The Widelands Development Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate of build-13 of Widelands. Widelands is a Free, cross-platform strategy game in which players control the fate of a small tribe that can grow into a big empire, in a style of play that is unique in the open source world. Please visit our homepage, http://www.widelands.org/ , to learn more.

Some of the highlights of build13rc2 are:
- stability of multiplayer game increased
- FPS regulation for decreased CPU usage
- improved economy routing
- many new sounds
- four new songs
- many new graphics and animations especially for the atlanteans
- balancing work for all tribes


As usual, there have been many more improvements to the usability and performance, as well as numerous gameplay improvements and bugfixes.

This release changes some basic data structures, including directory and file naming. Thus savegame handling will be broken. Because of these changes we recommend to uninstall any older version of Widelands, before installing the new one, to make sure that Widelands is only using the up to date data. While we welcome bug reports about crashes or misleading error messages when loading pre-build13 savegame or data structure (like starting new widelands with old data installed), we ask you to keep in mind that we are concentrating our development efforts on improving new features. Read the next paragraph for details about those new features. Concerning save games we introduce a new directory in your personal config folder. New savegames will be stored in $HOME/.widelands/save instead of $HOME/.widelands/ssave. $HOME/.widelands/ssave will be silently ignored as of the release of build-13.

New features include some serious change with the economy system. We are still discussing the best way to use this "on demand production". Please file ideas for the user interface about this engine as feature request rather than as bug. While there might be situations in build-13-games where you have to use quite sophisticated ways to finally get some production site to produce the very ware you need, most of the time you will find the new engine quite intelligent and convenient for the player.

Widelands uses SDL as graphics and input library and is currently available for Linux/x86, Windows (32-bit), Mac OS X, and in source code. Both binary and source packages are available from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40163

Simply download the binary package for your operating system and run the widelands executable! If your operating system is not supported, download a source package and try to compile it for yourself. See the homepage for the libraries you need to have installed.

You may also want to check the forums and our IRC channel, #widelands on Freenode, to arrange multiplayer games with other players.

We especially welcome every helping hand, even if you just want to contribute by helping us find bugs. Also translators for all languages are always needed. If you want to get even more involved in the further development of Widelands, you can subscribe to widelands-public@lists.sf.net on http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/widelands-public to keep up with development on a daily basis.