It has been a while again since the last blog post, and there has been a lot of progress. Almost everything in the new frontend library works now, and to test the library and how much it will simplify creating a new frontend, I quickly hacked together a "toy" frontend running in the Windows console.

It's not full-featured, but you can chat, join a room, add teams, and then play. You will even see a small ascii-art preview of the generated map. You can't create rooms though.

The frontend is Windows-only at the moment (wine does not seem to like it much, either), and the frontend+library are hardly tested at all. In other words, I take no responsibility if you decide to try it out yourself.

If that does not scare you off, you can download the console frontend here and extract all files it into the "bin" directory of a nightly build. Start the consoleclient.exe and enter your username. You will be connected to the hedgewars server, and the available commands will be explained.

To add a team to a room with the /addteam command, there has to be a file with the name .hwt in the bin directory. The zip file already includes the team "Cave Dwellers", but you can copy other team files from your hedgewars user directory.

Due to the (cheap) way this frontend is written, you don't have much time to type your commands. Once you start pressing keys, a prompt with your nickname appears, and the frontend stops reacting to anything but your input until you press enter. The server does not like that though, and if it has to wait too long for a reply it will disconnect you.

It is probably helpful to start the normal frontend as well, so you can see what you are doing, and to create a room to test in. If you are really curious, you can try the command "/loglevel -1" to see much more about the internal workings of Hedgewars than you ever wanted to know.

The source code of the client and the frontlib is available in my repository clone on Google Code, in the /project_files/frontlib directory.

With this finally working, I will start on the netplay implementation for Hedgeroid soon, so you can get your hands on something that is actually useful. Stay tuned!