Note. This only impacts users using the German, Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese locales. Thanks to Henek for investigating and identifying the offending strings.

A crash was discovered as of this release, probably related to the increase in translated text. It impacts only these 3 well maintained locales, and only under Windows. The reason for it isn't precisely known (Freetype2 bug? some underlying Windows system thing it uses?). We do have a couple of workarounds though.

1) Easiest. Just switch to English or some other language you understand that is not German/Swedish/Brazilian Portuguese in config settings. Don't forget to restart Hedgewars after changing languages.

2) Change the crashing strings. Henek has thoughtfully fixed the few strings with similar ones that don't seem to crash.
a) Download http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6618468/Locale.zip
b) Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Hedgewars 0.9.14.1\share\hedgewars\Data\Locale and copy 3 files in the zip there.

We're gonna look into this, hopefully a better solution can be found.

Let us know if any other locales have problems!

Oh, then there is solution #3... install Linux

This is an artillery style game, all movement is only using portals. Keep an eye for the bonus crate fountain at the end.
Best watched in high def of course.

Followup. This is sheepluva demonstrating how not to portal hop.

The problem is most likely that your graphics card can't load that particular file, that it is simply too large.

A workaround for this is as follows:

1) Download http://m8y.org/hw/Data.zip
2) Go to your Hedgewars installation folder, find the Data subdirectory.
3) As a user with permissions to write to that folder, go to one directory above that Data folder and unzip Data.zip. This should overwrite all the Splash files with an empty image.

If you are still having trouble after this, try enabling the Reduce Quality setting in Options.

Note. For everyone else, this is just a zip full of empty pngs, and won't actually help performance. Also, the issue has been fixed for the next version.

BTW, I'm slowly coming to the realisation that some people are running into this because they are running opengl in software mode.
Check:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\.hedgewars\debug0.txt (or whatever your user directory is)
If you see something like:
0: OpenGL-- Renderer: GDI Generic
0: |----- Vendor: microsoft corporation
0: |----- Version: 1.1.0
0: \----- GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 1024

You're running in software mode.
Try finding updated drivers for your graphics card.
http://niuki.net/2010/03/drivers-for-gma500-with-opengl-support/
for example...

The game will run a lot faster.

Initially proposed as a quick maintenance release, it kept growing.

You can download it  HERE

The OSX build is now available. For those who downloaded it prior to roughly 2009-05-25 00:40 UTC please download again, there were some missing libraries.

Changelog

• Speech Bubbles - during your turn, have your hedgehog express himself.  In chat, use "regular speech"  'thought bubbles'  -action bubbles-  with the quote marks completely surrounding the entire typed text.  You can also use /hsa /hta /hya to fire off a bubble at the moment of your attack.

• New graves and hats, my favourite grave being the dead hedgehog.  Also some tweaks to theme graphics.

• Two new taunts - a /shrug and /juggle -ing.

• New mobster voice! Also a remake of the default voice set.

• Animated stars in the frontend.  If you want to turn them off, use the Frontend Effects checkbox in settings.

• Plenty of new theme music and a new frontend theme.

• Some new game modes. Karma, any injury you caused (not including drowning) is dealt to you too, unless invulnerable.  Vampirism, where you feed off damage you deal, gaining 80% of it.  Artillery, where your hog can not move about.

• Options to control mine quantity and timer.  Those are made use of in a Minefield scheme/weapon set as one of the default sets.

• The sniper rifle demonstrated in previous news post.

• Various fixes such as: prevent desync when a player quits, fix a crash at end of game in reduced quality, bug in synching changes to map and scheme in room, fix bug in disconnection from server, hedgehogs keep hats while jumping, bug in rope/parachute when drowning with active girder/teleport, bug in rope that on rare occasion deleted it on firing and an alternate font for Chinese/Japanese text that should render correctly in-game.

• In addition, hopefully any missing graphics and maps that didn't make it into 0.9.10 are now correctly represented in this release.

 

               What's Next?

Next on our todo list is construction mode, this mode has both teams constructing a fort to battle on, and then battling it out on the forts they create. To build the forts teams are given a build period and lots of different objects to use, crates, girders, flags, barrels, and more.

You can read about construction mode here:  http://www.hedgewars.org/node/1269


Also, in the next version we will be renabling user login to the gameserver using your hedgewars.org account. On top of this we will begin tracking stats!  Things like total wins/losses, perhaps some achievements. We'll also be displaying this information on hedgewars.org, so everyone in the forums can see just how well you're doing.

Also, as with every new release.. we plan to have another tournament!

Registration for the 0.9.11 tournament will begin soon, this tournament will be 2v2 in nature, so you better begin finding a partner. Expect details and rules in a post soon.