Heya everybody,
in case the headline confused you: We're not getting death threats for developing an awesome game. What we survived is merging a rewrite that changed huge parts of our codebase. Why doing all this?

Content Contribution made simple!

Easy: Because Nihathrael introduced a new system to store in-game objects. We used to hide these in a database difficult to access, whereas now they are stored in a simple file based format: YAML. This makes it very easy to edit and add buildings as well as units. More polishing and documentation in this area is needed to make things even easier and thus scheduled for the next weeks. A more detailed news article on this system will follow as soon as it is well documented.

Automated Testing

Squiddy continued to work hard on our testing infrastructure – we can now write tests for our whole GUI. This might sound more interesting if you're a coder, but be assured that it's awesome progress and helps us a lot fixing bugs before you even report them!

Debian!

It's been a while since we announced to be completely compatible with DFSG guidelines (no content under non-free license), but now we finally managed to get packages approved into Debian sid! Thanks to christoph for taking care of packaging both our engine, FIFE, and Unknown Horizons including all missing dependencies. Check them out: fife-python and unknown-horizons.
Our own repositories are of course still updated regularly, so if you would like to receive development snapshots packaged and use our repo already, nothing changes for you.

Website polished

We received feedback that our most valuable pages like Downloads, Support and Get Involved aren't well accessible but too chatty and heavy on text instead. Few days ago we restructured those website sections, added a lot of nice images and hope you agree it's a huge improvement. Huh, can't even remember how it looked before? Certainly not as good as now ;-)

In additional news:

• Selecting your player color is now possible by clicking on the desired color - you even see what you chose afterwards. Also fixed an annoying bug where the player settings were not saved when switching game modes.
  
• The build menu code is being refactored at the moment and will allow you to see building costs without actually building them. Furthermore we plan to allow customization of its layout, so you might rather sort the menu by classes like Infrastructure, Mining, Companies, Agriculture and so on instead of the current per-increment sorting.
• We recently got reports on our beta testers mailing list about crazy mouse speed under certain circumstances. Because we're not sure what this is caused by, Torv added a mouse sensitivity setting to Unknown Horizons. You can fix the speed there, but we obviously also want to fix the underlying bug. If you experienced mouse speed problems, please report and share your relevant system configuration (OS, native resolution, UH resolution, fullscreen yes/no, graphics chip, driver, renderer, ...)
• Your settlement is now aware of what it did when you weren't around :) Check out a history of trade actions performed in the warehouse tab! Includes selling and buying items from the free trader as well as from other players.

We were also discussing our communication culture a lot during the last couple of days. A lot of devs like chatting on IRC as their way to express thoughts and discuss questions that come to their mind. How would you prefer to keep updated on our development process? We could e.g. try to send more messages to our dev mailing list, write more technical blog posts or open threads in our forum. Do you know where to look for our current meeting logs? Regardless of whether you're more into graphics, code or playing UH: Leave a comment in our forums, we want to seriously improve here!

Stay tuned,
Your Unknown Horizons team

Closer to world domination

Good news for our Asian friends: Thanks to the untiring efforts of chrisoelmueller and others, we finally managed to support CJKV characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese). The Japanese translation is completed by now already – 感謝 @ naraba! If you're interested in helping out with one of the other newly supported languages or those not yet finished, register at pootle and start right now! If the language of your choice has no UH project associated, please still select it in your pootle account and notify us on IRC.
We will update the translation templates later this week and add some new strings, so there is guaranteed fun for everybody :)

Interaction improvements

We've patched up our ship route configuration menu a bit in order to feature an appropriate settlement selection (it used to be a simple box without any information). Now, it looks like this:

Just click on a settlement to add it. It does not get any simpler. The boxes currently show the positions of the branch offices, so you can see where the ship is actually going to. We've also made the settlement tooltips work in the normal minimap, which by the way has seen a major overhaul, so you can expect to see it in other dialogues as well.

Other noteworthy additions

• Our road building tool has been quite smart in finding the optimal path for roads, but now, the roads are also built as straight as possible. By the way, the hotkey "R" now opens the road builder.
  
