BehindTheHedge: Interface improvements & more
In the BehindTheHedge series we provide brief glimpses into what's going on at the development side of the game.
And although we core developers are quite busy these days,
we are still working hard on the next release of Hedgewars!
So, in this post let's talk about what's happening to room filters, the in-game chat input system and some other things! 
New room filters
Tired of dealing with locked or password protected rooms?
Just filter them awayyyy.
Thanks nemo!
In-game Chat Input
New input text cursor, selections and Copy/Paste
In future releases you will be able to move the chat cursor to edit text you've typed more efficiently. (Hold Ctrl to jump over words!)
Holding Shift while moving the cursor will select text!
Also you will be able to copy selected text to your clipboard or to insert text from your clipboard using the usual key combinations (Ctrl+C/V)!
That means you'll also be able to paste stuff copied from other applications too!
Hedgehog speech hints
In Hedgewars you can already make your hedgehogs speak in speech bubbles by quoting your chat message using ", ' or -
If the quoted text starts with a digit, then that digit will decide which hedgehog is going to speak - but it can be hard to know/guess which number means which hedgehog 
In future releases you will see the required number for each of your own hedgehogs while typing!
What else is going on?
New challenging item!
nemo has made a hovering mine that once placed by a player or a script will attempt to chase hedgehogs that come to close!A nice way so spice up shoppa mode!
More about that -hopefully- later!
Cake-use could be become more skill-based
We are considering to replace the manual trigger of cake with the need to charge/wind up the cake timer before sending it out, by holding space.That way cake would only be as precise as your walk-time estimation and timer-charge skills!
(Timer-charge precision would be finer than seconds, even if you'd only see seconds displayed).
What do you think?
New frontend still in the works
When unC0Rr is not busy fixing bugs, he's working on a new menu interface for the game!It uses Qt5/QML and we hope to achieve a cleaner result as well as an easier to maintain/extend/customize user interface than the currently old and messy Qt4 frontend!
Our server needs a new home!
The current free provider of hedgewars.org notified us that they sadly won't be able to host for us anymore.That means we need a new server or host!
You can help? Let us know!
Do you have opinions or suggestions regarding above topics?
We'd love to hear them, please leave a comment!
Disclaimer: features mentioned above are still in development and therefore subject to change
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sphrix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgxcQ the link is not working, where is the kitty ?
the work on the tchat, and on the bubble speech is very cool ! congratulation !
i think the mine thing will be awesome, aswell as the Cake !
you are all doing a very good work !! gg
sheepluva
Thanks for your feedback!
And you typed x instead of X in that link, that's why it isn't working ;p
cri.thegrinch
Really nice works guys.. this game gonna be always better.. =)
mikade
I'm vehemently opposed to this. By all means, add a less expensive cupcake that behaves as you describe (perhaps even assign a key to let it jump, which cake can't do [yay, new strategies!]), but whatever you do, don't break existing and established weapon behaviors.
edit: Changes to input method sound awesome btw. Any chance this will let me type in Japanese, now? (I can only do so by ALT-tabbing and chatting through the frontend at present)
Wuzzy
Wow, the hedgehog number feature is actually pretty useful.
If I understand correctly, these are the number of turns/rounds left until this hog gets active, right?
I wish there would be a similar feature where you could reveal these numbers by just holding down a new key. I mean a feature where you see the number of turns left until this hog gets active.
Maybe I write more about this in a seperate post in Feature Requests.
Actually, I do not like the speech bubble feature that much. I don't say you should remove it, I just say I don't really use it.
And the fact that messages enclosed in dashes, quotation marks (and other characters?) can become annoying quickly when you just want to chat. There should be a possibility to turn off this feature entirely, so that i.e. quotation marks are always taken literally.
Actually, even in English chat there are instances where you need these characters for chat:
"This is funny!"-__-'_'The first one is a quote, maybe as answer to a question like “What did she say?”.
The second one is an emoticon (annoyed face).
The third one is another emoticon (perhaps a bit contrived).
There are probably more examples.
I know all this can be worked around by using a trailing space, but in practice, players will often forget these “magic” characters.
