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 lot of different things. The main theme of this post is polishing and quality assurance. But a lot of it!

Wuzzy joins the developer team

As some of you may have guessed, I (Wuzzy) joined the developer team somewhen at the end of 2016. Since then, I have worked hard on Hedgewars.

GUI improvements

Check marks appear next to completed campaigns and campaign missions:

Singleplayer missions have been reorganized:

Indicator symbols tell you when extra damage and/or low gravity are enabled (so you don't forget):

Proper stats and snarky comments have been added to the stats screen which also uses new icons. Here you see a finished game of Mutant:

And there have been big and small improvements in the frontend all over the place.

Game Styles

Almost all game styles have seen a huge amount of rework and polishing.

WxW

WxW has seen a lot of love, great for all those ninja ropers among you.

Most important change: WxW finally supports multiple wall sets. Before the start of a round, the first player can select the walls you need to touch before playing. For some selected maps, there is a large number of wall sets to choose from.

The menu also has been reworked:

3 more game rules have been added as well:

• Crate Before Attack: You must collect the crate before you can attack
• All But Last: If you attack the team with least health, you must skip next round
• Kill The Leader: If your attack does not hurt the team with most health, you must skip next round

WxW also supports almost any setting in the game scheme. Want to play border-less vampiric WxW with heavy wind and laser sight? We got you covered!

HedgeEditor

HedgeEditor has seen a lot of love as well. An almost infinite number of bugs has been fixed (it was badly needed), all texts have been rewritten, and the HedgeEditor has been made more user-friendly (well, as good as possible).

Dud mines can now be placed, and placed objects have their timer or health written above.

You can select the frame in sprite placement mode.

Highlаnder

A small but very useful change: If you kill another hog in Highlаnder, the names of all weapons which you just grabbed will be displayed.

Other changes

Wait, this is not all!

Many scripts now have improved script parameter support for more advanced configuration. For example, you can finally set the number of rounds in Racer.

A longstanding problem with many scripts was that while they could theoretically add custom weapons by overwriting the existing ones, the name and description were unchanged.
This lead to many fake “Air Attacks” which aren't actually air attacks, etc.
This has been fixed by improving the Lua API. For example, this is the description panel for the structure placer in Construction Mode:

This was previously just (incorrectly) called “Air Attack” and had the air attack description. Construction Mode, HedgeEditor, Knockball, Racer and TechRacer have been changed accordingly.

There are many small polishing changes for these scripts which are too many to list here.

Complete list of game styles with improvements: WxW, HedgeEditor, Construction Mode, Space Invasion, Tumbler, Racer, TechRacer, Capture The Flag, Mutant.

The small things

CopherNeue added a baseball bat animation and nemo added dynamite sparks.

Improved theme support

Thanks to KoBeWi, support for custom themes gets better than ever!

Theme objects can now be buried in two (or more) parts of land.
Sheepluva also made a small tweak to the Jungle theme to demonstrate this:

Water animation can be customized.

Theme objects can be placed on water. Flakes can rise. Themes support custom sounds. Flakes and clouds can be mirrored by wind.

To learn more about KoBeWi's work, see KoBeWi's post in the forums:
https://hedgewars.org/node/6603

New theme and forts

Random Bug of the Day

We're all just humans, and we make mistakes! The award for the silliest bug found in development goes to this gem found in Climb Home:

Yes, this strange bar thing is actually the image used on the flags of computer players.

Mystery Screenshot

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