I say we "include" it with a palatable set of stats. 
 By this, I mean that we put it into the game files, but not 
necessarily into any of the campaigns or multiplayer eras.

These units, just like freim's new desert tiles, are materials to build 
things from.  They were not made in response to need, they were made to 
pre-empt need.  Wesnoth worked just fine with sand being used to 
represent desert.  No one NEEDED desert.  But it is quite clearly a 
monumental improvement to have it available.


Metaphorically speaking, if making wesnoth games, both multiplayer and 
single player, is making a cloth, Dave et al. have provided the loom, 
and freim and I are spinning and dyeing the thread.
If you give us a little bit of free reign, we will provide you with a 
wonderful library of readymade art and units.  Please don't restrict 
us.



Without this - we have a few problems, many of them psychological.  In 
many situations, campaign designers do not even consider making new 
units - their art skills, and free time, are such that they do not even 
entertain the possibility.  On one occasion, Gafgarion was in such a 
situation, needing some enemy for the player to combat on an island.  
He thought to use the thieves, which had been created for a similar 
purpose (material to build campaigns out of), and then realized, quite 
happily, that I had made the mermen, which fit the situation much 
better, and made for a much less redundant game.  In an message he sent 
me, he seemed very thankful, and made it clear that he would not have 
considered creating units himself.

A unit like the dwarven runemaster does not necessarily need to be 
recruitable in multiplayer.  However, as I said before, he would make a 
cracking good GENERIC campaign hero - one that could be used in many 
different campaigns, and thus merits being in the basic unit tree.  I 
would replace the existing, and terrible-looking runemaster with him.

Additionally, from there, one can have a much easier time verifying if 
the unit does indeed improve the game by being in multiplayer.  Instead 
of standing around speculating on it theoretically, we can verify it 
experimentally.

Possible disadvantages I would like to pre-emptively debunk:
Data Bloat:  This is deeply eclipsed by other things, such as campaign 
pictures, music, and lack of compression (pngcrush/advpng-style 
compression).
Remember, these are only unit images.  All of those elf graphics I just 
updated - a whopping 110+ images, and most of the elves in the game, 
amounted to the size of just one HttT campaign story picture.
Unit Bloat:  They can't really clog the unit tree if they aren't 
recruitable - the only thing they will clog is the website which lists 
the standard units in the game.


On Feb 28, 2005, at 5:41 PM, James Spencer wrote:
> -So you intend to include units to balance all of the races in 
> 'classic'?

Absolutely.

Another mindset problem is that multiplayer revolves around default, 
and that other eras are a sub/superset of the units used there.  If we 
bothered to go to all of this trouble to make a system for multiple 
eras, then we should use them in a meaningful way.

There is nothing wrong with having a unit that is present in Classic, 
but not present in Default.  IIRC, currently, no such units exist, and 
I believe this is due to the above philosophy - people view Classic as 
a subset of Default, even though no one explicitly stated it had to be. 
 I know following such mathematical structures is pleasing to our 
logic-oriented minds (I have seen this dangerous tendency in myself, at 
times), but as Dave has said, there is no reason to establish such 
*implicit* rules - rules that people follow for no reason other than 
that is has always been done that way.  After a while, these rules get 
canonized by someone, and are followed explicitly, but the fact remains 
that there is no reason for them.

This is a dangerous thing, because it is needlessly limiting, and it is 
quite eerily reminiscent of the typical "authoritarian" mindset - doing 
things for no reason other than that they have been done that way.  If 
anyone should natively resist such tendencies, it should be a group of 
open-source zealots like us.  =)  Come on, guys...