HaxBall News

There seems to be a new bug in town which is causing the connection process to hang in the “Waiting for game state” stage. I have not made any changes to the game recently so I’m quite baffled about why it might have started happening.

In any case, I’m just posting to say that I’m aware of the problem and working to fix it. So don’t panic, HaxBall will return to being fully operational soon.

Update:

The bug is a tricky one, I don’t know exactly why happens and I was not able to find a good way to reproduce it reliably.

I just released an update which may fix the bug. I’m not 100% certain that it is fixed but I was unable to reproduce the bug with this new version, fingers crossed.

Changes:

• Resuming a paused game now has a 2 seconds delay during which a progress bar is displayed.
• Fixed a bug in which typing the letter p in the kick reason would pause the game.
• Slightly lowered the replayer time tooltip position so that it doesn’t get cropped out if the window is too small.
• Made some internal changes to the server to make the geolocation more robust.

Enjoy!

I’ve just found out about it and I’m working to fix it.

Update:

As far as I’ve seen the problem seems to fix itself if you close and open the browser again. It’s probably something going wrong on the servers of the geolocation service I’m using. So if you are having trouble try closing and opening the browser again.

Changes:

• Added a pause button that admins can use. It should be useful for when a player leaves, you can pause the game while you fix the teams. I understand very well that crappy room admins will be even more annoying with this feature in their power, but bad admins can be pretty annoying without it  anyway. If someone abuses it just find another room ;)
• Added a tooltip to the replay progress bar which tells you the game time at that point. (Only works on replays made with this and future versions)

Enjoy!

Changes:

• Added a progress bar to the replayer control panel. Clicking on it will make HaxBall fast forward until it reaches that position, this emulates some form of video seeking.

Yes, just one change! Since this change doesn’t break backwards compatibility I decided to release asap.

This feature is only available for replays recorded after the previous update.

Enjoy!

Changes:

• Removed the “Country” column in the room list, instead the flags are now shown in the “~Distance” column. As a side effect the room names now have more space.
• Made the chat reject newline characters, some players were exploiting this to send chat messages as someone else in the room.
• Made players move to the bottom of the list when they change teams. In the past the players would always be sorted in the order they joined the room. This change should make it easier for admins to remember who is next in line.
• Added team reset buttons for admins, they move all the players on a specific team to spectators.
• Added a bunch of features to the .hbs format: The possibility to set the initial speed of discs and edit the physical properties of the ball and the players. This .hbs file shows how to use the new features: newfeatures_tutorial.hbs. No real documentation page yet though, sorry ;o

Enjoy!

Apparently some Mac users are getting desynchronized since the latest updates. I have an idea of why this is happening but I don’t own a Mac so I can’t make any tests.

If you own a Mac and you are getting desynchronized I’d appreciate if you could spend a few minutes helping me test some things. Send me an email to haxball@gmail.com

Thanks!

Update: I got to make the tests I needed. The bug is found and fixed. I’ll be releasing an update at midnight which fixes this bug.

Update: Released! mac users should not desynchronize anymore.

Some people have asked me for the dimensions of the official HaxBall stadiums so here you go:

• classic.hbs
• rounded.hbs 
• easy.hbs 
• small.hbs 
• hockey.hbs 
• big.hbs 
• big_rounded.hbs 
• big_easy.hbs 
• big_hockey.hbs 
• huge.hbs

All of them in a zip

Apparently I introduced a bug on game replays which breaks it if you change the stadium during recording. I’ve found the reason and fixed it but I’ll need to release another backwards incompatible update, so I’ll wait until midnight to do so.

Sorry guys!

It’s done.

Time sure flies! It has already been 1 year since HaxBall was first released and ever since the game has never stopped growing in popularity. Last Friday was an all time record of 100k unique visitors in a single day!

It has been a while since the last update and for that I apologize. Some of you might have heard that I was working on a dedicated server for HaxBall, this was an Adobe Air version which would let you host rooms without the overhead of graphics, sounds and running on a browser. Unfortunately the performance during testing was a bit underwhelming so this project has been postponed for now.

Today I bring to you a new and exciting feature: The HaxBall Stadium Format (.hbs). This is a text format which allows you to create any kind of stadium! From boring things like just changing the size of the goal to crazy shaped stadiums with multiple goal areas and obstacles.

The .hbs files are plain text so you can edit them with any text editor.

Here are two sample stadiums:

• simplestadium.hbs
• simplestadium_tutorial.hbs (Same as simplestadium but it contains comments which should help you understand the format. If you plan to create HaxBall stadiums this one is a must read.)
• funkystadium.hbs

For now there is no documentation, if you want to learn to make stadiums you’ll have to figure it all out by tinkering with these sample stadiums. I’ll make a stadium format reference page in the future though.

I have one warning: The stadium format is in alpha stage and will definitely be changing. There’s a good chance that stadiums made for the current version of this format will stop working on upcoming updates, although they will be easy to fix/update.

In future versions of this format I’ll add the possibility of changing physical parameters of the players and balls (radius, kick strength, friction, speed, mass, etc.). I also plan to add features that will let you create things like speed boosters, bumpers, teleporters, high friction ground, etc. I’m really excited to see what kind of things the community will do with this :)

Changes:

•  Changed the UI to pick stadiums, there’s now a “Pick” button which will open a stadium select popup.
• Added a new default map called “Huge” for 4v4 5v5 and above. (Dimensions are subject to further tuning).
• Implemented the HaxBall Stadium Format (.hbs). You can load .hbs files from your hard drive by pressing the “Load” in the new stadium picker UI.
• Fixed a bug which made the score limit, time limit and stadium buttons visible even when a game was in progress.

Enjoy!