Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?
Wesnoth makes current hardware sweat to the point where my relatively new MBP sounds like it's taking off, as is my friend's ThinkPad. It's also the only game capable of slowing my current-generation iMac down to the brink of operating system usability and beyond.
The game itself is slow, UI actions, moving units across the battlefield - pretty much anything happens only after a noticeable pause. There is no apparent reason why a largely static, 2D, tile-based, pixel game should be this slow.
The network code and its underlying model are an unmitigated disaster, by design. If you experience any network glitch during play, including short wifi disruptions, the connection collapses. But it doesn't do so right away. It can take up to a few minutes for the game to notice that a player has disconnected. There is no automatic re-connect, all players have to save, exit, and rejoin. While playing Wesnoth it's advisable to stay in contact over email to coordinate.
Sometimes, the game state gets out of sync between players and the server. When the game notices that, you get the option to cancel the game or ignore and continue. If you do the latter, in-game causality breaks down completely (with hilarious results). If you opt for the former, once again, everybody has to save, exit, and re-join, and hope anyone has a non-corrupt save game. The game state isn't large or complex by the way.
These are not merely bugs; they are deep, architectural problems.
"However, I wanted to be able to develop Wesnoth quickly, using the latest technology and latest C++ features. Because of this I didn't spend much time focusing on things like minimizing the memory Wesnoth takes up, or trying to make it ultra-fast. This does limit its portability a little in that it is difficult to get working on systems with limited memory"
Yes, Wesnoth is hamstrung a little by its tech stack. The dev team very much wants to move to SDL 2 and support OpenGL in the future.
How will they do that? With more and interested developers. Hence, the call to action.
Getting it running on an existing engine (UE4 can do 2d fairly well, for instance) seems like a better investment of resources. What they're building is a solved problem. It was a valiant effort to do it on their own, especially in a time when that was the only way. They could reap the benefits of all those learnings in the backend and instead focus efforts on tweaking gameplay, inventing new forms of play, and smoothing out rough edges in the UI or visuals.
Sometimes the best games take a (long) while, and may never be finished.
So I downloaded the source, inverted application of damage, and recompiled.
To that, my friend said "no! the hacking is supposed to be about manipulating the data files..."
I replied, "my way was easier."
Thanks for mentioning Nethack and reminding me of this :-).
[0] ok, not really, the nethack4 faq mentions 'The development team who worked on versions 1 to 3 of NetHack (the DevTeam) are still working on it (although there was no real evidence of this until 2014), but they don't release their progress, meaning that the situation is effectively the same as if they'd been doing nothing.'
What I don't see is very much momentum toward establishing a proper successor fork a la Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.
Sometimes updates actually make things worse. I like Brogue 1.7.2 a lot more than 1.7.3 for example. You should try that game if you haven't already, it does so many things well!
the game is basically equals of it's former self, with many more graphic enhancement and sophistication that push the battle system, the maps and the editors to their limits, but while being timeless it also has exhausted its replay value and lives in a market which is vastly different to the circumstances that brought it to life many years ago
Also as one who lived through the times when gaming on Linux was almost unheard of, or required a lot of imagination, I think Wesnoth is part of gaming history right now. The future is here and Valve helped bring it about, the quality and quantity of games on Linux has completely transformed in the last 5 years.
So gamers looking for entertainment on Linux have so much more to look forward to right now than Wesnoth. It's time to move on.