The members of the jury agreed on the maps for final community voting. If you like to participate in this voting, please take a look at all nine maps and try to give an objective vote for your favourite map afterwards.

Following maps are the final candidates:
* Crater by Tarrei
* Four mountains by Quappo
* Islands at war by Tuxlands
* Last Bastion by Another Barbarian
* Mystical Maze by Tuxlands
* Rendez-Vous by Quappo
* The far north by Another Barbarian
* The pass through the mountains by Quappo
* Three warriors by Quappo

If you want to download the maps and/or to vote for your favourit one, please visit our contest page.

Note: You will need a current SVNBuild for some of these maps to load. You will find information on such builds on our Contest page.

The end of submission time for our map contest has been reached. The forum threads for submission have been closed and all jury members started their work. 11 non scenario maps were uploaded, while no scenario map was submitted to our contest.
First point is absolute positive, as a lot of these maps are as good or even better as the ones we already had in our official releases. So first outcome of this contest: we got the maps we searched for.
Second point is a pity. But we already bargained before start of map contest, that there will not be more than one or two submissions in scenario map category, as we developers know, how hard it is to write such scenarios with our current editor .
And last but not least one other outcome of the map contest are some improvements and bugfixes on the editor.

What's up next?
Well, the jury will decide which maps will participate in final voting and as soon as these maps are chosen, vote time will begin (so perhaps even some days before 7th September 2008 as announced in map contest regulations - but the jury will decide on this point.)
So soon it will be up to you, to decide and vote for your preferred map. And if you like, you already can take a look on all submission here

In last few days we implemented the ability to select and load a savegame in multi player mode. The code is still unfinished, so that one player needs to distribute it's savegame manually. All the other player than have to copy it to the same location from where the host loads this file (normally in ~/ssave/ or [widelands]/ssave/ on windows).

Anyway as far as we tested it, the savegame loader works quite stable, so the only missing thing in this case is network sharing of files. And that feature is also needed for non standard mapfiles, that not all players have got.

Want to test it? than just start!!!
On irc are often people having some free time (or even waiting for other players) to play widelands via internet.
Looking forward to meet you online .

Because of the widelands map contest we already got some new bug reports for the editor. Beside some other, the awkwardest was fixed in current SVN:

If you created a map but did not set the starting positions of the players, the editor automatically saved them at the coordinates (-1,-1). During loading of that map Widelands than crashed and explained that (-1,-1) are not coordinates on a 64x64 map (or similiar).
This bug was fixed. All maps showing this problem should be loadable again with current Widelands SVN versions. An update is recommended.
If you don't want to compile widelands yourself, you might find inofficial precompiled versions here (Linux) and here (Windows)

The Widelands development team are pleased to announce their first map contest. Entries are invited from all Widelands players. Use your creativity in designing original new maps, and compete for the grand prize! We hope this contest will result in many new maps for the official Widelands distribution. Even if your entry doesn't win a prize, if its good enough, it's likely we'll include it in our next official release. To make sure this is possible, all submissions must be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

From now until 31st August 2008 submissions will be accepted in two categories: non-scenario maps, and single player scenario maps.
When all the submissions are in, a jury¹ will choose up to ten finalists in each category. The community will then vote to decide the final winners. We hope to provide some modest prizes for the top ranked entries; so far we have two Widelands t-shirts for the winners. If you'd like to help us by contributing a prize, please contact Nasenbaer

For more information about this contest, please see our contest page

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¹ = members are listed in "RULES AND REGULATIONS" on contest page