For players, this is a great chance to take a look at what's changed and been added since 1.14, and there is a lot! A variety of new units have been added, the Dunefolk faction has been entirely rebalanced along with many other units, unit sprites have been updated and animations added, Descent Into Darkness has been overhauled and many other campaigns have also been significantly improved, the mushroom terrain has been revamped (which was surprisingly controversial), the Plan Unit Advancement modification has been mainlined, Isar's Cross now has an amazing background, and many more besides.
For content creators, this is the start of our feature freeze, which means that you can start porting your add-ons to what will eventually become 1.16 without worrying whether each release will break your add-on. Of particular note is that uploading and downloading add-ons are now done incrementally - meaning only things that have changed between versions are uploaded or downloaded - so uploading and downloading add-ons should now be a lot faster. Additionally, you can provide one or more [translation] tags in your _server.pbl to provide a translation of your add-on's title and description into languages other than English. However, there have also been a significant number of API changes, which have resulted in a large chunk of lua especially being marked as deprecated. This is intended as a one time occurrence to clean up and reorganize Wesnoth's APIs; the goal and intention is to never repeat this or anything close to it in any future development series.
And lastly, please report any bugs you run into! With new features come new bugs, and just because we created these features doesn't mean we already know every way they can stop working.
Add-ons client
- Fixed: using the versions drop-down in small-screen mode returned to the title screen (issue #5810)
- Fixed: keyboard input in small-screen mode returned to the title screen (part of issue #3059)
Campaigns
- A Tale of Two Brothers
- S02: Dialog revisions.
- Sceptre of Fire
- Revisions to the last two scenarios.
- Tutorial
- S02: Mention the acceleration factor preference.
Lua API
- Pathfinding functions are now in a new wesnoth.paths module.
- Pathfinding in map generation now takes an options table as the third argument.
- New sync module that contains functions for multiplayer synchronization
- In particular, wesnoth.synchronize_choice is now wesnoth.sync.evaluate_single
- allow_end_turn and end_turn moved to the wesnoth.interface module
- wesnoth.message is now wesnoth.interface.add_chat_message
- Shroud and fog control are now in the wesnoth.sides module
- Shroud data strings and the special string "all" are no longer supported by place_shroud - only a list of locations is supported
- wesnoth.map.parse_bitmap transforms a shroud data string into a list of locations
- wesnoth.map.make_bitmap builds a shroud data string from a list of locations
- There are now two different ways of altering shroud: place_shroud merges with existing shroud, while override_shroud replaces the entire shroud with the new value.
- New schedule module for working with schedules and time areas
- wesnoth.map.get_time_area now returns the area's schedule object
- The global scenario schedule is available as wesnoth.current.schedule
- wesnoth.get_time_of_day is split into wesnoth.schedule.get_time_of_day (ignoring illumination) and wesnoth.get_illumination (which considers illumination). Both functions now take the location as the first argument.
- wesnoth.get_max_liminal_bonus() is now wesnoth.current.schedule.liminal_bonus
- wesnoth.replace_schedule is now wesnoth.schedule.replace
- wesnoth.end_level() and wesnoth.get_end_level_data() are now removed - instead, there's an end_level_data field in wesnoth.scenario.that serves both purposes.
- wesnoth.get_traits() is now wesnoth.game_config.global_traits
- wesnoth.teleport moved to the units module
Multiplayer
- Added Isle of Mists, a new single player or coop survival scenario.
Networking
- Added support for encrypting connection using TLS to multiplayer/addon client/server
- Moved password hashing code from client to server, relying on TLS to avoid sending cleartext passwords
Packaging
Terrain
- Added some great tree variations
- Added 'icy cobbles' (terrain code `Rra`) - mostly useful for the transitions
Translations
- Updated translations: British English, Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic, Slovak, Spanish
Units
- Added missing Seahorse graphics
- Revised Jinn (unit config and graphics)
- Fire Wraith added
- added LordBob's Jinn, Fire Guardian, and Fire Wraith portraits
- Moved Naga guardian line from UtBS to core, and made some revisions
- Dune Apothecary experience needed to level up changed from 100 to 65
- Dune Captain experience needed to level up changed from 86 to 75
- Dune Herbalist cost changed form 15 to 14
- Dune Horse Archer experience needed to level up changed form 70 to 65
- Naga Sicarius hp changed form 55 to 53 and melee damage changed form 9 to 6, new special "deflect" added to melee attack
- Fire Guardian can now level into Fire Wraith, experience needed to level up for Fire Guardian changed from 50 to 29
- Revised statistics of all animal horses, Bay Horse can now level into Great Horse
Wesnoth Formula Language
- The use of "side" on units and "owner" on terrain objects is now deprecated. Instead, you should use "side_number" or "owner_side", respectively. The old key returns 0 for side 1 and so on, so the new key is preferred.
- A unit object now has a "terrain" key that returns the terrain object the unit is standing on.
- Add new functions tod_bonus() and base_tod_bonus() to get the bonus on a specific location
WML Engine
- add 'unslowable' and 'unpetrifiable' status to immune to slow or petrifies
- Schema validation now checks whether string values are translatable or not, according to what the schema specifies.
- Fix schema validation rejecting Lua AI goals
- Unit special notes are now read directly from weapon specials, abilities, and a few other places, meaning the `[special_note]` tag is usually not required in `[unit]` or `[unit_type]`.
- A warning is now displayed when the next scenario is unknown (issue #5530).
- Changed the default duration for `[print]` to 5000 milliseconds, and added support for `duration=unlimited` (PR #5868).
Miscellaneous and Bug Fixes
- The unit description tooltip in the sidebar now includes the text from `[special_note]`s.
- Added a collection of item images
- AI: fixed crash when using attacks aspect with invalidate_on_gamestate_change=no
- AI: fixed crash when using custom_synced_commands
- Micro AIs: fixed unit variables getting lost when continuing from replay
- Fixed AI state initialization problem after reloading