• You can now finally send ships via minimap, and every time you do, you will be rewarded with animations so magical we believe you have never seen one like that before :)
• After the Summer of Code, our ships can fight. Since one might need an army of ships and not just one, we implemented a queue control for our boat builder:
  
  Just click on a ship to cancel the order. Slight adjustments of the ship icons are still on the TODO list as you might notice ;)

New hidden goodies

Because we love interesting details, that may not be worth the work, but still are awesome to have, we've added some new goodies:

• The hotkey "O" will open a pipette mode. While it's used for colors in image editors, you can select buildings to build in Unknown Horizons. We might take it to the extreme and add a clone-mode, so you can apply your perfect settlement structure to a second island, and maybe even save a building pattern throughout games, but our usability labs will first have to evaluate this.
• With "A", you can change to settlement ownership based view, where tiles are colored in the according owner's color.
• The hotkey "K" toggles the health bar for your ships, which is usually only visible when you select it. This way you can easily get an overview of the status of your units.

Many other updates are not mentioned here because of space issues, for example some major performance improvements in the area of saving and loading. If you're interested in such technical details, please let us know via comments or in our forums and we'll dig deeper into that in the next post.

Cheers,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Hey everyone,
we are back with a couple of updates. Enjoy!

RPM Packages

We can proudly present new packages for all major RPM-based linux distributions created by Nelson Marques (nmarques). He does it to popularize Unknown Horizons and the FIFEngine to the community. The next step is to include these packages in the offical repositories.
You'll find the packages in our Linux Download Section!

New Graphics (Fish!)

We got some great new graphics by lmg this week. Most importantly he reworked our fish swarm to look a lot more natural. Check them out below:

He also designed a great wallpaper and polished the pirate ship model on the way:

Unknown Horizons on RockPaperShotgun.com

Unknown Horizons was reviewed on RockPaperShotgun.com recently. This totally skyrocketed our visitor numbers for a few days, but the server endured it! Check out the great article here:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/23/anno-where-im-going-unknown-horizons/

Interview with Nihathrael on OSArena.net

Nihathrael gave an interview about Unknown Horizons and his work on the project at the  Greek website osarena.net. The English version can be found at the bottom of the post here:
http://osarena.net/english-writings/sinentefxi-me-ton-thomas-kinnen-tou-unknown-horizons.html

General Status

Work on Unknown Horizons is progressing nicely and we are getting a bunch of commits to the repository every day. Stay tuned for a more detailed update on this matter.

Cheers,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Hey everyone,
we've finished our Linux packages for Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSuse. Thanks to Christoph for the Debian based packages and nmarques for the OpenSuse packages!

You'll find links for your distribution in our Linux downloads section.

Enjoy,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Hey everyone,
our next release Unknown Horizons 2011.3 is coming this week! Before we unleash the downloads for you (and fixed all the last minute bugs) we'd like to give you an overview of the upcoming new features and improvements for this release.

Complete settlement AI & Combat and diplomacy system

These were the Summer of Code proposals of gscai and mihaibivol, respectively. Check gscai 's posting and our Summer-of-Code wrap-up for a huge bunch of information and praise!

FIFE performance

Another Summer of Code result is the outcome of kozmo's proposal to improve FIFE rendering. Check their release notes at fifengine.net for details. Small spoiler: This is what you probably will love most about our new release! Make sure to thank the core devs of FIFE for their work if you are impressed: prock, vtchill, helios2k, and kozmo  :)

Support for internationalized voices

This feature initially was not planned to be worked on, but mtfk joined us, highly motivated to implement such a system, and sent out a pull request after discussing his code structure in detail. We already had German and English voice files in our repository, to be played at map creation time, and now seblabel and his wife contributed some French ones, too. The files you will hear depend on your language settings (as e.g. our scenarios do, too).
Should you be interested in donating your voice for more in-game events in more languages, please contact us! We can also clear recordings to a certain degree, so you won't need 100% professional (and expensive) equipment ;-)

New buildings, new ship

We worked hard on finishing settler increment for this release and are almost there. Thanks again, wentam and orakeldel, for your great work on these! New stuff includes storage hut, cannon tower, frigate, salt ponds, tobacco field & tobacconist, butchery with cattle run & pigsty as well as a new gravel path!
The only building left to implement for now is a kind of doctor, which requires us to give it a meaning in first place. Do you have ideas for catastrophes that do not upset players too much or feel plain unfair? There can be various, please share your ideas in our forums!

