Hase Development "blog"

[Ziz]

When/where can we download the new version?

I don't know. Maybe this weekend, probably next week.
There are still some bugs, I need to implement the new weapons and the AI is not finished yet.

 

[HolySmoke]

If you're impatient, you can always build your own with the hase16 branch from the git repo

Don't go asking for online multiplayer with that though (might actually be possible, but will be a ride), think of it like a preview.

 

[Ziz]

If you're impatient, you can always build your own with the hase16 branch from the git repo

Don't go asking for online multiplayer with that though (might actually be possible, but will be a ride), think of it like a preview.

Depends... All weapons are included now. There are only two things missing:

• Better AI
• Fixing one last movement bug

Furthermore I want to improve the ingame help, but that doesn't break multiplayer.
So as long as you don't play with me against AI and as long as I don't fix the bug, you can safely use hase16 with multiplayer

 

[Ziz]

Okay, the last two points of my to Do are done (I defined the movement bug as fixed, but probably it isn't, but this is future spikes problem).

So in fact Hase 1.6 is ready! The AI does now smart stuff like choosing different weapons depending on the AP, collecting AP at all and kicking players asses sitting on their hats.

sheepluva and klopsi even found the first bugs. So probably tomorrow or the day after I will make a big release post with a summation of all my changes, a video and of course: a pnd!

 

[levi]

Aha, I spy 1.6 downloads on the old hase download page.  I shall be on IRC tonight, hopefully, armed with a new release to test!

 

[Ziz]

Aha, I spy 1.6 downloads on the old hase download page.  I shall be on IRC tonight, hopefully, armed with a new release to test!

At least I did upload a bug fixed version.
You all (sheepluva, klopsi and all people who downloaded a version yesterday) should update.

However I stil didn't test on the pandora, I hope it still runs well. XD

Edit: Okay, I did a first test. Actually it runs fine, but the AI aiming needs too much CPU power. Need to fix this.

 

[Ziz]

So, I am thinking about working on a next version. Especially as I hardly find some online partners to play, I am thinking about giving the AI some handycap, so that it starts e.g. with more (or less) hares or with more (or less) health per hare. Just to make it harder for me to win. Right now I don't loose against AI at all. Furthermore a game with 2 human players with 3 hares each and 3 AIs with 1 hare each but maybe more health could be quite interesting.

However this new version would break downwards compatibility again. So do you have some ideas or wishes I should implement for the version, when I will break the compatibility anyway?

 

[levi]

You'll make it harder for yourself by handicapping your AI opponents?  Something lost in translation perhaps?

I'll have to think and see if I can come up with any ideas, but to get in before the mob: Make it like worms!

 

[pmprog]

You'll make it harder for yourself by handicapping your AI opponents?  Something lost in translation perhaps?

Just a linguistic thing. The verb of handicap means to disadvantage oneself (which is they way you worded it), however, the noun refers to both advantage and disadvantage in order to "level" the playing field.

 

[Ziz]

You'll make it harder for yourself by handicapping your AI opponents?  Something lost in translation perhaps?

I'll have to think and see if I can come up with any ideas, but to get in before the mob: Make it like worms!

Uh, I thought a handycap can also be positive even if it used most time used in a negative matter.

 

[Ziz]

You'll make it harder for yourself by handicapping your AI opponents?  Something lost in translation perhaps?

Just a linguistic thing. The verb of handicap means to disadvantage oneself (which is they way you worded it), however, the noun refers to both advantage and disadvantage in order to "level" the playing field.

So, I was right?

 

[levi]

Hmm

A handicap (as opposed to handicapping something) is traditionally a scoring hack whereby the each player's score is manipulated in some mathematical way.  I take it that's not what your proposing either, but to make the AI more skilled.

I think that would be a good thing, provided you could give an option for us mortals to make their aiming less precise.  Currently, AI hares are rather dumb in terms of strategy, but shooting aces, not even needing a trial carrot to deliver the knock-out punch.  If there was a way to make the AI behave more like a human opponent in that their aiming is likely to be off by some margin until they've made a good shot, that would be good, but I think it'd probably be a lot more work.  Some random misalightment, multiplied by some difficulty factor might be enough to begin with though, provided you can make them more strategic.

 

[Ziz]

Hm, improving the AI at all would be indeed cool. But as you mentioned: Also some work. ^^ I will think about it nevertheless.

 

[pmprog]

A handicap (as opposed to handicapping something) is traditionally a scoring hack whereby the each player's score is manipulated in some mathematical way.

