Hi all! I haven't written in my blog for a long time, so you maybe forgot that I am responsible for implementing video recording in Hedgewars.

Screen capture software usually skips frames if your computer is not fast enough to record & encode video in real-time. But video recording in Hedgewars is not real-time; instead it first records game demo & camera positions and then starts video encoding in background using as much time as necessary. The result is that you can easily record high-resolution videos.

To record video you just need to press ‘R’ during a game. You will see a red blinking circle in top left of the screen indicating that you are recording video right now. After all interesting events have passed press ‘R’ again and recording will stop. Then actual video encoding will automatically starts in background.

Here is video showing how it all works:

And here is screenshot of the page with list of recorded videos and options for video recording (click to enlarge):

Hi everyone!

Time for some updates. Implementing the actual atlas took quite a little longer than a week, which however, was to be expected. After all it was a rather complex change. During the last two weeks the atlas code has gone through quite some changes. As you may recall in an earlier A&O I described, how I seperated texture internals to sprites and textures.

The next logical step was to pack several sprites into a shared texture like you can see in the following images:

The whole process works adaptive, meaning one sprite can be added after another. The packer will try to insert the requested sprite as good as it can into the free region(s).

However at some point new sprites wont fit in anymore. As you can see the atlas is already quite full after having added 13 sprites to it.

Hi everyone,
let's interrupt the flow of GSoC updates for a special announcement!

If you hang around with us in IRC you've probably noticed that Xeli set up a nice buildbot system that automatically compiles the latest version of Hedgewars and checks if each commit breaks a particular configuration (not that it ever happened )

One of the amazing thing of our configuration is that we were able to setup a full platform check for Linux, Android, Windows and OSX (iOS might come up later on). Windows is compiled from unc0rr's machine through WINE while OSX is actually crosscompiled from Linux (yeah, we're officially in the club "I managed to crosscompile for Apple, yo!")

Today we bring this to a step further, nightly builds are available! Now our buildbot prepares some easy packages for every platform, so that you can live on the bleeding edge and try our new exciting features before official release! Getting some early feedback will help understand the community position on certain design decisions and also improve our release capabilities, by spotting and (hopefully) fixing bugs before an actual release.

So, don't waste any more time and head to http://xelification.com/nightly/

Koda

Insert standard disclaimer clause here: nighly software is completely untested and unsupported and might not play nice with your current profile, so make backups as always!

Hello again.

Over the last weeks, I have been busy working on the new frontend library (frontlib for short), which is written in plain C for best portability. By now, the scope of the library has become clearer, so I want to give a short overview of what it will look like, what already works, and what still needs to be done. As you can see in the image above, one of the things that already work is the map preview rendering.

In my last blog entry, I wrote that there would be a function for each kind of message that could be sent to the engine or the server, and a callback function for each kind of message that could be received. Since then, I have become convinced that this low-level approach is not a good idea, since using a library with that API would not actually save much work.

The first important change is that the frontlib now contains data structures that can hold all important game configurations: The choice of map, team and hedgehog information, game and weapon schemes. It can also read and write .ini files with these settings, so it now handles more than just networking.

As a consequence, the frontend can now quickly build a game configuration by loading weapon schemes and other settings from .ini files, and then ask the frontlib to pass this entire configuration to the engine. The same data structures will also be used for netplay communication, so it will be easy to tie everything together and e.g. start the engine with game settings received from the server.

To start a new game, the frontend can now pass the entire configuration to the frontlib at once, and let the frontlib work out how and when it needs to be sent to the engine. Likewise, the callback functions have changed in keeping with this higher-level approach.

Hi everyone!

Time for this weeks A&O.

I've pretty much finished upgrading everything thats relevant to GL2+ and GLES 1.3+.
Meaning we should be more or less ready for ES2.
For the water rendering (It really just was a vertical gradient), I've added a seperate shader.

The only stuff thats still missing to be upgraded is the stereo draw mode.

For this week I've planned starting to finally integrate the rectpacker into the engine.
Both modes, GL2 and the original FFP GL1.x mode should benefit from this, as this reduces
the amount of times textures must be changed.

I'm as well trying to get an ES2 emulation layer on my desktop in order to find the last missing pieces, keeping the GL2 version incompatible.