Some thoughts about Wesnoth campaign-building

Project Battle for Wensoth has a large community forum, divided to threads for different topics like strategies, support, development etc. These forums are, as they usually tend to be, a bit scattered. Usually forums aren't the best way to start studying of anything, but these are pretty useful if you are already familiar with Wesnoth and want to find solutions to problems you met or just to get fresh ideas. But you can find (or why not to write?) some "summary-type" postings as well, like this one.

Some quite random thoughts concerning to campaign-building, what can be better (as my speciality is WML these are mainly related to coding):
The best way to get familiar with WML is to play different campaigns and if you find some technical aspects to be interesting then immediatelly check the WML-code (and remember it as example). Also this is good way to get ideas for your own campaigns.
Help and WML documentation in BfW forums shold contain examples as much as possible. Examples of certain features would be convenient. Right now because help in Wesnoth site is pretty laconic, so less skilled campaign-builder have to search for real uses of described tags anyway. (It means Google is still important source of information, even if you have found respective topic in Wesnoth site.)
After changing campaign .cfg-file you have to restart the Wesnoth program because it caches missions, and this causes changes you have made won't affect without restart. It makes test-process time consuming and is just annoying, it would be very nice if this could be changed somehow.
I missed for WML-validator a lot. I found several topics in Wesnoth forums where were discussed about creating that tool, but looks like all those projects are still "under construction". Good thing is that very likely there will be WML-validator soon.
The main way to balance forces is to adjust incoming. Therefore I think it needs an extra attention carrying money between scenarious as it can easily disbalance well tuned (single) scenario. From that perspecitve it is safer to keep bonus ratio low (or not to give bonus at all- then you can test and balance each scenario independently of others).

And one more, a bit personal thing- as distinct from recommendations from forums I think that too much of dialogues are not good at all, I think the dialogue should contain only useful and necessary information, otherwise it gets boring and works as pointless waste of time (without possibility to interrupt it before getting to play). It seems to me that dialogues longer than 5 sections won't be read through, so if you have anything to say, do it in first 5 section :)

Battle for Wesnoth

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game. I'm not very familiar with role-based strategy games, at first glance it looks like "Heroes of Might and Magic" for me. In this game you are acting in a land called Wesnoth. You have a hero who has to fight against the enemy, for that he can build up (or has already) his own little army. This needs money, to get money you have to conquer villages. Different units (soldiers in your army) have different abilities and weaknesses, the player needs to consider more or less carefully, which units to produce and which units to use in a battle.
The goal of the game may vary in campaigns, but usually player have to destroy the enemies' leader(s) and the player's own hero must survive and/or reach to some point on the map. In general this is up to the developer- it is possible to set any sort of event as the winning (or losing) condition. Usually the length of play is limited by the maximum number of turns. It is possible to define different difficulties of play, for example developer can specify that at "easy" level you get 40 turns and can create 5 types of soldiers, but at "medium" level you have, let's say, 35 turns and 3 types of soldiers available.
Also it is possible to play online against other players.
I have to admit this game isn't too addictive for me, but I'm not a big gamer anyway. For me the most attractive and interesting property of the game is the possibility to create your own campaigns with any goal and tactics you want to or can implement, create your own items and characters with a unique look and behaviour. Due to this an active community of users has formed who are developing the game and missions (forum).

FSF and OSI

Open Source Initiative (OSI) is an organization promoting open source software (homepage). Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organization supportig free software movement (homepage).
Although they seem to have similar aims they are addressed to different aspects of software: "open source" is a development methodology (definition of Open Source is here), "free software" is a concept which means the freedom to run, study/discover, change and distribute software (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). Access to the source code is a precondition for these freedoms, thus the concept "free software" contains also openness of the source code, but "open source" itself does not say anything about the price or other commercial aspects, "open source software" can be commercial software, but neither free nor open source software can't be proprietary software. Distribution and modification of proprietary software is restricted, you have to get permission for that. "Free software" does not mean "free download" (i.e. price 0), the differences are explained here.
Thus OSI promotes open source deveopement as a practical (business) solution, FSF promotes freedom (as ethical category) of using and developing software.
Software for 0 cost, but with non-published source is not free nor open source software.
Both organizations have set up a licence approvement process- licences approved by FSF complying with free software definition (as this is described above) while licences approved by OSI meet the criteria of openness of source code (for more specific description see http://opensource.org/docs/osd.
The lists of licences approved by OSI and FSF are available at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses.
Numerous licences have approvement of both, thus being free and open source software. Here is the table provading the comparison of licences approved by these organizations.

Basically we can conclude that OSI is aiming at companies' needs while FSF is focusing on developers' and practitioners' interests.