Not strictly true.
Home conversions of Street Fighter 2 (and 4?) lets each player select a handicap which alters the amount of damage they deal and strength they have.
In horse racing and grand prix, IIRC, they used to force adding weights to the lightest racers to remove the ability to be faster purely by being the lightest
 

 

[Ziz]

After over a year I am touching Hase again! I showed it a lot of people, but as they don't have a pandora or another openhandhelds device, they had to play on a PC. And there is the problem: The controls for the desktop version are awkward, not very intuitive and to complicated. So I will add mouse support for the menu and the game the next weeks. The console players will also benefit from this as this also involves touchscreen support.
I am half way through adding mouse/touchscreen support for the menu and game settings, I will tell you more about this if this is finished.
However, today I noticed a totally unrelated, critical bug: Multiplayer was not working anymore. And nobody noticed. This is a bit sad, but to be fair I myself did not play online since half a yeah or similar. The problem was, that ED's server started to answer in chunks for some reason and my client had not idea, how this worked and paniced... I added support for this now. Maybe it was a bad idea to implement the HTTP protocol myself. However with this I don't have any depenendencies beside SDL on my targets and I didn't want to build some HTTP library for every of my target. And I have many as you know. I made only one exception for the zlib, as every system - even the gp2x - have it preinstalled. Well every target except windows, so windows users have to transfer more data. (In return the windows version runs a bit faster - even with wine under linux, as the windows SDL uses directdraw, which uses hardware acceleration for the buffer flipping)

So, stay tuned, version 1.6.4 is on it's way!

 

[canseco]

It was great to play Hase online, and glad to see you would keep developing it.

I just found hase-git on Arch Linux AUR repos, installed it (it's amazing to see automatic compilation, packaging), and it works very well.

The only thing i miss is a fullscreen option, but the mouse/touchscreen support is more than welcome,

 

[Ziz]

Fullscreen option -> will put it to my to do.

 

[Ziz]

Okay,

I finished the most recent version and uploaded the pnd and versions for all supported targets.
As planned I added touchscreen support. I hope you like it. Furthermore you can use the touchscreen to steer the hare ingame and to choice the weapon faster. But for fairness reasons I didn't implement targeting via touchscreen. On the PC version you can use the right mouse button for targeting, but it will just move the cursor in the direction of the mouse cursor and not target to the cursor itself.
This version now has a working network mode again (as already mentioned). Last but not least, did Drummaster78 tell me, that my ports flicker and most of them didn't even run anymore. This should be fixed for Hase, too.

• Caanoo
• Dingux
• GCW
• GP2X
• Linux (32 Bit)
• Linux (64 Bit)
• Open2X
• OpenDingux
• Pandora (Repo)
• Windows
• Wiz

I tested only the Pandora version, so please help me testing!

 

[levi]

I just tried out the i386 build on my old laptop, and the touchscreen/mouse controls worked well for me there. I did get a segmentation fault towards the end of my first game. Much of the ground had been destroyed (there wasn't that much to begin with) and there were quite a few floating ragnorok heads around, but it didn't seem to be recalculating the level at the time:

ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
* Recalculating level:
  Drawing Ellipse: 0
  Update Gravity: 1
  Drawing Ellipse: 1
  Drawing Arrows: 10
  Blitting: 7
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

 

[Ziz]

Thanks for the test! I had a segfault the last days, too, with many AIs playing autonomous. As I didn't have any crashes in real games, I thought the bug is rare enough to fix it later™.
Well obviously I was wrong.
I did a test run with AIs again, this time with debug symbols and gdb and got it to segfault with a backtrace.
So, I will try to fix this segfault and update hase the next days.
[doublepost=1493376647,1493370491][/doublepost]

I just tried out the i386 build on my old laptop, and the touchscreen/mouse controls worked well for me there. I did get a segmentation fault towards the end of my first game. Much of the ground had been destroyed (there wasn't that much to begin with) and there were quite a few floating ragnorok heads around, but it didn't seem to be recalculating the level at the time:

ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
* Recalculating level:
  Drawing Ellipse: 0
  Update Gravity: 1
  Drawing Ellipse: 1
  Drawing Arrows: 10
  Blitting: 7
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:8306:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Okay, I fixed the bug I found, but let's make sure we had the same, so please tell me:

• Did you play against AI?
• Can you remember, that you or someelse else stood on the head of the AI?
• Maybe did you even use the "kill above" weapon yourself?

Because I fixed a bug with this weapon. It could rarely occur, that a hare is registered more than once standing on the head of another hare - giving double damage, which is not intended, but no reason to crash. Howerver killing twice is. Killing undead leads to segfaults as everybody knows.

I am uploading the new version right now. I will tell you, when you can give it another try.
[doublepost=1493379787][/doublepost]And Upload Done