HaxBall News

Changes:

• Implemented /avatar and /clear_avatar commands
• Implemented restricted view size mode (selected with Number 4 for now)
• The game will now remember your prefered viewmode/zoom level.
• The game will now automatically try reverse connection if forward connection fails, this should fix improve the connection success chance for a number of people. (This is related to the reverse_setting that was available already, it will try using that setting automatically now)
• Implemented a shorter timeout for players that have disconnected but didn’t properly leave the room. It’s 30 seconds now.
• Fixed bug where players would become invisble and unable to move when starting a game.
• A bunch of other smaller bug fixes.

Changes:

• Implemented arrows pointing to players outside of the view.
• Probably fixed the bug that causes the host to randomly kick players with “bad actor” as reason. (It is hard to reproduce so I’m not 100% certain, I’ll be keeping an eye out for it to see that it is truly fixed.)
• Disabled gamepad input support for now. It was causing problems to players that had been playing with gamepad using key mapping software.
• Default player name is now empty, forcing players to actually pick a nick.
• Default value for max players changed to 12.

More updates to come soon.

Give it a try html5.haxball.com

Found something wrong with it? Dont panic! This is an alpha version, it’s bound to have bugs and lack features. My top priority is reaching feature parity with the flash version and new features may come after that. If you find a bug please report it here.

The flash version and html5 versions will coexist until feature parity is reached.

Screen/Viewport size

One notable difference with flash version of haxball is the bigger use of the screen. This is something I always wanted to do, but since flash was not hardware accelerated it wasn’t possible to do it at a reasonable framerate.

However, a bigger viewport can make the game look really tiny (specially if your screen is 1080p or above). For this reason I’ve added camera-zoom feature. You can change between 3 different zoom levels using number keys 1 to 3.

Some people have expressed to me that they would rather have the restricted viewport size that the flash version had, this is something I’m considering as an option. If this matters to you too let me know.

Netplay

The netplay works very similarly to the flash version but uses WebRTC instead of RTMFP.

If you have issues connecting to room hosts but were able to do it in the flash version you should report it here.

You will notice ping will be a bit lower than usual, this is mainly because in flash network events were handled 60 frames per second while in html5 the events are handled immediately and independent of the screen refresh rate. This meant that flash could add about 32msec of latency depending on how close to the frame updates the network packets would arrive.

Another nice improvement is that the game will no longer lag if the host changes tabs. (flash would lower it’s frame rate and thus handle network events even less frequently)

Ive been working on it for a long time and it’s very close to being ready.

I’ve been silent in this blog about it since I wasn’t particularily sure I’d be able to finish it and I wouldn’t like to announce vaporware. However, I’m now pretty confident it’s gonna be released so here is the official teaser/announcement.

You can expect it to be released this year. (Hopefully november, but no hard promises)

Among other things will feature:

• Unchanged physics, true to the flash version gameplay.
• Improved but still user hosted peer to peer netplay using WebRTC.
• Better use of the screen space, no longer constrained to a small window.
• New bugs! Which will be fixed as they are reported.
• Some missing features! Which will be implemented soon.
• Survive Flash death. RIP :’(

Sadly only Firefox, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers fully support the technology needed (WebRTC). So HTML5 HaxBall will not work in Safari or Edge for now.

Changes: Improved player banning and implemented automatic banning of spammy users. These changes address the room DoS attacks that have been happening.

HaxBall now lets you change your country and location, to do so go to the options menu and click the “Change Country” button.

The way in which HaxBall detects your location is not infallible and often results in a wrong country. This change will let players correct it when it’s wrong (Or whenever they feel like it).

Enjoy!

Edit: Changing countries from inside a room is now disabled, to access the menu you can open the options menu from the rooms list.

Changes:

• Added a /colors chat command which lets room admins override the way in which the red and blue teams look.
• Added “Disable custom colors” to the options menu, enabling this makes the game ignore the custom team colors. (Useful if the admin has bad taste ;)

/colors explained:

To set a team color you must have admin rights. Use it by typing the following command in the chat box:

/colors <Team> <Angle> <AvatarColor> [Color1] [Color2] [Color3]

Team: Should be either “red” or “blue”, it specifies which team you are overriding.

Angle: Should be a number in the range 0…360. It specifies the angle in which the color stripes will be drawn.

AvatarColor: Should be RGB in hexa (ie: FF0000 for red), it specifies the color of the avatars.

Color1, Color2, Color3: Should be RGB in hexa (ie: FF0000 for red), they specify the colors of the team’s discs. The number of colors is optional, discs will have evenly sized stripes for each color specified.

And you can clear a team’s custom colors by using:

/colors <Team> clear

Examples:

White background with red avatar for red team:
/colors red 0 FF0000 FFFFFF

Red and white background with black avatar for red team in a 45 degree slope:
/colors red 45 000000 FFFFFF FF0000

Argentina’s flag colors for blue team:
/colors blue 90 FCBF49 75AADB FFFFFF 75AADB

Clear red team custom colors:
/colors red clear

Enjoy!

Changes:

• A loading bar is now displayed while HaxBall is loading.
• Fixed the hud messages (ie “Red Team Scores”) so that they don’t remain visible when a game admin stops and starts a new match.
• Added “¿¡+*@#$%¬^” to the list of characters players can use in their avatars.
• Some internal cleaning of the source.

That’s it, enjoy!

Apparently, after the rtmfp server change, a few players are having issues connecting to hosts they were previously able to. This is why I will be changing back to the previous server again soon (probably 24 hours after this update is released).

This update adds some internal functionality that is necessary for a smooth switching of servers in the future.

That’s it, sorry for the inconvenience. ;)

I changed where the RTMFP server is hosted (which should solve the problem for now).

This required an update to the flash game client. If you are still having problems be sure to refresh the site and clear you browser cache.

Unfortunately this time the game won’t be able to tell it’s users that they are running on an old version, so please help spread the word that a refresh is required.