Google Summer of Code 2013 Announced!

Mon, 2013-02-11 23:24 — Koda

Hey everybody,
Google has just announced Google Summer of Code 2013, the program that brings students in the world of FOSS development by sponsoring them during the summer working on an open source project!

Of course Hedgewars will apply for participation again this year, and perhaps it will host a couple of projects outside the realm of Hedgewars.

No details or idea list are ready yet, but start spreading the word, we're going to have another exciting summer!

Update: Since we're already receiving a few contributors willing to start hacking with Hedgewars, if you need some fresh ideas to carry out, checkout the the TODO page and of course our bug tracker

Cheers,
Koda

Upcoming user interface improvements.

Sun, 2013-02-03 19:44 — dag10

.hi .collapsible .inner { display: block; } .hi .collapsible h1 { cursor: default; } .hi .collapsible h1 div { display: none; } .hi h3.instruct { display: none; } #postbreak { display: none; } #breaktease { display: block; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; }

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

The option for choosing what type of network game you want to play will be inline, appearing over the "network game" button when you click on it.

Current:	New:

Log-in prompt

When choosing to play a network game when you're not logged in, an improved log-in prompt will show. Credit to Ondrej.

Room list

This brings us to the improved game lobby. The search box will be placed at the top and given focus as soon as you enter the lobby. As you type, you can use the arrow keys to move the room selection up and down. Pressing enter will join the selected room.

Current:	New:

Creating a room

Clicking the create room button will display a dialog prompting you for the name of your room. To make the process faster, it will default to the last room name you chose, so you can reuse the same name with ease.

Game lobby

Some of the biggest improvements lie within the 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:

The map selection interface dynamically switches to a tabbed layout when the window is too small, allowing for chat to always be visible:

Current:	New:

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:

You may have noticed the new theme button. Theme selection is out of the way when you don't need it. And when you do need to select a theme, you can see full-sized icons:

Additionally, a drawn map can be loaded directly from the game lobby:

Settings

Settings are broken up into more descriptive pages:

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:

Second, the team key-binding interface is completely redone:

Current:	New:

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:

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.

More after the break.

PAotH Comics are Making a Return

Mon, 2013-01-07 00:07 — Star and Moon

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!

Mon, 2012-12-10 14:09 — Koda

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 Smile

Invitation to Google Code In 2012

Sat, 2012-11-17 16:38 — Koda

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 Wink Smiley