Okay, quite a few. Okay, you hear we have sound, but no picture. Okay, Battle for Westnaught is a turn-based strategy game. That means you can move all your units in one turn and then press the end turn button.

Then the AI computes, or your opponents, the human opponents. You have a hex field based game map. Because hex fields allow a better movement sheen. For example, if you have squares, the diagonals are more larger away than the verticals or the horizontals.

Do we have a picture? Right. Why? Every one of you knows German, right?

Is there really someone not knowing German in here? No, you're joking! Let's see. Can you start the old version, please? I can. I can. Let's start the old one.

Maybe this is English. No, it's not. But I can switch. One moment, please. Spanish? What do you want? Can you scroll through the list of supported languages? I want to do this later on in my talk. We can't do this during your talk. Yeah, okay.

We're perfectly organized. Not really. Okay. Well, Bob, hurry, you're too fast. Okay. Talk faster. Okay. Well, Niels will demonstrate a little bit of the game play, I hope.

I'll try to. The game is following the KISS principle. KISS means keep it simple and stupid. That basically means you remove everything from the user interface

or from the game mechanics until you have reached a level where it barely works. Nothing left to remove. So you can just click on units and move them.

Or we attack other units. It's nothing more. Right? Did I miss anything? Recruit. Yeah, okay. You can call for new units if the ones you have don't are not enough. Now I'm lazy. Yeah, he destroyed the site.

Okay. Westnut is a major project, a mature project. We have reached 10 years last year. And sadly, during the last two ones, user accounts or forum visitors are stagnating.

So we are not growing anymore. The question is, why? That's difficult to answer.

Maybe it's because we fail to deliver with new content. Content? Now we are full, sorry. Content is the most important stuff for open source games. Many open source projects, gaming related ones, have problems with content.

You have a good engine. You have a stable idea of the game mechanics. But only a campaign with three scenarios, if it is campaign based. And that's half of an hour gameplay, and then it's finished.

Can you leave the scenario, please? I just want to attack. Yeah, okay. Let's attack a little. Mark Campagna, go now.

Okay. Westnut is different. We have a lot of campaigns. 17 or 18, have you counted them? Many. Many. Most of them are larger than 10 scenarios. So you can play at least two weeks around the clock, if you are fast and good.

That's much more than many commercial games offer. For example, The Last StarCraft comes with one campaign. 24 scenarios, if I remember correctly. That took me two days to finish on the easiest difficult level.

And that was too easy for me. The next difficult level was too hard for me. So it wasn't exactly the right audience for the game. Okay.

We are not able to include any more campaigns into our game. Because we lost our pros manager. And that's really a problem. We need a certain quality of art work, pros, story, whatever.

And it's hard to reach. Anymore. Without the old staff. And staff changes over time because people lost interest or are not at university anymore. Or don't have time or just die. We are not sure the last one really happened, but it can.

Maybe one of our developers died and we didn't notice. Could be. No chance to tell us. In real life or in the game? If they died in real life, how would we know? They would just drop off inactive.

Not react to our mails anymore. And basically the same which happens if you are really busy from real life work. Yeah, sometimes people just quit without noticing or answering any more to emails or however you try to contact them. Reasons are unknown.

But you know for yourself. I bet you have quitted something and just broke up every contact. At least once in your life. No? Well, let's change the topic.

All but one of all the campaigns we have are collected from our add-on server. So they are in fact made by users which got hooked to the game and produced one or more campaigns.

We took them if they are fine, polished them and included them in the game which isn't possible right now anymore. So the new version of Westnite shows some improvement but we can't deliver with the most important stuff. New content.

That's mostly true for older players or long-term players. New players of course have still plenty of content to choose from.

Still you need to keep your user base happy. Long-term users tend to produce more content. So you do not want to lose them at all. Yeah, please ask.

Please make sure to speak up. We try to record it and otherwise it's not audible. A game developer I knew was making a game and he said he doesn't have time for content. He's on his own. Or scenarios and stuff. So what he did was auto-generate random content. How do you consider that? Ah, there's a genetic algorithm maybe.

