In the BehindTheHedge series we provide brief glimpses into what's going on at the development side of the game.

In this episode I talk about a few random assorted new features in the upcoming version of Hedgewars.

Resizable hand-drawn maps

The size of hand-drawn maps can be scaled with the slider, allowing for huge and tiny drawn maps:

Proper team support for campaigns and missions

The team identity in campaigns was completely ignored before. No matter what team you chose, the actual team you play had a fixed name.

This will be fixed. Your team name, hog names, graves, flag, etc. will now be actually be used in the campaign, instead of the pre-defined identity.

However, for A Classify Fairytale, the hedgehog names and hats will still be the choice of the campaign. This is done for story reasons; the story wouldn't really work if custom names would be allowed.

Single missions can now also be played with the team of your choice, and Hedgewars keeps track of your progress on a per-team basis.

Completed missions get a check mark and completed challenge missions will now save the team's high scores.
In the challenges in A Space Adventure, the highscores are only shown at the start of the mission.

Target radar

In target practice missions, you can now unlock the “target radar”: It displays the position of the next target (as a red circle). To unlock this, you have to complete the target practice mission at least once.

Controls

A couple of new convenience controls have been added.

If you push down [Precise] and one of the zoom, volume or camera move keys, the change will happen more slowly.

There's now also a control to unselect the current weapon, but it is disabled by default. This key can be useful if you need to unselect your weapon fast (e.g. if you have bee or girder selected).

And you can display object infos with [O] (see below).

There are a couple of improvements to the controls menu as well.

Most importantly, a long-standing bug that semi-broke non-QWERTY keyboards has finally been fixed. The bug was that in the controls settings, the displayed key was only true for US QWERTY keyboards but was incorrect if you used any other keyboard layout.

For example, if you selected the Z key and have a QWERTZ layout, the game would have actually used the Y key. The list now displays all keys correctly.

Also, key conflicts will now display a warning message. The controls menu also displays “special” key combinations that you cannot change directly, like [Shift]+[Home] to change hedgehog tag types.

Also, the campaigns completely ignored the team-specific controls. This has been fixed as well now.

Little visual helpers

You can now display information about objects with the [O] key. Currently, this shows mine timers and health crate contents. In replays, the “health” of barrels will be shown as well.

If your flying saucer is in dark/opaque water, there will be an outline:

Improved turn transition

The time between turns was too fast (a player complained). After a turn the next turn started almost immediately. It was often so fast you couldn't even read the damage tags because the camera moved instantly, making the damage unreadable.
So a few short time delays have been added to make events like damage or Sudden Death less hectic and the text more readable.