Hi everyone,

we just ended our weekly developers meeting. As every week, we'll try to give you a short overview of what was discussed. For the details, see our logs .

Here is a short overview of the discussed topics:

Tickets in the Future Milestone

We discussed a few tickets from our future milestone, that we have been postponing for years now. We discussed having an in-game encyclopedia, but decided it is not very useful. If you have a different opinion, please let us now!

Multiplayer Improvement: Adding Different Goals

Mesutcan is planning on adding different game modes to our multiplayer mode during his GSoC project. This will include endless game, different goals (X Money, X islands, etc) and possibly even a coop mode.

Suggestions by Raymond

Raymond approached us with a big list of suggestions which we went over. Most of them include graphical updates (more animals, animations for the marketplace, etc). We completely agree that these are needed, so if you would like to contribute graphics to the game, let us know!

Status Update

Not too much happened this week, but we continued to improve Unknown Horizons especially under the hood. Mainly technical changes that will make upcoming changes easier (like resource groups). We also improved the selection of multiple units and fixed several bugs related to that.
Knutas will try to work on getting our windows build automated, so that hopefully in a bright future we will be able to provide you with weekly builds.

If you want to give us feedback, you can find us in our IRC channel or post in the forums. Please also visit our Wiki for more details.

That was it for this week's update, stay tuned for more!

Your Unknown Horizons Team

we hope you are enjoying our latest release 2012.1. Development is back on track and we've already completed a lot of under the hood work to ensure steady progress. Our GSoC students are currently fleshing out their proposals and we are working with them to make sure this years GSoC will be a full success.

To further improve Unknown Horizons, we'd love to hear some feedback about what you liked and what you didn't like. Your opinion is invaluable to us, as with continued development, one tends to get blind for small mistakes. This includes gameplay elements, graphics, interfaces and everything you feel is missing. We want to develop a game for all of you, not just for us ;-)

We look forward to reading your feedback in our forums or directly in our bugtracker if you found a bug. To discuss changes with the developers, join our IRC channel!

We are proud to announce that Unknown Horizons and FIFE are able to mentor three full-time students this summer, funded by Google to work on Open Source projects!
In particular, we chose these students and proposals:

• Vasilis Daras (vdaras) – Improvements to the FIFE GUI bindings: Guichan and Pychan
• Krzysztof Nowak (Kiryx) – Combat AI, Diplomacy and Personalities
• Mesutcan Kurt (mesutcan) – Multiplayer Extension/Improvement

The teams of Unknown Horizons and FIFE are sure that we will see an awesome amount of progress this summer and we really hope that even some of the students we could not accept still stick with us. Thanks for your application everybody!

Of course we also need to thank Google and especially Carol Smith for providing this wonderful experience to so many students and organizations! You're all awesome! Check the list of all accepted proposals if you're interested: Google Melange

Heya everybody,
today we proudly announce our latest release: Unknown Horizons 2012.1! Almost on time, and we think fixing the last known crash was worth waiting a few days. Enjoy this great release!

Before we go into the details, we'd like to thank our friends at FIFE for releasing their newest changes prior to schedule, specifically for us - making this release possible. Cheers folks!

A short overview of the new features in 2012.1:

• Usability and interface overhaul: especially these blog posts
• Components and object files, as explained here
• New buildings which are listed here
• Multiplayer save/load
• Status icons for buildings
• Catastrophe system (currently implemented: fire)
• An update checker that will inform you about newly released versions in-game

(You can check out the complete changelog here.)

As expected, packages for Unknown Horizons 2012.1 can be found in the download section of our website. Packages are available for Windows and many Linux distributions. Downloads for the remaining Linux distributions and OS X will be updated as they become available.

Known issues

Since Unknown Horizons is still under development, we left some minor hints in our release to indicate this ;-)

• OpenGL - Support broken on certain netbooks - please stick to SDL in these cases. More information in our FAQ.
• Fisher boats stay on the map after tearing: This is a feature, we will add a re-assign mechanism to other fishers later
• The preview when placing an iron mine looks like placing a mountain
• When rotating view, some buildings may get confused about their Z coordinates. Working on a fix here, stay tuned.

Return the favor

Please report any crashes or problems through our support page.

If you have feedback or ideas on how we can improve your gaming experience with Unknown Horizons, please also share them on our IRC Channel or the forums!

Want to help out but aren't the coder type? Check out the list of open areas to tackle! Amongst other important tasks such as scenario writing, game design or balancing, we'd like to emphasise that Unknown Horizons is still in need for a lot of translation work.
We are adding more and more content from release to release. With pootle it takes seconds to start translating Unknown Horizons to your language! Visit out pootle translation server to get familiar with the system or go to our wiki page Translators Guide for more information. Contact us on IRC if your language is missing.
No matter if you want to help out with game design, writing, graphics, voice recording or programming: If you like UH, check our "Get involved" page!

If you like playing Unknown Horizons please consider donating to the project. This helps with paying our servers and to continue development. It also serves as a motivation to all team members :-)

Have fun with 2012.1!
Your Unknown Horizons Team