I don't know.

Still in a normal game you want to have some campaign with some storyline evolving around some characters, good or evil. And you want to have something going on. For this you need people who are able to create scenarios. So the basic setup of each single scenario. Then some overarching concept to make it a campaign.

And people are also able to code it, so define it. And maintain it afterwards. As you can see here in the add-on server we have lots of content from users. Because we make it really easy to produce new content and upload it there. We have a real problem converting from this new content uploaded there.

First finding the high quality content and then getting it into mainline. Because of the level of maintenance you have to do, whenever you change something in mainline, you might have to touch this content. So eventually you just get too large.

Please open the add-on manager? Ah, you're already there. Okay. There's a lot of add-ons on there. There are over 500. I guess it was 620 something.

That's quite a lot. But there's a lot of unfinished or not working or just bad quality or not what the user wants to play.

You as open source developers should be confidencing those version numbers. Not. So how do you find quality content or discriminate quality content from non-quality content? The answer is simple. You can't.

Pardon? We don't have a rating system. That's a problem. You can sort by size. Which might be a sign of quality. You get music?

Yeah, might be a sign of quality because there's much music or much art in there. But, yeah. It also might be just a collection of stuff that makes no sense to us. You can also sort by downloads.

So if you download the one with the most downloads, it gets more downloads. So it's a self-empowering system and mostly the most downloads are just things with fancy names or which ones, the ones that got first on the add-on server whenever we open a new one for a new release.

A rating system would be a solution, who said it? Yeah. Do you have any experience with rating systems? Are you a game developer? Not a game developer myself, but I'm kind of looking at larger games that have equivalent systems like Little Big Planet, for example.

Please talk louder. Sorry, Little Big Planet is an example where there's a lot of the rating system that allows us to say, well this one has got something halfway decent in it, I'll give it a go.

But yeah, I don't know, I'm not a game developer myself. It's not that easy to establish a rating system, but mostly our concerns are that competition might spoil our friendly community.

Yeah, that's the reason. And I think we will need to get to a rating system sooner or later, just to make sure that the add-on server is still usable, or usable again.

But yeah, old habits and old rules are changing slowly in large open source projects, especially if you don't have a dictator.

So I'd like to advise you, keep your dictator happy so that he never leaves. Our dictator left and we can't find a new one, or can't agree on a new one, or can't agree that we need a dictator.

All that stuff. I guess a basic problem you often face when implementing a rating system, if you upload finished content, it's good. But if you upload iteratively, like open source work usually is done, you upload an early version. Someone downloads it, sees, doesn't work, bad rating.

Next one downloads it, doesn't work, bad rating. Then you've had some votes, you have a very low rating, you upload a new version, what do you do? Do you discard all the old comments? Or do you keep them without your real chance for improving?

And it values to the rating? So if the rating was made a year ago, it might not be as valuable in here? And that will adjust quite nicely? The problem is, we have not tried out, we are still in the face of fighting against each other, if we really want a rating system, yeah?

Good point. And what about maybe splitting the channel of additional content in two? So you have one group of content that you know from the core developers, they are trusted, they are accepted.

So they are testing, you know they are actually good and quite proper. And then you have another group of additional content that anybody can upload. I guess that helps. Yes, I promised that and it ended in a flame work, of course. But it's a good idea, I think it's a good idea.

Maybe another idea would be to rate based on activity, so the most active as it downloads. Yeah, but what is active? Number of commits maybe, or when was the latest update to the end? I don't get someone who uploads it every day.

We have at least one active user of the download count. You can get every system, you are human, you are more clever than the system.

Sadly. You are a human, that's ridiculous. Yeah? Actually, I think what you are saying is that the open source technology doesn't necessarily fit into game development in general. Do you think so, really? Yeah, I am not saying that we do not need to talk about anything that is not in the classroom in heaven.

The thing is that when creating a game, you first of all need a vision which is usually one person or a small group of people. Then you need to provide the content, the game itself to the end user. And users rarely want to see an iterative process, they want to find a finished product.

