Macklebee's Habboween development blog
Yargghh! I hope you’re all enjoying following along with the events of Captain Murphy! I wanted to take a small break from Pirates, to share a small development blog on some of the work that we’ve been doing for Habboween!
I’m super excited to get both the classic range of Habboween furniture and Gothic lines out to you all, and can’t wait to see some of the really cool stuff you’ll build, we’re even bringing back some of the Halloween public room variants that you may not have seen for almost 15 years!
Post Battleball, a number of you have been asking for the latest in our line of development blogs, so I’m here to talk a little bit about what’s been going on behind the scenes to support our latest changes.
🎃 The Gothic Furniture Line
Gothic furniture is fairly iconic within the hotel, it has an incredibly distinctive look, was the first to bring animated wall items, and its own set of animated floor items. Originally released around 2007 in line with Habbo’s v13 release, Gothic Furniture made use of a new animation framework within the client to power both its wall items, and its floor items. Origins did not support this framework.
Prior to Habbos v13 release each and every furniture that had an animation had either its own animation class or shared a class with one or two other pieces of common furniture, this includes things like teleports, gates, fireplaces, sinks and minibars. This means that each time we added a new piece of furniture that had some form of animation it would likely need its own animation class.
These animation classes were responsible for iterating through the different images that make up a piece of furniture, and the frames that make up that furniture's animation. Our new animation framework simplified all of that into a far more re-usable block of animation instructions, an example of which is shown below:
⌨️ Adding the animation framework
On the surface this may seem simple, newer versions of the client have them so we should just be able to take the code! This wasn’t quite true, the biggest challenges included:
- Habbo Version 13 made use of the Dynamic Furniture system (download when needed) as opposed to furniture being stored with the game, this changed where code expected certain configurations to exist for each furniture.
- Habbo Version 13 had a number of new furniture properties not yet used in Habbo Hotel: Origins, such as metadata about whether or not a furniture was recyclable, these are small things, but as Origins did not yet provide those tags, code used for managing furniture state (and thus its animation) also needed to be modified and couldn’t simply be used as is.
- Habbo Hotel: Origins has already made significant changes to many of the classes that interact with the new animation framework, think about quality of life improvements such as being able to move wall items that did not exist in Habbo. Therefore we couldn’t simply copy over entire classes, we’d lose some of our QoL improvements.
- Lack of substantial documentation on what changed in the client and when. The client itself has a tonne of code level documentation, which is fantastic, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of information on why certain things changed, when, or why, and so reading between the lines can be a little difficult!
Transparently, I share this as I’m aware the expectation is that moving between versions would be as simple as using the client of that later release. It’s not that easy!
🛣️ A quick update on what’s next
As we continue to provide regular content updates to you all, we get asked a lot about what’s coming next. The biggest answers are of course: Trax, Snowstorm and some form of Daily Challenges to help with player retention and onboarding, however there are a number of quality of life improvements we’re also keen to get your feedback on. These include: chat history, a “follow friend” button, trade confirmation dialog, and a private room ban management system.
I want to try and get a meaningful, visual product roadmap to you all soon so that you’re able to really understand the current vision for Habbo Hotel: Origins, and I’ll be working with the team on that soon.
As an aside, I will be taking a couple of weeks off towards the end of September, so we’re trying really hard to ensure a smooth handover and transition of duties whilst I'm out. Please be gentle with the team, they’re all rockstars and are stretching to support us.
Then, I’ve also got a few images to share to give you a taste of the new stuff that’s coming for Habboween 👀
