Time for 0.9.17, or the belated anniversary release!

Well, initially this was supposed to be a quick release to fix a few bugs in 0.9.16 and throw in a feature or two.

But, things took a couple of weeks longer than planned, and along the way, some other fun stuff got added!

Let's see... New theme, Cave. Fight amongst translucent crystals in a cave underground, endless dripping builds up stalactites and stalagmites, and the light from outside illuminates the cold gray world.

New voicepack, Hillbilly. 'Nuff said? Yeehaw!

AI is now smarter. Now with the ability to switch hogs, you may find it is not quite as easy to defeat a horde of AI as it used to be. More improvements planned in future.

Frontend revamp. More attractive missions screen, timestamping and links in chat, DLC page refreshes on access, chat styling, and a fix for a frontend crasher.

Ice. This is for a future ice gun, but for now you can try it out on the bridges and girders of the Snow/Christmas theme, or on any static map with a mask that uses blue.

A number of small graphical tweaks. 3D modes should look more 3D now (clouds/flakes), girders don't leave windows when placed in blowtorch tunnels, static maps can now have background land.

Aaaand of course, the bugfixes...

See the ChangeLog as usual for a bit more detail.

So, Halloween was Hedgewars' 7th birthday according to unC0Rr.
Yes, he was working on it for almost a year locally before pushing it to a public
source server on:
changeset: 0:475c0f2f9d17
user: root
date: Sun Aug 21 20:58:04 2005 +0000
summary: "default layout"

I was hoping we could do a small birthday release, but at this point it will have to be a belated one.

So, after 7 years, what's next for Hedgewars? Well, there's always more to do, and being open source, everyone has their own opinions.
Here are the things going on that I know of.

* Campaign - Hedgewars still needs a campaign. In order to do it properly, a few new Lua functions need to be added to allow keeping track of progress through the campaign. This will also require people to design a campaign story, levels, missions, bosses...

* Android port! Xeli is still working on improving it, but it needs more love and more developers. Do you use Android? Are you a programmer? Help out! This could also probably use help on UI and graphics side, if that's more your thing.

* And of course... always new weapons, modes and features. People keep coming up with endless things they'd like the game to do. Personally I want to try an ice gun next.

* And someday? Web port (still a long ways to go). This one is one that excites me. I think we are finally at the point where Hedgewars could be run in your browser at a decent FPS and with relatively little content to download. Cross-compiled to the web using emscripten, and with supporting tech such as CORS, WebGL, IndexedDB, WebSockets and async AudioAPI. This is a major task since it will require reimplementing the I/O layers, as well as managing a cross-compile in the first place.

Anyway. Happy belated birthday, Hedgewars!

Ok. Emergency rerelease. Anyone who downloaded prior to Sat Sep 17 18:30 UTC 2011, please grab it again from the download page.

Hi! Remember these? It's been a while right?
Well. It's that time again. A new release of Hedgewars.
As usual, you can get it on the Download page.

There's quite a lot of stuff in 0.9.16, so it is hard to know what to focus on. Let's pick some highlights.

* Downloadable content! Simply click to install any content. New voices, hats, maps, themes, translations, music, scripts... Hedgewars is now more customisable than ever before! As time goes by we will be soliciting community content to feature on this page, so remember to check it from time to time. If you decide you want to go back to standard Hedgewars, just remove the Data directory from your Hedgewars config directory.

* 3-D rendering! Diorama-like rendering of the game in a variety of 3D modes. Let us know which ones work best for you, we didn't really have the equipment to test them all.

* Resizable game window. Also full screen has been re-enabled under Windows.

* New utilities! The Time Box will remove one of your hedgehogs from the game for a while, protecting from attack until it returns, somewhere else on the map. Land spray will allow you to build bridges, seal up holes, or just make life unpleasant for your enemies.

* New single player: Bamboo Thicket, That Sinking Feeling, Newton and the Tree
and multi-player: The Specialists, Space Invaders, Racer - scripts! And a ton more script hooks for scripters

* New twists on old weapons. Drill strike, seduction and fire have been adjusted. Defective mines have been added, rope can attach to hogs/crates/barrels again, grenades now have variable bounce (use precise key + 1-5). Portal gun is now more usable in flight and all game actions are a lot faster.

* New theme - Golf, dozens of new community hats and a new localised Default voice, Ukranian.

Testers are appreciated, as ever.
There are already quite a few of you who I've been playing with in the evenings, and we've found a lot of minor issues while doing that.

Copy and paste build instructions for ubuntu/debian.
http://www.hedgewars.org/node/2215#comment-15049

approximate feature list
http://hedgewars.org/node/3206#comment-21019

Please file bugs on:
http://code.google.com/p/hedgewars/issues/list
(check for existing reports first!)

Try testing new features and utilities/weapons. Try to come up with unanticipated behaviour combinations.

Thanks!

p.s. - for the hat creators.
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/misc/hats_js_anim.xhtml

Is the current list of hats.
Hats on:
http://m8y.org/tmp/newhats/hats_js_anim.xhtml
that have red squares around them are ones that have pixel errors. Most of them it is subtle. Try changing to a light coloured or dark coloured theme. Some it is pretty clear.
Hopefully someone will fix them so they can be included. Otherwise, they will probably end up in a content pack on:
http://hedgewars.org/content.html

Hi guys. Just like a few of my other blog entries, I'm here to cover the bad news and the workarounds.

1) OSX will desync with other operating systems if playing the Blizzard map (used by the CTF_Blizzard mission as well).
Fix?
Download:
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/share/hedgewars/Data/Maps/Blizzard/ma...
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/share/hedgewars/Data/Maps/Blizzard/ma...

And place those in /applications/games/Hedgewars.app/contents/resources/hedgewars/Data/Maps/Blizzard on the OSX machine.

2) Snow and Christmas themes, and maps that use them, will crash if Reduce Quality is all the way to the left, due to flakes not being optional on those themes. If possible, increase the Reduce Quality slider by 1 to the right. If not possible and you are able to do your own build, I can provide a patch against 0.9.15. Basically amounts to applying:
http://code.google.com/p/hedgewars/source/detail?r=e73707bb99c006db16ae6...
Another workaround if you want to try these themes and must use maximum reduce quality is to create a scheme with a border. This will disable snow.

3) CTF Blizzard map, as well as suffering from (2) will also crash if the Reduce Quality slider is 1 to the right of far left. Fix is to either increase it 1 more to the right or download:
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/share/hedgewars/Data/Maps/CTF_Blizzar...
and copy it to your local Data/Maps/CTF_Blizzard directory.

Oh, and looks like http://hedgewars.org/node/2598 still applies