All Maps of Bos Wars 2.6.1+ (svn r10193)

I filled a recent craving for playing a sci-fi real time strategy game by re-discovering Bos Wars and playing every single player map.

image: Bos' level of art, many screenshots indicate a much lower quality.

The game runs on low-spec computers and can be quite fast-paced. I quite enjoyed playing it in a tower-defense/tower rush style. The last release of Bos Wars has been over two years ago, but development is not frozen, the last commit was on 2012-08-09.

The three biggest issues I personally had are:

1. Some maps are aesthetically displeasing.
2. For a beginner, it's hard to decide what map to play.
3. Many units and buildings don't have voices/sounds.
4. The interface is confusing in regards to resource quantity.

Visual style of old maps

image: most likely the first map you play in Bos (because it's selected by default)

To address issues 1 and 2, I hope that this blog post will help. The screenshots at the bottom show the game start screen at 1280x1024 for every of the "Start Game" single player maps. If you see a level that you'd like to play, right-click and "open" the link or image, to see the level name in the file name of the screenshot.

An in-game solution to issue 1. would be to create a map folder called "old" and move all levels in there, when the rendered ground texture clashes with the units, buildings and resources.

This suggestion might be seen as disrespectful insult to the original map makers, but having the current map selection structure is a barrier for new players, who need some guidance to get started without having to open random levels first. They are likely to assume that the first level they play is representative of the visual style of the entire game, which can be quite wrong, as you can see by the different-looking screenshots at the bottom.

Map selection screen

image: Bos Wars map selection screen

To solve issue 2 in-game, a preview of the mini-map, as it is seen with "non-revealed map" would help. This might be a non-trivial UI/in-game-rendering task if it has to work fully automatic.

Missing/repetitive sounds

In regards to issue 3, I started by contributing a patch with some voices and sounds. If you would like to help as a voice actor or by turning voice lines into soldier/pilot/driver voice/effect mixes, please feel free to comment in this blog post, if you would like to coordinate this with me and other potential contributors. Female voices are especially welcome (source).

Feedback on my patch is welcome too. Watch/listen to the video below, to see what kind of voices are missing and what kind of voices are being used multiple times in Bos Wars.

video: Unit sounds in Bos Wars

Resource UI

I'm not sure I have figured it out completely but here goes nothing.

image: how I interpret Bos' resource info

Without having thought this through in detail, this is what seems to be missing:

• Resource icons.
• Absolute value of resources in stock, rather than divided by ten(?).
• Color coding of income/spending.
• Display of the sum of income and spending - in a prominent position, individual display of income and spending in a non-prominent position.
• Indication of resource effect by buildings when selecting buildings and when hovering them in the build menu.

Starting screens of all Bos Wars maps

If you see a level that you'd like to play, right-click and "open" the link or image, to see the level name in the file name of the screenshot.

gallery: All Bos Wars maps

From death declaration to dragons and damnation... and two 2D map editors

youtube-dl: hyzOB92EuZM | tinyogg

The 2D RTS Bos Wars (BW) 2.6 has been released, after two years of release-silence. The new release includes

• Enhancements to the editor and map format
• New units, tilesets, maps, translations (italian and portugese)
• A campaign

About the campagin, which is called "swindler", I can only say that the story drawings are beautiful and that the first mission is unbeatable boring (which is why I can't say anything about follow-up missions, if there are any): you need to navigate a weak unit through a maze of high-damage towers - blind. You only have a chance when you have a good memory and accept having to restart the mission 20 times. The only other scripted scenario is the tutorial level, which has (computer-generated) mission voices even! You can see both missions being played (and the mentioned story drawings) in this video [tinyogg].

The new map format is 'patch-based', which is like 'tile-based' I suppose, only that it allows you to use tiles of any dimensions. The editor works well, it could only use a 'tile draw mode' which would continue to draw tiles while holding down the mouse button (this happens for units, but not for tiles). Here's a video [tinyogg] demonstration of the editor, make sure to skip if it gets boring, I show off tile, resource and unit placement and then test-play the map.

What I really really want BW to have is a tower defense map/mode. :)

Since I started talking about editors, I'll just go ahead and show the PARPG one:

youtube-dl: vXqojPwGYj4 | tinyogg

The editor is all right, it seems to be a bit hard to get existing resources into the game though: they need to have a xml definition file for each image (hand-written I assume) and then you have to import them into the map with multiple mouse clicks.

You probably know of the lack of a maintainer for PARPG but there are also coding and asset-making jobs to do for Techdemo 2 - enter "2D" and "3D" into your browser's search function to filter out the art tasks. A list of 'good tasks for new programmers' was written, you also ask for guidance here. The current programmer's hot topic is "inventory and objects".

youtube-dl: NFoGyph_Bc4 | tinyogg

Formido is a short top-down shoot-until-aliens-kill-you game. It is well-made, but I won't be coming back to it as I will be doing to Violetland.

youtube-dl: bRnHlyYJSlI | tinyogg

Damnation of the Gods aims to become an enhanced Dungeon Master clone. Right now it is an old-school engine with a pleasant GUI which relies on freeware DMJ's assets. Assets is what the project mainly needs.. and maybe some guidance for a plot?..

youtube-dl: a6q4X3ZxKNM | tinyogg

Dragon History is a Czech-language (with some horrible but fun text translations) adventure game for scummVM. Its code is GPLv2-licensed. I got no reply yet after asking for the gfx and audio's license..

Did I already mention that my Linux game video recording troubles were over the day I discovered this guide to use ffmpeg for it?

Remember my high praise of krank? Well now thanks to above post you can finally witness [tinyogg] visuals and sound in motion!

Also, dear Linux users: get youtube-dl if you're unable to use the youtube website. It owns. Look for it in your software repository.

Oh wait, I forgot one piece of news:

youtube-dl: 3B4GVILtzIw | tinyogg

Search and Rescue 0.9 was released. Contrary to FlightGear I was able to get my vehicle into the air (on the third try ;) ). Sounds would not work but I kind of like the low-resolution textures. I'll have to play it a little more to figure out if there's more fun things to do besides crashing helicopters. ^^