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

[Richard Kettering]

I should have clarified a few things.

This was just a suggestion, one which I obviously have no authority to 
implement.  I have never done things without permission, I wouldn't 
suddenly start doing so.

I meant that this "policy," such as things go for wesnoth, would only 
apply for well-drawn units which, in the opinion of at least one 
campaign author, might have use in multiple campaigns.

> I tend to agree with the overall philosophy, however, why do we have 
> to actually ship the images and unit stats with the game? We've 
> already had a system where we had a 'library' of graphics in the Wiki, 
> and any campaign designer could cherry pick it for their use as they 
> wanted. Perhaps the system needs to be revised to combat the Wiki 
> vandalism problem, but the point remains that if the units aren't 
> actually used, I'm not sure they have to be shipped with the game. 
> Shipping them with the game also restricts the campaign designer 
> somewhat by saying "this is the stats the unit should have," while 
> just providing images externally gives the campaign designer more 
> implied freedom to use the images as they want, and assign them stats 
> and so forth.

Given the rate at which we get decent graphics for new units, these 
days, we certainly wouldn't have a heap.
We would be lucky to get 3 fully animated units per month.  I hope that 
changes.



Another "psychological effect" of having things in mainline is that it 
makes them much more visible than if they were in a user campaign.  
This prompts artists (just like me), to go and improve them.  If a unit 
is buried in a campaign which I have no time to play, I am not likely 
to do any work to improve it.  I can only assume that other artists 
would act the same way  - if they are reminded of the ugliness of a 
unit every time they go to the unit page, they will be motivated to fix 
it every time they go there.  If they never see it, they will never 
improve it.

Example:  A lot of people HATED the appearance of the woses.  Had they 
been in a user campaign, I doubt anyone would have touched them.  
However, because they were in mainline, several people, including 
finally, myself, took it upon themselves to improve the unit's 
appearance.

> Sure, if a unit has a use in the official version of the game, such as 
> in the 'Classic' era, then we can include it, but I don't see a reason 
> to otherwise. Especially since if the unit isn't actually used, it 
> won't be playtested, and so we'd be including a whole heap of units 
> with untested and unbalanced stats. Would we really want to do this?
A generic dwarven hero would really be a nice thing to have - right now 
we just use the third level of the dwarven fighter as our "generic 
dwarf leader".

A vague analog to the elven lord would, in my opinion, be a nice thing 
to have.  Several other people have stated so on the forums in response 
to different posts about the runemaster for the last year.  The unit I 
am proposing is intended to replace a current MAINLINE unit which 
somewhat fills that role, but has terrible graphics.  By giving him a 
full set of levels, he can be used more flexibly, and if someone wanted 
to, they could use him as a campaign hero.  He is used as a campaign 
opponent ... somewhere ... right now, but is rarely used because he 
looks so bad.

This guy:  
http://wesnoth.slack.it/units.cgi?page=view&unit=Dwarvish%20Runemaster