With open source in general, you create apps, it's a bit different. You expect a system to rise over time. When a gamer gets a game, he wants to play, he wants to finish a product. However, recently games like Minecraft, DayZ and so on, have managed to link this iterative process with development.

My suggestion is to actually split the game. I mean, have a beta branch and say, don't tell the people, this is beta. Yes, of course. We have a beta branch, of course. Also with beta, you could try out the rating system, you could try out other stuff which was not a consensus part.

Then that could be much more dynamic. We have a development branch and you get a stable branch every one or two years. But the problem with the development branch is that you can do lots of crazy stuff on it. And the users won't actually complain until it's a stable version.

The thing is, that's the thing. You have a stable branch and a development branch, which is sort of this beta, alpha, whatever. My point is that this is a beta from the perspective of the developer, it's not the beta from the perspective of the user.

So he thinks, okay, this is not stable, I'm not touching that. And if you would have a semi-stable build that is stable as an executable that has content or features that might vary, then we would get the start. People would like to check it out.

It's sadly not. We have a very strong multiplayer community and we make sure that our stable releases are compatible with each other. So one stable series, every minor bug fix release would stay compatible with the other, while in the development release, because we are doing some crazy stuff sometimes, they are incompatible.

So the players just see, okay, when I go to the multiplayer server, how many people will I find there for finding other players? Now, of course I want to continue. As you can see here, 160 are in other games. Players right now on a Saturday afternoon.

And there are even 32, okay, 31 guys hanging around just in the lobby, waiting to start games or stuff like this. Whatever, just talking. So, the matter is now, if you come on the development server and only see two guys around, And that's if you're lucky.

If you're lucky, those guys who want to play multiplayer will not be there. And if you have no one there, The Witch's Circle starts, you can't promote this version. I think he was first.

Louder, much louder please.

It may break the game mechanics a little bit. So new people can be overpowered with something like that. Only after that, the character makes its way to the main stable version. The other thing I would like to say is,

We can use some kind of statistics of people using those modes, those campaigns, and not use the rating system, but I know the statistics. If a person downloads a new mode and spends a lot of time on it,

and that person does the same in a late time, I mean a couple of days. We don't watch our single players. We had a system once upon a time to gather statistics like this. The idea was great. No, many had it on. We had lots of data, but nobody really made use of the data,

because it was just too much information to go through. Yeah, data mining is not an easy task.

We have, I work on a game called Big Fighter, which is a similar idea. We get tons and tons of user content, and we've done a couple of different things to encourage that.

We've just instituted a rating system. I can't tell you how well it works or not, but we made it very easy when you're rating a level, and you press the key while you're playing, and the rating gets sent to the central database, so there's no friction to rating things. We used to have people would post their levels in the forums, and people could vote on them there. We had one to five stars, and that tended to work pretty well.

The other thing we've done that has worked really well is we have level design contests once every six months or three months a year, and people will submit levels, people will vote on them, and we've gotten some really fantastic levels. I found that the sense that you were saying people will get upset by the competition,

I find the competition actually encourages people to push themselves to the next level. They look at what this other guy did, and they say, well, I'm going to do better than that next time because I want to win the competition. That's been both a positive thing for the community because it gets people involved, and it also generates a ton of really high-level content. There is good or positive competition,

and you have negative competition. You need to encourage the positive one, and this encourage negative. Oh, you are all leaving. Pardon, please, again and louder.

When was it that you were collecting all this data and you didn't have the analysis for it? Because I'm thinking that five years ago, people weren't interested in big data back then, but now a lot of people are, and that would be a way to attract more people to the project?

Well, I looked at our statistics three years ago regularly. Let me check if I can still find it, but I think it's gone. But it wasn't easy to say why did people quit at Scenario 5 just from the statistics?

No longer there. Why do they lose their gold in this scenario? It was difficult for me. I just used it for developing the campaign. Maybe it can be used for rating add-ons better than for development.

We need to try out. Of course we need to try. We will do so. Next year I will tell you. Regarding what kind of recognition is given to content creators, especially the good ones? A forum title.

