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!

This formal title is for demonstrating that we are improving our release skills!

Wow, our beta program has been a huge success, lots of downloads and user feedbacks! More than 30 bugs were found in just this little time (~20 of them just by vos, hats off) and we've been busy fixing everything we could.

A few bugfix have been planned for a future release (1.0.0 maybe) and some other could have completely slipped, but we plan to respect our self-imposed release date of 31st October!

Without further ado, I present you the Release Candidates, which are the best approximation of the final version you are going to download in a few days.

Windows: http://download.gna.org/hedgewars/hedgewars-0.9.18-7918-35dfc54ba2c6.zip
OS X: http://download.gna.org/hedgewars/hedgewars-osx-0.9.18-7918-35dfc54ba2c6.tar.bz2

Even better than beta, these versions are *immediately* available for download. As always please report any issue in our cozy bug tracker

Like always, you can read previous comics here or here.

And that about wraps up the portal saga!

You read it right! The rumours were true! We can now safely announce a release plan!

0.9.18 is on its way, just in time for Hedgewars birthday, the 31st of October.

We've prepared some builds for you so that you can betatest the next release of Hedgewars and report any bugs you might find! In the rare case you find any, please add them here: http://code.google.com/p/hedgewars/issues/list

Let's see who's the first player to get past the 100th issue (but please check for duplicates before posting)

Third update: Congrats to vos for making it!

By the way, if you have any translation update now it would be a nice time to submit it! Also, if you ever contributed code for Hedgewars and for some reason you haven't been added to the credits yet, get in touch with us immediately!!!

Update: The Windows build is ready!
http://download.gna.org/hedgewars/hedgewars-0.9.18-7740-4ba77e6178cd.zip
Second update: The OS X build is ready!
http://download.gna.org/hedgewars/Hedgewars-0.9.18-7676-a25e943dd4b0.tar.bz2

The beta builds are being baked right now, and they might be hot for a while, we'll publish them very soon (tm)

Happy 50th Comic Strip Guys!

You can read previous comics here or here.

For the sake of not enveloping the news page, a PAotH update will be posted for every five strips rather than each new one individually.