itch.io

Well, Wesnoth is on itch.io since itch.io allows people to specify the amount they want to pay (including $0), which is something Steam doesn’t offer. At this point about half our money comes from people choosing to pay a non-zero amount here on itch.io.

It’s a work in progress over at https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/7707. Though it’s not yet usable and there’s no ETA for when it’d be ready.

The download source doesn’t matter.

Odd numbered versions (1.17, 1.19, etc) are development/beta versions which get new features and content but may break things between releases. Even numbered versions (1.16, 1.18, etc) are stable releases which will mostly just be translation updates, bug fixes, etc. 1.17 was worked on for a couple years and eventually released as 1.18. 1.19 will also likely be worked on for a couple years and will eventually become 1.20. And so on.

It’s on Steam or Flathub, since those provide a runtime with the necessary dependencies for Wesnoth to run. itch.io doesn’t provide such a runtime and we don’t want to have to deal with providing them ourselves, so a Linux version isn’t available here.

We even still have the installers available for those early versions at https://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/wesnoth-1.0/

No guarantee they still work with modern versions of Windows though, of course.

There is a Linux version actually (Flatpak, Steam, as well as often being packaged by individual distros).

There isn’t a Linux version on itch.io since it would require either for us to include all Wesnoth’s dependencies as part of the download (which is a pain) or require players to download all the required dependencies themselves (also bad). Flatpak and Steam on the other hand provide all the dependencies that Wesnoth needs as part of their respective runtime environments, which makes it much easier to provide just “a Linux version” there.

The installers do still exist actually and are created for each version - see here. The issue is that the installer tends to cause issues with antivirus software because it’s unsigned and getting a proper signing certificate would be a lot of time and effort (explanation here), so the link to it was taken off the website main page. The reason being that people won’t have issues with antivirus if it’s launched via the itch.io client, though my understanding is anyone downloading the standalone zip is likely to have the same antivirus issue when running wesnoth.exe as they would with the installer.

The release announcement posts on the Wesnoth forums do also still have a link to the installer.

Alright, sounds good. Thanks again!

As a follow up to this thread: how far back are players able to download old versions of a game? Are old versions available indefinitely, or are there limits in terms of version age and-or the amount of data uploaded to a channel?

It does, thanks.

Yeah, it sounds like I misunderstood them; thanks. What I don’t follow though is:

Then butler will create a history for each channel, and users using the Itch app will be allowed to select a previous version, if they want.

When downloading through the app I don’t have the option of downloading older versions uploaded to a channel, I only have the option of which channel I want to use.

For the game the Battle for Wesnoth, major releases are handled in the following way:

• Even numbered versions (for example, 1.14.x) are considered the “stable” series and only get smaller bug fixes.
• Odd numbered versions (for example, 1.15.x) are considered the “development” series and are where major changes are made, including things that are not backwards compatible.

Eventually though, development on the 1.15 series will finish and it will become the next stable series: 1.16.

The questions:

• What happens to the channel if I click the “Delete file” button on the “Edit game” page? Does it delete the entire channel, or does the channel still exist but it’s no longer available for download?
• What happens to players who are using a channel after “Delete file” is clicked?
• Is butler able to rename a channel? For example, to rename the 1.15 channel to 1.16? I am aware of the “Change display name” option, which is not what I’m asking about.