Our content creators, the main exchange platform is our forum. In the forum we have some titles. Of course every developer gets a title, translators get a title, artists get a title, and those who are known to create good content get a title, and those who are known to create innovative content

get a different title yet again. So we use the system, especially since the forums are the main place to complain about content which doesn't work. The most... The balloon? Reward. Reward is a positive comment in the forum.

And it's not very much. And maybe a high download rate. But you can abuse the download counter like I explained before. This made not only one user-made content designer mad

and going to rage. Designers need more reward. That's definitely the case. I want to come back to the point where you earlier said on

that you need to basically forward-port add-ons to new West-North versions. Is that so? Yes. I think that is a very great showstopper for players. Players? For the users. They want to try out perhaps very old add-ons that haven't been reviewed in any way.

So if you compare it with other games, for example the very obvious Doom, you can still play maps made in 1994. Because all the versions are supported throughout. And there's no forward-porting needed. What we do have is, we do have different add-on servers for different versions.

So we have one add-on server for the old 1.6 series. We have an add-on server for the 1.8 series. We have a different one for the 1.10 series. Not anymore? Okay, it's more than six years ago. You have as well like if you take the client from trunk right now.

Can you say with confidence that you can run almost all? Yeah, that's a problem. We have scripts for updating stuff, they don't catch everything. But there are people in the forums who grab old content and port it and then throw it on the new server and throw it into version control at the same time.

The matter is, if we kept the backwards compatibility all the time, we would just shoot ourselves in the leg. It depends on how well defined your engine is. And basically what we are developing these days is the engine. And since the engine is changing all the time,

and we don't have one single fixed format of how everything should be, it's not this easy. Especially since we also say that our core content, which can also change, is in a stable release, the stable API, so to say.

Core content there also being the units with the unit images. So if you reference one of those from the core group, it's perfectly working in this release, in this stable series, for example. But we do not guarantee that we don't, for example, change the animation of a unit, meaning that the frame you will then see, if you are looking at frame five,

is not a completely different one. So, in theory, the content might load, but it might not look like the designer intended it to. Or her, like, intended.

About programming method, data mining and stuff, and although I blame you, because this is a game developer's view, I mustn't forget about the actual players. There are plenty of players who actually can't contribute any graphical aspects or any code,

without maybe willing to re-rate the add-ons for you. Like, they can have a pre-selection of possible interesting add-ons for you. You can actually get five players, trusted players,

to test those versions, or something like that. Players want to review stuff. We are just denying it for the old rules and that we don't want to encourage competition, yeah? But it must be players who don't contribute themselves and all the data they provide you must be anonymous, actually, towards the community.

We don't want to produce competition in the game. You're thinking about not having competition. We don't want to have competition. Competition is... There's healthy competition. Yeah, indeed. We expect there's going to be unhealthy competition.

So, the main point which we see as unhealthy competition often are leaderboards. Because leaderboards often lead to flameballs and stuff like this. So that's why we say we do... often. That's why we say in our multiplayer community we do not support an official ranking list or something like this.

If you do want to do some ranking, you can do so. But we will not officially support it within the game itself. There are ladder gamers who have some chess-like... It's called ELO. ELO rating thing.

But we don't give them any support and point with fingers on them because they do this. We don't do this. We just ignore it. No, there are fake people... Well, okay. Yeah. ...between ranking players and ranking content.

So there's different kind of... I mean, that's not really competition. It's just telling new players here's something good for you to play. And if you want attention, you kind of need to give them what they need to stay. Yeah. So it's not about players competing against players.

Yeah. The idea is that content creators don't help each other anymore if there is too much competition. But I don't share that idea. I completely agree that there's healthy and unhealthy competition. But...

a large project takes a lot of time to change old rules. Yeah. And it's an ancient rule that we don't like to encourage competition. And we lack the dictator that says, okay, we do it because we need to do it. Yeah? There was a question.

