Playing Hedgewars on the TV
Today I wanted to play Hedgewars with my kids on the TV while sitting on the couch. I fetched the laptop, connected the HDMI cable and attached a wired Xbox 360 controller.
The first problem was that the menu was super tiny on a 32" Full HD TV 3 meters away. Even on my laptop's full HD screen it's too small. (Changing the zoom in the settings only seems to affect the game, not the menu).
Next problem is that the menu has no gamepad or keyboard control support (apart from "space" to activate a menu item, but it's not visible which item will get activated; pressing the arrow keys does not indicate that another menu item is selected).
And the last problem was that the game does not seem to have a default controller mapping, so that I had the choice to a) map 40 actions to the gamepad buttons or b) ditch the gamepad and play with keyboard and mouse.
In the end even the game with the maximum zoom of 150% was too tiny on the TV screen, and so we disconnected the HDMI cable and played directly on the laptop on the table before us.
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It would be nice if hedgewars could be put into a "big screen" mode that scales all the input elements up 200 or 300% so that it can be played on the TV. Gamepad support without manual configuration and keyboard/gamepad navigation in menus would also be nice.
Is it possible to donate money to get that implemented?
Hi there!
UI-scaling is currently Work-In-Progress.
However, progress is very slow as far as I'm aware.
Mostly due to a lack of spare time¹ among existing volunteer developers.
As high resolution displays are everywhere now, scaling is a common and increasingly important problem.
It surely will be finished/fixed by somebody at some point in the future due to that increasing necessity, but I don't know when that will be.
¹ I doubt donations would help much towards this goal as we lack time more than money - but if you still feel like donating you can find BTC donation addresses in the signatures of some devs (e.g. nemo, Wuzzy).
We do not have a general donation pool for the entire project, as far as I'm aware anyway.
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Actually, time is not my problem, it's more like motivation.
I have just been distracted with many other things in the previous months. So yeah, this was my own choice.
Admittedly, my interest in Hedgewars was fairly low in the last months, because 1.0, and so many distractions. But I still intend to seriously "return" to it one day. I even have a load of ideas! Honestly, I am also getting frustrated that Hedgewars is still not getting much traction, even long after the precious 1.0.0 release. The forum is as dead as ever.
That's also not very motivating. We still didn't do even the tiniest bit of attempt in marketing yet. I suck at this and don't like marketing, even if I know that it probably should have been done a long time ago. 
Donations are appreciated (see my signature ...), but I have to stress that it literally is a donation. You can't "buy" features by donation. That's not how donations work. Otherwise it would be called "paid work", "contract", and the like.
But I have still been listening to suggestions, complaints, feedback and all that in the time, even if I didn't respond always.
That having said, I fully agree that UI scaling is a pretty important issue, and it becomes increasingly important as resolutions become more and more gigantic.
I'm afraid there is really nothing you can do except reducing the resolution in the settings. Which I doubt your device even supports … So you can only wait. :/
I wonder if we should increase the max zoom level more. According to this feedback, we probably should. Downside is, everything will become extremely blurry at one point.
Maybe we should switch to nearest-neighbor interpolation instead?
But rest assured this UI scaling feature is pretty high on the priority list. But I cannot predict when I will find a (serious) developer interest in Hedgewars again.
The other two things are also obvious good ideas. But you do !!!NOT!!! have to map all 40 actions to the gamepad in order to play. Most controls are optional convenience things and don't really need a mapping. You can play the game with much fewer buttons, actually.
Adding full gamepad support to the main menu WILL be quite a challenge, however, there's a LOT of things that need to change for this to work.
I think this issue should only be attacked when we have created a new main menu ("Qmlfrontend" in dev-talk), which is another BIG task. There are many other reasons why we desire this for a long time.
Anyway, note that Hedgewars is clearly a made as a PC (or laptop) game, it was obviously not designed for other devices in mind. That doesn't mean that better support cannot be added later. For now, I take the lazy position and just say that Hedgewars is (mainly) a PC game, and other devices are just not supported (well enough). Yet.
And until then, you can always reduce your laptop resolution ... I know, it sucks, but that's really your only option right now, sorry.
Note we have a setting to play the Hedgewars game (not the main menu) in a different resolution.
Also keep in mind that development on HW was started over 10 years ago, obviously technology has advanced so much since then. Seems we have to catch up.
Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer.
If there is any way we as players can help you just let us know. We love your game and we want it to grow
As for the marketing: maybe starting from Fosstodon would be good. Hopefully there are many players in Fediverse who didn't hear about Hedgewars or didn't have opportunity to actually try it.
Szkodnix allegedly wrote:
Here is a guide how to play Hedgewars on TV. With these settings I find it quite enjoyable to play Hedgewars on my 4k TV. You need to have only 1 Xbox Controller to pass around.
Menu UI Scaling
The Menu UI by default does not scale even if set to fullscreen mode. There is however a nice trick that Windows 10 offers: Override high DPI scaling behavior. Enabling this will force Windows 10 to scale the Hedgwars UI by the same percentage as is set in the Display Settings of Windows 10. Having a 4k resolution will default the scale value to 250 percent but you can change the scaling factor.
To set it, right click on hedgewars.exe and go to properties.
Then on the compatibility tab click on Change high DPI settings.
Then check the checkbox Override high DPI scaling behavior.
You can try using System or System (Enhanced). I prefer System (Enhanced) since it makes everything look more crisp.
Ingame Resolution
The ingame resolution should be adapted to your TV resolution. I found for my 4k TV an ingame resolution of 1600x900 to be adequate. Setting it too high will make everything look tiny. If you have a different TV resolution, you might wanna play around with that setting.
I advise against changing the zoom value, since the zoom value does not affect the scaling of the ui elements like the inventory and the health bars. So set the zoom value to 100 percent.
Controller Configuration
For this you need to have Steam installed and Hedgewars added as a non steam game.
For the controls in the menu you can use Steam's Desktop menu controller. That way you can control your mouse and click with it using the controller buttons.
For the ingame controller configuration, I have created a XBox Controller Configuration which you can use to play the game.
Here you can grab it: https://imgur.com/a/NPndrmV
For it to work, you need to have the Hedgwars Keyboard Configuration be at default values though.