''On Walking and Stacking'' - A blog post by dmitrym

[Michael]

Recently, habbo.com has been going through a series of updates changing the way walking and stacking works. While these changes went unnoticed for a vast majority of a users (except, perhaps, for the “glued chairs” bug), there are people who feel really affected by these changes. This post is some insight to what is happening, as well as a way to say “sorry guys for your troubles”.

First, I’ll introduce myself – my Habbo nickname is dmitrym, I’m Habbo developer and I work at Sulake since 2008. Chances are, last week I broke some of your mazes.

Why?

Habbo has to evolve to stay cool. And just adding the content is not enough, we need to improve core features to be more intuitive for the new generation of Habbos. What was cool in 2000 and 2006, is lame by standards of 2013. So we are working on an improvements to core room functionality of Habbo. This should both make Habbo more accessible to the newer generation, and give more experienced player more powerful tools for creating rooms that were not possible before. Sorry, I’m not allowed to give you more details (“… yet”, hopefully).

Yes, but why breaking X?

Habbo code is old. Heck, compared to other MMO games, it is ancient. Some parts of it (especially related to rooms) are older than many of the current players. :-) It is layers of legacy stuff, complex, obfuscated, all glued with patches and supported by crutches. Add to that more than 4000 different furniture types. Whatever unbelievable combination of furni properties you make up – chances are, there is two or three types with this combination, all released back in 2007.

So when we tried to implement something that was not possible before, we had to clean the mess first. And doing this, we accidentally fixed many of old bugs, which for older player became a de-facto standard. Skipping over void. Dropping down or jumping up 6 levels. Stacking things into each other. God knows what else. Of course, we introduced some bugs, but those are nice modern bugs that we at least know how to track down and fix. :-)

Known issues

Diagonal walking – after recent code changes, Habbos could not walk over non-walkable furni when moving diagonally between two adjacent tiles. While technically such movements constitute a bug, we’ve listened to you and will make it possible again. Walking diagonally between two non-walkable furnis is still not allowed, as is not allowed to walk over the void (even when moving diagonally between two adjacent tiles).
Going on high furni was broken. Fixed.
Dropping down from high furni – previously, it was possible to drop down or climb up furni of arbitrary heights under certain circumstances. New code allows only height changes of no more than 1.25 units in any direction, so falling down is no longer possible. We’ll add explicit support for dropping down up to 4 units.
“Ditch” stacking – thanks for the feedback from you, we’ve realized that this feature (still a “bug”, technically) was essential for building highly sophisticated rooms. We’ll temporary put back old buggy code, while looking for a cleaner solution for more flexible stacking.
Client shows that you can stack furni in any place. This may be really confusing. We are working to fix it.
The fixes mentioned above are going to be deployed tomorrow.
I found not listed walking/stacking bug!

Please, post here detailed description of what is wrong and a link to room (as in http://habbo.com/room/xxx, not room “Lions den”) that demonstrates the bug. If the bug needs a few players to reproduce, please describe how many players and where those should be standing. Mind you – by bug here is I mean obviously wrong behavior, not “it worked differently before”!

I want X back!!!

If you really think X was important – please comment down here why you think Habbo will be a better place if we bring X back. Not just “it was cool and I had rooms using it”, but what cool games/features does X provide. I cannot promise that every cool feature will be brought back. The code is different now, and emulating old bugs is a curse for any developer.

Little bonus

Again, the new code was put in place to make extending core room functionality for new (yet undisclosed) feature. But here are some nice side effects:

Now you can put welcome mat in the doorway :-)
You can stack things up to level 40 (compared to old 10, guess why this change)
And if I’ll have some time to spare in the coming weeks, Habbos may gain an ability to walk under stacked furnis, provided there is enough vertical separation. At least now this looks technically feasible.

http://blog.habbo.com/2013/05/13/on-...-and-stacking/

I'm excited about being able to stack things up x4 the height at the moment, and walking under stacked furni!

Thread closed by runeaddict99 (Forum Moderator): As it is already posted here.