Usability and interface improvements

Let's give a bit of background information here: Usually, devs just put together some placeholder interface to check if some new feature works, then perhaps ask a GUI artist to create fancy buttons and in the end, nobody at all checked if the result is something our players have fun using.
It mostly isn't. :)
So the awesome news is that totycro grabbed the chance of doing real research into this direction. He ended up working on a usability test with several test players and his team delivered a huge list of serious problems and annoying behavior afterwards. During this summer, we improved many of these, but there still is a lot to do and we plan to keep working on this field towards our next release. Changed game-play and interface elements include:

• new minimap, now displaying whole map and disabling buttons when their action is invalid (also, more game speed modes)
• new in-game pause menu offering quick and clear access to all important player actions
• reworked main square overview, now shows important information bits for each increment; also has 'allow inhabitants to upgrade' toggle
• taxing happens on per-increment basis instead of globally now
• ships automatically unload all resources when a new settlement gets founded; ships display branch office building costs
• allow environment to become translucent (hotkey T)

... but there is a lot more to discover. We hope that those changesets help you enjoy Unknown Horizons and really appreciate any opinions on this topic. Our forums are open for all kinds of feedback -- please use them!

New stats widgets & Random map parameters & New maps

Multiplayer mode has now long been implemented, but it felt strangely unrewarding to just play side-by-side and get almost no feedback about how you're doing. We thus added a widget where you can compare your score in-game (current key: F2) and also lists of settlements and ships (F3, F4). Have fun!

Our singleplayer mode of course had to get some improvements after this as well, so we implemented several parameters to our random maps at game start. Choose your desired island size (max, mean, standard deviation), map size, water ratio, resource density as well as the number of AI players, and whether or not you'd like to play with the free trader and our pirate.

Beta Tester Mailinglist

Can't wait for the next release? Subscribe to our beta mailing-list and be informed about new development releases right away! Currently Unknown Horizons 2011.3 Release Candidate 6 is being launched.

We hope you are as excited as we are about the upcoming release!

Stay tuned!
Your team of Unknown Horizons

Heya!

On OCT 6, FIFE team released version 0.3.3 of their engine that is the machine room of Unknown Horizons (official release announcement). We found some minor issues, but be assured FIFE did an awesome job there! A lot of things troubling UH performance before have seen huge improvements: general amount of draw calls, image loading, building area highlights, minimap drawing, rect selections, and so on. Thanks for everything!

So what's our plan now? We eagerly wait for the bugfix release 0.3.3r2 scheduled in few days and then ship all those improvements to everybody interested with Unknown Horizons 2011.3!

Should you want to play with those new features of both FIFE and UH earlier than most others, make sure to follow our beta tester mailing list. We regularly announce fresh release candidate packages and win installers there. Subscribe: UH-Beta. Issues can be reported through the usual communication channels IRC, forums, mail and so on.

Share your feedback to help us improving Unknown Horizons even further! :-)

Heya!

Since our last posting is rather old already, we'll update with the big news today: during last week, both Summer of Code students working with UH finally merged their results into master. This means that you will see a combat system and AI players our next release!

Let's again summarize what gscai and mihaibivol created over the last few months (a plus as huge as 55% of the lines of code we had in April, according to ohloh, now at about 60k)! Within the next weeks, all our students will probably write a blog post on their own about how their summer went, we will link these postings here after they are published.