Maybe this whole overloading thing of the chat should be completely rethought. IMO it is not a good idea to do all things of different things (speech bubbles, commands, actual chat) in a single text input field which originally was only intended for chat. Maybe I write more about that somewhere else.
EDIT: Regarding the menu interface: What do you thinkg about this?:
http://www.hedgewars.org/node/5985
sheepluva
I personally don't know the details of the issue and I don't think any of my changes will affect, not to mention fix, it.
I'd like to look into it though. Can you write/link me a guide with instructions of how to exactly reproduce that issue (preferably for x/ubuntu).
You do not understand correctly :P
These are the numbers of alive hedgehogs in order.
First hog will always be first hog until it dies, regardless of turn.
I did think about maybe allowing holding ALT key to give insight into team order and who's turn is next.
But I didn't feel like adding a new binding and also I was afraid it further encourage people to name all their hogs identically to make it even harder for their enemies to figure out who'll be next to attack.
Hm. Actually I'd prefer ALT to toggle to/from mouse-cursor mode.
WRT
: I am probably going to generally exclude -.- and 
(with arbitrary amount of _) from becoming quotes.
But yes, there might be more elegant solutions (e.g. when mouse cursor is finally available during game, people could just click the hog and type into it's speech bubble I guess)
Wuzzy
Then maybe then couldn't it be simply enforced that all hog names must differ? The real problem is that it is possible to have identical hog names, not that people use/abuse this possibility.
If you agree, I make an issue out of this.
This sounds like an awful workaround and it is way too focused on English chatslang. Remember that the chat is not only used by English-speaking people who use weird chatslang that way.
Also, there are tons of emoticons, just picking two out of them is an arbitrary choice.
What is needed is a measure to generally disable speech bubbles, regardless of the content of the chat message. Anything else just opens the door for weird corner cases.
I guess I just open a new thread for this right now.
Nexia
I actually second this. The cake has an established way of use currently, with all sorts of players, it just seems wrong to me to replace that all of a sudden with this manner of a change in behavior. I know I'd definitely find it quite different to the cake I know :P
Firework
Some nice ideas. However, I would prefer the Cake to be left as is. I enjoy the simplicity of the Cake. There are plenty of other weapons that already have a timing skill element - e.g. Grenade, Cluster Bomb, Water Melon etc.
lighthouse64
Nice ideas. I'd definetly like seeing a smarter cake :p
Dziq
Cake should be replaced with new one, current one is too easy to use , too overpowered because can be used without much thinking.
bubble talking is nice feature too (just for fun or taunting), but yes - it would be nice just to click on a given hog and type directly in bubble or something similiar to like that
Also, typing for example: "/hta blablabla" should work even when its other player turn, currently its not working like that
Hovering mine ? hmmmm mixed thoughts, but new weapons are always welcome, Anyway weapons can be disabled in scheme setting if somebody dislike it.
I can't wait for next release
guest41967
Like changes. How about have two cakes - normal and timed? One can be tweeked with dmg or xplosion bonus or just left in for players who want to add it into game. I think once we try it we might either like it or hate it, so it will be cool if it doesn't replace but is an additional weapon or option.
Also, a lot of people play custom versions of vamplander now and not a lot of default high. What sucks though is that ballgun, melon and ice gun are OP. Melon is somewhat ok but ballgun is really op early in the game. Usually you can just kami kami, until ballgun, to get big advantage. Ice gun is just brutal if someone gets it late game, as you might as well just stop playing sometimes if its 1v1 and 1 person has icegun. We don't want to take them out because we like having lots of weapon options in vamplander and brw, but they can be op. We try overall health and dmg variations but then it nerfs other weapons.
We need a bit of a ballgun, melon and ice gun nerf. I know I'm probably going to get lynched for saying it. We don't have to really nerf them but if there is some way to tweak them for hosts that setup vamp games that would be cool. I don't know how it would work or what ideas are, but maybe some way to lessen damage from them or turn on ice gun if host chooses.
nemo
You know you can customise the weaponset right? Just take out freezer if you wish.