Why does the game need to keep advancing? Most games in the industry are written, released, and finished. The best have a timeless nature, still excellent even though they haven't been changed for decades.
Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?
I regularly play Wesnoth over the internet with a friend. Though we sometimes explore other games, we always come back to Wesnoth because it's compelling. However, and I say this as a fan, this game has severe issues - it's not just a few bugs and maintenance:
Wesnoth makes current hardware sweat to the point where my relatively new MBP sounds like it's taking off, as is my friend's ThinkPad. It's also the only game capable of slowing my current-generation iMac down to the brink of operating system usability and beyond.
The game itself is slow, UI actions, moving units across the battlefield - pretty much anything happens only after a noticeable pause. There is no apparent reason why a largely static, 2D, tile-based, pixel game should be this slow.
The network code and its underlying model are an unmitigated disaster, by design. If you experience any network glitch during play, including short wifi disruptions, the connection collapses. But it doesn't do so right away. It can take up to a few minutes for the game to notice that a player has disconnected. There is no automatic re-connect, all players have to save, exit, and rejoin. While playing Wesnoth it's advisable to stay in contact over email to coordinate.
Sometimes, the game state gets out of sync between players and the server. When the game notices that, you get the option to cancel the game or ignore and continue. If you do the latter, in-game causality breaks down completely (with hilarious results). If you opt for the former, once again, everybody has to save, exit, and re-join, and hope anyone has a non-corrupt save game. The game state isn't large or complex by the way.
These are not merely bugs; they are deep, architectural problems.
"However, I wanted to be able to develop Wesnoth quickly, using the latest technology and latest C++ features. Because of this I didn't spend much time focusing on things like minimizing the memory Wesnoth takes up, or trying to make it ultra-fast. This does limit its portability a little in that it is difficult to get working on systems with limited memory"
Honestly I think it could be written in Javascript with better results than it currently has. I've never tried multiplayer as I found the single player laggy which is unacceptable for a game a "simple" as this. Just goes to show that language alone doesn't alway influence speed...
This game isn't exactly simple. There's an entire meta language called WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), support for a powerful AI and Lua scripting. There's also very intricate multiplayer code that I don't think in any way could be trivial with JS.
Yes, Wesnoth is hamstrung a little by its tech stack. The dev team very much wants to move to SDL 2 and support OpenGL in the future.
How will they do that? With more and interested developers. Hence, the call to action.
Why don't you just stabilize everything and prepare to release a final polished version? Then, you can decide if you want to keep working, or if you want to stop and put the game in maintenance mode. Do you even have enough developers to support that? There is value in completing creative projects.
Are you playing wesnoth 1.12 because they have significantly improved the rendering performance in the latest version. I know 1.10 could lag my computer but 1.12 is very fast and snappy. Also in my experience, playing 1.12, the game state almost never gets out of sync. If it happens it is because one or more players have different version of some add-ons. So yeah, you really should try 1.12 or even checkout and play the version from their repo because it has even more improvements to it.
I too was in love with this game when I only had a cheap pc with windows, but years later started burning my new laptop and got me angry and ended erasing it.
Then, to be extremely frank, it sounds like the game is a technical failure and should be abandoned. Trying to fix an older game such as this seems like an uphill climb. Better to greenfield it and start from scratch. The original engine sounds like it needs a rewrite anyways.
Getting it running on an existing engine (UE4 can do 2d fairly well, for instance) seems like a better investment of resources. What they're building is a solved problem. It was a valiant effort to do it on their own, especially in a time when that was the only way. They could reap the benefits of all those learnings in the backend and instead focus efforts on tweaking gameplay, inventing new forms of play, and smoothing out rough edges in the UI or visuals.
The problem there, though, is not the maintenance, it's the actual reimplementation of the thing. At this point it's probably man-years of work to do that sort of a port to a new engine, and getting that sort of commitment doesn't strike me as easier than finding one or two folks to help out.
Perhaps the cold reality is Wesnoth 2.0 will need to take radical steps away and use some rather modern engine (Unity, MonoGame, etc.) But keep in mind, right now we’re looking at a fairly successful, high production-value FOSS project. it needs short term answers as well as long term ones.
What strikes me as strange is that you don't usually ask others to maintain your unmaintained labor of love for you, because you don't have the time and manpower. Plus, it sounded like they were complaining that they "weren't keeping up".
They were specifically asking for Windows and OSX programmers for example. Labor of love or not, doing maintenance work and testing on an OS you don't use yourself is not something most of us want to do on our free time. These guys are volunteers after all.
Because the car analogy doesn't perfectly fit. This kind of labor of love is a game that's enjoyed by many. So asking people to help is more like a barn raising than an "engine hoisting".
Funny you should mention NetHack as the latest version, 3.4.3[0], was released on the 8th of December, 2003. I'd say it's a pretty good call to consider it finished.
there are a ton of forks of nethack, and basically the dev team seems to have disappeared[0], so I wouldn't consider it finished as much as "AWOL".
[0] ok, not really, the nethack4 faq mentions 'The development team who worked on versions 1 to 3 of NetHack (the DevTeam) are still working on it (although there was no real evidence of this until 2014), but they don't release their progress, meaning that the situation is effectively the same as if they'd been doing nothing.'
SporkHack was good for a while, harder than 3.4.3 at least.
Sometimes updates actually make things worse. I like Brogue 1.7.2 a lot more than 1.7.3 for example. You should try that game if you haven't already, it does so many things well!
went here to say the same thing. it's ten years old, and while I was super excited at the beginning, playing it and discovering every aspect of the many campaigns, it has felt stale in a while.
the game is basically equals of it's former self, with many more graphic enhancement and sophistication that push the battle system, the maps and the editors to their limits, but while being timeless it also has exhausted its replay value and lives in a market which is vastly different to the circumstances that brought it to life many years ago
I think it's somewhat the nature of open source games. It reminds me of the AoE clone 0 A.D.[0] which has been in development for over a decade and still considered in alpha.
Also as one who lived through the times when gaming on Linux was almost unheard of, or required a lot of imagination, I think Wesnoth is part of gaming history right now. The future is here and Valve helped bring it about, the quality and quantity of games on Linux has completely transformed in the last 5 years.
So gamers looking for entertainment on Linux have so much more to look forward to right now than Wesnoth. It's time to move on.
Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?