First of all, there's our artificial intelligence system (click here for the original proposal which we selected). gscai literally started with nothing but his mentor nihathrael and the code that drove our free trader around the map and created a tough player that is able to look for a nice island to settle on, divide that islands into parts with different purposes, deal with inhabitant needs and taxing, produce goods, optimize collector coverage, watch production chains and consumption stats, react accordingly, buy and sell resources as needed, deal with other players, expand through feeder islands where more resources are cultivated and then shipped to the main island by trade routes, conform to several hundreds of personality constraints where you can tell the AI how to behave in an intuitive file format, well, I will only stop now because this sentence needs a period at some point, but really: the only thing that it does not know about right now is combat -- because this had been worked on during the same time in a different branch :)
As a player, the important news is that you can select a number of AI players when starting a singleplayer game. Oh, and you will need to be quick, else they will take all cool islands and only leave you a very small patch of ground to settle on. All this is achieved without any cheating by the way, our AI gets the same starting resources as any human player, has the same building pool and uses the same balancing values!

On to our second huge and brand new feature: War! Cannons! Destruction! Aww, sorry, still like it? mihaibivol, mentored by totycro, implemented his combat system proposal which, amongst others, included the classes FightingShip and FightingGroundUnit; unit stances such as aggressive, hold ground or flee; combat based on individual weapons which are equipped to units; cannon tower as defense building; design of tabs for single units and unit groups; a diplomacy system that currently knows Friend, Neutral, Foe and behaves accordingly if you deliberately attack units of players not your enemy before; and finally a lot of calculations under the hood when it comes to damage dealing.
As a player, you will also see new graphical content such as the cannon tower, our awesome new ship model, the attacking tool cursor, new tabs, icons for stances and so forth. We currently work on a dynamic boat builder that actually allows you to build ships with cannons and will definitely include this in our next release!

As you might remember, kozmo was selected to improve our engine FIFE with both vtchill and prock as his mentors and the results of his reconditioning are just great! Only a few of the many improvements available for FIFE 0.3.3 are: support for atlas files, animation spritesheets, batching and the experimental OpenGLe renderer (check his application proposal here).
Just to give some numbers, FPS on average improved by 200 % and the atlas files also reduced the disk space consumed by our assets from around 30 MiB to 10 MiB. Additionally, kozmo kept a branch in our repository up-to-date with these FIFE API changes and has as well merged all new UH stuff in already. This helps us hunting bugs while keeping our master stable for you.

After the new FIFE release in roughly four weeks, we will do our best to quickly follow up with packaging all those new features into Unknown Horizons 2011.3. Stay tuned :-)

Yeah, lot of progress here recently, so we'll again show two cool pics.

We today constructed a new in-game pause menu that hopefully is easier to work with (and distinguish from our main menu) than before. Additionally, wentam works hard on a new ship class for Unknown Horizons, so we present his current frigate WIP. Enjoy!

Hi everyone,
it's time for a short status update again.

Progress

• Random maps  look awesome now and are generated much faster (gscai)
• Many other performance tweaks (gscai)
• Better pirate (gscai)
• Trade routes are nearing completion (mihaibivol)
• Campaign mode is in the making (court-jus)
• Savegame crash bug fixed (totycro)
• A lot of minor stuff as usual
• Tavern building added (manthus & kaschte)
• Updated settler hut gfx (manthus & kaschte)
• On the FIFE side, big plans are being made for performance improvements during GSoC (kozmo)

I'd like to thank our GSoC students for showing so much passion even before the coding season and Court-Jus for his great contributions on the campaign system! Keep it coming guys!

Windows Release Problems
Sadly we noticed that there is a major bug in the current release, the game crashes if you press save. We've fixed the bug in the development version, sadly for windows users this will mean the bug will not be fixed until the next release.  Please bare with us, the next release shouldn't be to far away.

Stay tuned for more, awesome things loom on the horizon!
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Hey everybody!

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

• Mihai Bivol – Combat System for Unknown Horizons
• Ott Tinn (gscai) – AI player for Unknown Horizons
• Kozmo – Improve the overall performance of FIFE

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! A last Thank you to the SoC-experienced folks at Battle for Wesnoth that helped us getting started and staying in the loop. You're all awesome!

Heya and welcome to another short update!

In our last meeting we discussed the current blocker issues that currently prevent us from releasing. We addressed these two as showstoppers:

• Problems with sheep
• Problems with fisher and boat builder

Because we want to release as soon as possible, we decided to implement workarounds for both. The sheep will temporarily be replaced with an animated pasture that produces lamb wool just as e.g. the potato field produces potatoes. We hope to be able to fix all bugs related to sheep (together with new graphics) in 2011.2 then. You won't believe how hard this hunting is.