Who wanted to say? The stagnation of user base of your game. Again, you must be much, much, much more louder. You were worried about the stagnation of user base of your game. If I'm correct, you said that

your game is more than 10 years old. Yeah. So the game... games is an entertainment and people, they tend to like new ways of entertainment. And, of course, you can provide new entertainment by providing new content.

It's like a TV series. The first season gained some people who watched it. The second season, wow, it's a big explosion. Everybody speaks that it's a great TV series. The third season is okay. The fourth one is, well,

I don't think you should see it. And so on. So everything has a way up and then stagnation has a way down. Even if we take some great strategies like Warcraft 3 or Warcraft or any other games from

commercial firms, they didn't last I think longer than 10, 15 years. Even though they were a cyber discipline or, you know, e-sports and so on. And the spacecraft it lasted a long,

but the main user base was from Korea. So now it was replaced with the spacecraft 2. And don't you think that main is trying to think about the battle for Warcraft 2 with 3D graphics and so on?

Or maybe not? 3D graphics are a big issue. Every day someone drops into the forum and asks when will Westnite go 3D? Yeah.

If you compare our pixel art images to 80s or the 90s we are doing quite well. Yeah.

Yeah, you are right. Commercial games want to sell a new game. So you have a part 2 or part 3. We don't need to release a part 2 or part 3.

We can just incrementally add new stuff. But the problem is everything new is always causing resistance. There is always at least one developer who wants to have a word added, who says oh no, I can't live with it. So

everything new is always a huge fight. Yeah, no dictator. That's the problem. We are talking about open source projects. Everyone working on open source projects has their own motivation to do so. No matter if it's a game, if it's some office suit or if it's a web browser

or just some command application. The matter is if you have a project which is of some size and some age, you will have several old developers in there who of course think, hey, I've contributed so much. What I say is the golden rulebook.

You will always have this. You won't get around it. So it will be difficult for new developers to really get hurt and get their new and often great ideas really implemented. That's why Fabi says you need a dictator. You need some

I think what Fabi wants to say is what

helps most is to have someone as head of the project who is one strong-minded, but who can also listen and who doesn't say, okay, we have always done it this way, so we need to continue it this way. So it's yeah, absolutely.

I'm not sure what you mean. Modifications. We have add-ons and new features and modifications where you can change existing content, but most add-ons are just content.

Some of that stuff is possible. Some content creators, as I said are very innovative in what they are doing.

Who was it who made it? It was basically a movie player. Do you remember? Ethereum. So you saw the game. He basically used the system to create a movie player with it. The main problem was syncing the audio with the video. Like always.

First you, sorry. I was going to say, I'm actually having a new version of 1.2 or something. As somebody said earlier, games players don't really need development. Usually when you play a game, it's like an online game

made for online content. It's only made for specifically online games. I think it's just a game they played. They might stick around for a couple of months because they wanted to try new versions and plug in new add-ons or something. But at the end, they just say I finished the game and that's done.

I know I played 1.6 years ago. I finished most of them in campaign. It's a really nice game, but I'm done. I have other games. I think if you want to improve the user base and also change the way you play development, you might think maybe it's time to get to a new version.

You take the core developers and whoever wants to keep maintaining the old one can keep doing it. Then you take the core developers or people who want to do it and say, yeah, now we're going to make Wesnoth 2. Question. What is the difference between Wesnoth 1 and Wesnoth 2?

In a theoretical idea, what could be the difference? I think deep down, the idea is that it's mostly the same game. At the end, it's a new name, so people are going to say yeah, it's a new game. You get to say from now on, we are going to discard all the ways of doing development and say we are going to start with a new way.

I am the creator, so somebody can take the lead. We are going to have these objectives. We are going to abandon all the code base or try with this new way of having an engine and adding new features to the core engine. I don't know how it works. I say, yeah, no old stuff.

