Upcoming user interface improvements.
Hedgewars recently participated in the seven-week 2012 Google Code-In, a Google-sponsored programming competition for pre-university to contribute to open source projects and earn points.
Twenty five different students, including myself, contributed code to Hedgewars, resulting in many bug fixes and additional user interface improvements.
Let's take a closer look at user interface improvements coming to the next version of Hedgewars. Click on images to view them in their original size.
Most of the visible improvements were created by me except where stated otherwise.
Click on a category:
Network game type
| Current: | New: |
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Log-in prompt
Room list
| Current: | New: |
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Creating a room
Game lobby
Let's take a closer look at what's changed:
Overall page layout
Room controls, such as the room name, will be moved to the top of the page. The settings button is moved to the bottom-left, and the start button is larger for easier clicking.| Current: | New: |
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| Current: | New: |
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Map selection
Many people aren't noticing the variety of map types at their disposal, so fixing this is a primary focus in the new map interface:
Mission maps will now have descriptions, too.
| Current: | New: |
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Additionally, a drawn map can be loaded directly from the game lobby:
Settings
Team options
Two major changes are happening to the team options page.
First, hat selection will no longer be a drop-down box. Instead, hats are selected through a large dialog page with build-in search. Like with the room search, arrow keys can be used while typing to move the hat selection, and pressing enter chooses the selected hat:
| Current: | New: |
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Master game-wide key binds
It will now possible to set game-wide key bind changes that will be the default key binds. Individual teams override the master key binds, but teams no longer have keys bound by default:
Easy feedback
You may have noticed a new "feedback" button on the main page. With it, users will be able to send suggestions or bug reports directly to Hedgewars developers from within the game:
System information can (optionally) be sent too, thanks to Martin Bede:
System information can (optionally) be sent too, thanks to Martin Bede:
Summary
I've covered the significant user interface changes coming to the next release of Hedgewars. Hedgewars will hopefully be faster to use, and easier to for newcomers to navigate. Buttons are also larger throughout the interface for easier clicking.We are not yet sure when 0.9.19 will be released, but you can see these changes today by downloading and compiling the source code.
PAotH Comics are Making a Return
Hi there, it's Star and Moon here, and I have some news:
It's been way over a month now since we've received an update to PAotH comics, but they've finally returned, and I will be posting them all on schedule again, which is one comic per week (and sometimes more). To view the latest comics, visit here or here.
Also, you may have noticed I've stopped posting the PAotH comics on the news page, this is only temporary, due to certain cameo appearances, and you should see the comics coming back here again!
Have a good day, and happy late new year.
And now, I leave you with this exciting picture of a hedgehog weilding a Rainbow Rod.
Service announcement!
Just a quick post to announce 25 new tasks available for GCI participants and a new download for OS X (64bit) which fixes a strange crasher with "The Specialists" mode.
Update: make that 50! We have a total of 100 tasks 
Invitation to Google Code In 2012
Amazing news just arrived!
Although we had no plans to participate to GCI this year, we got involved the same! The good guys at the Copyleft Game Group invited our team to provide a few tasks and mentoring power.
And so we did, we just submitted around 40 tasks that students from 13 to 17 years of age will be able to tackle, along with the other 100 tasks from the group and thousands from all the other GCI organizations.
We finely tuned the tasks to be well self contained and precise, giving pointers to where to start working. Many tasks do not involve coding at all and were designed to simplify approaching open source projects. Being in a larger group also help leverage the load of mentoring so we believe this year will go smooth.
Head over http://gci.copyleftgames.org and start browsing the group task, spread the word with your friends about GCI and get involved in FOSS!
Koda 
0.9.18 released!
Happy Halloween everyone! AKA Hedgewars Birthday.
So it's been a while since the last release, so, quite a lot has accumulated.
Not everything that was planned has been completed, but hopefully future releases won't be a year apart so they should be added Soon®.
Right. On to the goodies.
* Hedgewars now has a campaign! It should hopefully be expanded and interface polished in future releases. This was a GSoC project.
* Another GSoC project, video recording! Use the 'r' key to start/stop recording video. Video management is on the frontpage.
* PNG screenshots, to make sharing screenshots more convenient.
* What would a release be without new weapons? The meat cleaver is the latest addition. The harder you throw it, the more damage it does. Cleavers also work well for climbing or blocking entrances.
* The AI is now a lot more evil. Set it to maximum level to get the full effect. It knows how to use cake, sniper rifle and kamikaze, as well as aiming shots to drown hedgehogs or do fall damage. It has also gotten more effective at a number of existing weapons, and can move around the map more intelligently.
* Drawn maps now have variable pen width, and an eraser tool. Note that the eraser does increase the size of the drawn map network traffic, so don't use it as a substitute for undo.
* Static maps no longer have size limits. Please use this sanely, since not everyone has a machine with 16 gigs of memory like you do.
* New missions such as portal and rope training.
* Customised team colours!