The fisher on the other hand needs a bit more work. As we blogged some time ago, we implemented the fish resource and a boat for the fisher. Current problems happen because our boat builder can also build fisher boats and the code for assigning them is not even in planning stage right now. So we will also use a hotfix here and have two fisher boats: One that belongs to each fisher and will collect fish, one that you can build and drive around with at the boat builder.

Once these preparations are ready, there are only smaller problems and we think that's acceptable for a development release. This especially means that if you have a clone of our git repository at hands and want to test the status quo, please help us in removing balance issues and bugs you possibly encounter!

Thanks and kind regards,
Your team of Unknown Horizons

Heya,

I'd love to tell you that nobody applied for writing an update post because we are so busy improving Unknown Horizons. Well, that's true to a certain degree: The part with busy holds true.
Besides all the stress we felt recently, there still was and is some progress though and we decided that is it about time to tell you (-,

Code improvements

Most importantly, we are implementing a new tile set structure that will allow us to provide a working island and map editor soon. In the meantime, if you are running our git source, only random maps will work on branch development.

Another not-so-visible improvement has been made to our folders. Cleaning up the structure that in most parts was more than two years old hopefully eases navigation through our code- and contentbase. There also have been new scenario conditions added in master, but you'll need to wait for our new maps before excessive testing and usage of these.

New game content

On to stuff you see and like to see: content, content, even more content. We have added a whole third increment to the game! You can now help and watch your inhabitants progressing to the 'settler' level. The main goal there currently is to produce tools. 
For that, you need a toolmaker.
For that, you need charcoal and iron ingots.
For that, you need a charcoal burning and lots of lumber as well as a smeltery.
For that, you need more charcoal and iron ore.
For that, you need iron ore deposits.
… you need … so much … wait.
Yep, we even have implemented the natural form of iron ore deposits: mountains!*

Shortage on graphic artists

As you see in the above list, there is a lot of parts you need to assemble a working production chain. Sadly, we have not enough graphics artists to produce high-quality assets that can go straight into Unknown Horizons. manthus has provided great pieces of work with the charcoal burning, the toolmaker and several (graphical) building upgrades you will find in the pioneer increment, but some buildings still only exist as placeholders. They are found under the component 'Graphics' in our trac and have a high priority. The smeltery for instance likes to get replaced for sure. Another task is creating a housing for our settlers, right now they reside in pioneer log huts. Help! They want half-timbered quality standards!

If you are interested in contributing and are able to put your work under a CC or GPL license, give it a try! We'll honestly not reject you, visit us on IRC, post on the forums or in our bugtracker.
* Or a first step towards having mountains at least. You'll see what I mean

here in this new picture!

Maybe we'll also show two of them.

All improvements are of course welcome, the mountain graphics are likely to be replaced if we have better ones available.

More new content

That said, let's sum up what other upgrades I talk about. We also added a field with sugar cane (P) and a distillery (P) for liquor. A tavern (P) uses this alcohol to produce another kind of get-together-and-meet-pals resource which increases tax income. These (P)-buildings lack proper graphics right now, too. New pioneer versions got added for the pavilion and the signal fire, more to come. If you help :)

We further populated the sea with a fish resource. This means that the fisher can only work properly if there is a school of fish in range now.
Still work to be done, of course, the animation e.g. looks odd and is synchronized all over our archipelago, but that's a huge step in the right direction already.
Later, you will be able to build boats at the boat builder and assign them to a certain fisher. A fisher without boat will only be able to hang around fishing with a rod, that is not the most effective way for sure.

To wrap up this huge text: We are moving forward, there is progress, but it could be better. With exactly your support. Not only are graphic artists needed, even playtesting users, evolving into professional bug hunters, are of invaluable help.

Help wanted:

• 3D-modelling, urgent need ;-)
• playtesting and balancing, can be done by everybody
• animation

Kind Regards
Your team of Unknown Horizons