That's basically what we are doing with every new stable release. We are just not naming it Wesnoth 2, Wesnoth 3, Wesnoth 4, and we are still keeping the old content there and updating it. The matter is what commercial games do there is they have old campaigns, they just drop them, they are no longer there, and you get the new release, which doesn't have the old campaigns,

but some new ones instead. What we are doing instead is if we have some new content, for example, we add it in addition to the existing stuff. Yeah, but I think you don't want to support old campaigns. I mean, old campaigns are made for the old version, and that's fine. I mean, player can still play that. It's not like it's going to be a worse version because you have a new one.

You say, yeah, now I am going to start with a new version, new name, and new content. So you can say the best adults for the previous version, for the previous game were these, and this is how it's done, and the next, the new game is going to be a new game. But what is the benefit of removing the content?

Because then you have a new community, you have a new interest in the game because it's a new name, it's a new core team. It's a new... Yes, exactly. People seem different because they say, yeah, I have 1.8, yeah, it's just some new content, but I don't care.

I already played 1.6, 1.7. But if I say it's 1.2, or it's a new name, and maybe I can see in your game, a completely new game, then it's also a new interest for the players. Maybe a version or two would not be fantasy themed, like steampunk or...

Yeah, the problem is just that if you change it this radically, it would mean that you would have to redo all artwork. That's not viable. Well, if you want to have a big project, I mean, it's not even necessary, I don't know. I guess we also have the same problem as most open source games probably have.

The ratio between coders and artists is heavily focused on coders. That's true. We've had a lot of artists, and we currently have still quite a number of artists. They come, they learn stuff, they leave, but those artists are pixel artists.

We don't have, well, we might have people who have experience with 3D modeling and texturing, but we don't know. I'm not saying doing 3D, because I think modern doesn't mean doing 3D or 2D. Anyway, well, adding a new add-on, well, going in a new direction

where you replace all the artwork and then you need the amount of work that's been done in the past 10 years, all over it. Continuing the topic, I believe more or less the same as about the marketing open, like sending mails to the users and telling that it's a new version.

And maybe the new version should not split too much, the previous one, but it can be like something that affected history, like invasion in the world from government, I don't know. Something that makes the scenes different, because we respect what this element, that's

the thing that will change in the world. And then, I believe, that way, like, it doesn't matter if it's 3D or not, because the people that play it, they play because they have this feeling like old school or something like that. With this interaction with the new element, it will be the thing that will bring them to play

the new version of 3D. Yeah, but it's not an online role-playing game, like World of Warcraft, where you can yeah, throw in the goblins, yeah? Just saying there was a goblin invasion and just changing every mainline campaign or add-on with that goblin invasion

in mind. It's difficult. It's very difficult. We are trying. The new version features a caliphate, some mixture between Middle East and Japan warriors,

I think. So, yeah, we try to introduce new stuff, but StarCraft tries to balance three different factions. And they do reasonably well. Koreans are thinking they do well.

We have balanced six or seven factions. And that took us at least five years or maybe we haven't been finished yet. Introducing a new faction means working, iterating over the balancing issue again.

We are doing that now for one new faction. Just replacing more than one, or yeah, that's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of work.

I've thought about a Kickstarter project to collect a lot of money and yeah, money can move things. I think we just do those two questions now.

We're basically out of time. I'm sure you have a choice going with Battle of the West or whatever that could be. The thing is, this game has been going on for ten years. Ten years of game development is a staggering achievement. And there have been commercial games

Neverwinter Nights, Quake, StarCraft. That's it. We haven't been able to achieve that. The thing is, at some point you have to cut off the cord and start, maybe not talking for real, but think what defines Westnoth and what you can do add new, which will make a different game built upon the same foundations. Because I'm sure I haven't seen the source code, but I'm sure

that through that ten years of development it wasn't a single structure which was growing in a specific direction. It was growing organically. That's how birds work. At some point you have to look at the structure, take away everything that is not needed, go again to the Kissprince and build a new game upon that. And the thing is that

after ten years, I don't believe there's a chance to have a spike again. There's only a way downward unless you create a new project at least with the same foundations. That might be true, yeah.

More users, more content, more fun. Nicer graphics. More and better. Basically replace all those people in the community we don't like with people we like. No.

Someone needs to be first.