Hikou no mizu

Hikou no mizu 0.9.2 update

Hello there!
Hikou no mizu 0.9.2 was released yesterday evening. It includes new features on the display side, changes under the hood to modernize the source code, and bug fixes!

New features

More configuration options are now available and accessible from the option screen of the game. Specifically, vertical synchronization can be enabled to avoid screen tearing, or disabled, and then an option to cap the framerate is available.
An optimization pass has been added to the data building script. It significantly reduces the size of the spritesheets generated for character animations, without noticeable quality loss, using pngquant. As a consequence, both the loading times for fight scenes and the size of the game archive are dramatically reduced in Hikou no mizu 0.9.2. The last fun feature to report is the support of colors and emphasis in the command line output :)

Under the hood

A lot of work has been done under the hood on this release, as the source code has been migrated from C++98 to the C++11 standard. Besides modernizing the source code, this brought extra benefits like switching to the C++11 <thread> library, which should be more portable than the previous direct pthread implementation (especially on Windows). Another thing is the C++11 random number generators, which should be less biased than the previous implementation.

In parallel, the xml parsing and writing code has been ported from TinyXML1 to pugixml, which is significantly faster and more memory-efficient. The other main reason for porting is that as TinyXML1 is getting old and unmaintained, pugixml is more future-proof. In the process of porting the xml parsing code, the code has also been improved to be more robust to malformed xml files!

Bug fixes

The main bug fix addresses a glitch on text rendering which was occuring on some platforms, with some characters being rendered blurry and somewhat sliced.
Another fix solved an issue preventing joystick key bindings to be saved and loaded accurately.

As usual, you can find the full changelog and download links in the download section.
Next versions will focus on gameplay elements and networked gaming :)
Have fun!
Duncan

Hikou no mizu 0.9 is out!

Hi there,
After a bit more than a year of development, Hikou no mizu 0.9 is released today!
It is a major update in four key aspects of the game.

Audio & Sound

Much work has been dedicated to make the audio experience of the game more enjoyable and realistic.
In the past release, audio playback was hardcoded with the player's action: Every time a player would perform a kick attack, the corresponding sound would be played. Similarly, moving would trigger a looping playback of a single footstep sound. As such, it lacked flexibility and scalability, as more sound effects are included.

In Hikou no mizu 0.9, a sound effect description system was introduced. The available sound effects can be listed in a configuration file, and directly referred to in the description of a character's attacks and animations. As such, one or several sounds may be triggered at precise timesteps of any animations, without recompilating the game. The sound effect systems has been used to support new audio content, as listed below. What is more, to increase realism, sound effects are played with a random variation in pitch, which avoids repeating exactly the same sound several times.

• Ground hit effects, after a jump or fall.
• Air friction effects, when a character attacks.
• Weapon hit effects, when a throwable weapon hits a target.
• Footstep effects which depend on the ground type.

Graphics

As a key improvement of the graphical quality of Hikou no mizu 0.9, character animations have been regenerated with an increased resolution. In turn, the game now supports a native resolution of 1080p without upscaling, with the exception of the "Dōjō" arena (which has an increased level of zoom adapted for versus gameplay). Under the hood, the re-generation of framesets from source vectorized animation files has been further automated to be able to generate framesets with an arbitrary scale. In turn, the size and layout of each frameset is recomputed at build time.

Other improvements of the graphics of Hikou no mizu 0.9 include:

• The ability to set display modes more flexibly (including in windowed mode).
• The dynamic adaptation of the UI layout to the display mode.
• A redrawn Takino default punch animation.
• Smoothened movements of the dynamic fight scene camera.

Gameplay

Hikou no mizu 0.9 marks a progress in the gameplay of fight scenes. Three key new features have been added:

• A jump state for characters, with default, punch, kick, and hit animations. It replaces the former behavior in which players were running in the air.
• A new "Versus" game mode, designed for 1 on 1 fights. In a versus fight, the two players are always facing each other, and the speed of backwards move is reduced.
• Specific camera zoom levels can be defined per arena. This allows to give a different feel to the fight scenes of various arenas. For example, the "Dōjō" arena has a high level of zoom which is adapted to versus fights.

User Interface & Options

The options menu has been reorganized to separate general parameters and key bindings, which have been moved in another tab. This freed space in the general parameters tab, in which sliders to control the volume of music and sound effects independently were added. Other minor changes include:

• The removal of the "apply" button in the options, as the changes are directly saved.
• Pressing the escape key in the main menu resets the menu.

The complete changelog as well as installation instructions are available in the download page! Specifially, Hikou no mizu is now available as a flatpak package, to ease its distribution on most GNU/Linux distribution. An Archlinux package is also available on the AUR, and work is being done to publish an Haiku package. Alternatively, the project can still be compiled from source on supported operating systems!

I hope you enjoy the update,
Take care,
Duncan

Hikou no mizu 0.8.91, published in the AUR!

Hi!
A new development version, 0.8.91 is out. You can check it out in the download page!
Also, Hikou no mizu has been packaged for archlinux-based linux distributions and published in the AUR!
If you are using e.g. Archlinux or Manjaro, you can easily install it using a command such as:

# yay -S hikounomizu

Take care,
Duncan

Hikou no mizu 0.8.9!

Hello there,
Hikou no mizu 0.8.9 is out! A lot of work has been done since version 0.6.2, further detailed in the changelog below. See more of it in the screenshots and download sections!

• Migration to SDL2 (benefits include joysticks hot-plug support)
• New and improved characters selection menu (with graphics and preview)
• New and improved arena selection menu (with graphics and preview)
• Key binders added
• Joysticks support
• Takino animations drawing completed
• Added four arenas: Konomachi, Longyear, Ísui, and Järvi
• New musics: VHSailing Rally by Riverwave and Hai by Insan3Lik3
• Dynamic fight camera adapting to the position of players in the arena
• Improved fight interface, character icons added
• Hit-able platforms
• Better text rendering (kerning support)
• utf8 text printing
• Various gameplay adjustments
• Switch to the CMake building system
• Haiku support!

Take care,
Duncan

Hikou no mizu 0.6.2

Hey !
Shortly after Hikou no mizu 0.6.1, here is Hikou no mizu 0.6.2, featuring graphical key bindings !
See the download page to download it !

Enjoy !

Hikou no mizu 0.6.1

Hi there !
Shortly after Hikou no mizu 0.6, here is Hikou no mizu 0.6.1, featuring a functional AI.
The game is now playable alone ! ;)
See the download page to download it !

Enjoy !

Hikou no mizu 0.6 released!

Hey,
After some years without a news (due to time-demanding studies), I am happy to announce the release of Hikou no mizu 0.6 !
See the download page to download it !

Changelog :

• Threaded Music handling
  • Fighting music
• Threaded Playlist handling (+ graphics notifiers)
  • Menu playlist with epopsan's song (thanks to him)
• More fighting sounds
• Support for looping sounds : repeating step sounds
• New configurations items for sound & music volumes.
• Coherent GUI Art guidelines in options / menu screens...
• Structured GUI : Sound / image on focus
• Support for crouched characters / kick animations.
• Support for hit animations.
• Hikou : default kick, moving default & punch & kick, crouched default & punch & kick, default hit, crouched hit.
• New Takino : default.
• Notification on fight-ends : winner, choice to replay or exit to main menu
• Debug mode : red squares on hits
• Prettier screens

TO-DO :
utf8 characters management ?
AI
Jump animations
... :)

Enjoy !