For lack of a better category, I am using Game Ideas.
I just merged a huge Hexxagon rewrite that resulted in some nice improvements and also some things that had to be axed (damn you 5888 bytes of storage space!):
New features:
Game now uses an internal map to keep track of the game board.
Now after you set up the players and double-click a Blink, you will see a lot of activity while the board is mapped (it is able to map the board with any configuration you may be able to come up with). It kinda looks like something that uses a lot of power is happening and then power is restored. It is almost worth the extra time you have to wait
With the change above the game is a lot snappier and there is no possibility of it getting stuck in a weird state as everything happens fully asynchronously so there is no global state synchronization needed (before there was some needed).
On a player turn, it is able to known if a position can be moved and will only pulse positions that can. This makes it easier to play on bigger boards.
It also know if a player has any pieces that can be moved and will auto-pass the turn if the player has not. No more double-click to pass. A nice side-effect is that a player can not skip their turn now simply because any moves would put it in an unfavorable position. Playing your turn (if possible) is now non-optional.
The groundwork for the Hexxagon AI (coming soon!) is in and an external blink is now able to select origin, target and confirm a move. For it to work in a completely seamless way I will need to find more space to add some more code.
Brand new color for empty Blinks. Goodbye orange and hello yellowish. Thanks to @gpvillamil for the suggestion and figuring out a nice color. This improves contrast with player colors by a lot.
Now what had to be removed due to space constraints:
No more self-destruct. It always looked like a gimmick to me as I could not find a single instance during an actual play where it would be useful to anything else other than getting some player really mad at you. Still, if for some miracle I can find the space (but see above there are other priorities), I will add it back.
Lightning animation during takeover of a Blink is gone. It was neat but served no gameplay purpose, took a considerable amount of space and was very subtle. Still I kept it behind a define and might add it back at some point (again, if I can free enough space to do everything I want).
The maximum number of Blinks the game supports is 85. Down from 256.
Now go and test it out if you can as I am sure there will be issues to fix. If you do, let me know what you think of the changes.
I updated my automatic installers with the new version. As long as you have a dev kit that is already setup and working, you just need to unpack the file for your platform and run it. Make sure you either have the publisher connected to a Blink when you do or you have the dev kit Blink connected.
Well, you can move to any blink up to 2 spaces away from you. One of the spaces being a hole is not relevant. In fact, a considerable amount of code is there just to deal with this (and is what makes this game interesting from a code perspective).
I just updated Hexxagon and the associated installers to the latest versions. Things worth mentioning:
1 - Game should never ever get stuck again unless there is a Blink with some type of hardware failure. Even if it does, resetting is now able to get it back in shape even if there are pending datagrams that are stuck.
2 - Disconnecting Blinks during gameplay resets the game. This is better than letting the game continue in a broken state. This might be improved if I find the space to do it.
3 - When a player has no position they can move to, a white flash will indicate that and the turn will pass automatically to the next player that can move (before, it would simply do that without the flash, which might been a bit confusing.
4 - When selecting a target, the available positions will light up (as the always did) and, also, the positions that can not be reached will dim more to make the possible positions even more evident.
5 - Complete rewrite of most of the communication stuff. Is is actually faster than it was now.
6 - Unfortunately the AI currently does not work with this version. I will work on updating it soon.
Here are the updated links to download the installers:
Just make sure your dev kit is connected and ready to upload (no need to use any IDE), download the version for your platform, unzip it and run the executable file. It should automatically upload the game.
Several updates have been made to Hexxagon. Please try it if you can (see installer links for easy installation) and let me know what you think.
New features:
Disconnecting blinks during gameplay will now flash the disconnected faces white so players have a chance to reconnect them. Removing a blink during mapping will still reset.
Empty spaces now show with a pattern (every other face lit) to make it easier to distinguish from other player pieces (specially the red ones).
Duplicate/Move positions now show in different ways so it is easier to differentiate between them (duplicate will still show as before while move will show with the same pattern as empty spaces).
Mapping animation now show inverted colors so that the mapping end with all blinks on (instead of off before).
End state now shows positions that were held by the winning player as solid player color and other positions (empty or belonging to other players) show in the same color but with the empty space pattern.
There was even a nasty bug fixed!
Here are the updated links to download the installers:
Thanks to @gpvillamil for the suggestion and figuring out a nice color. This improves contrast with player colors by a lot.