Hive Time

Happy 4th beethday, Hive Time!

Hive Time turns 4 years old today! Time flies like a bee. Or something.

To celebrate, I've put together a wee patch that adds an in-game music player and a new chat command.

Music player

I had wanted to include a way of indicating which music track is playing as far back as the game's initial release. Since Godot handles music decoding and doesn't expose any of that metadata, it didn't make sense to spend effort on writing code to parse stuff that's already being parsed when I had other work to do.

While working on Fossil Sweeper (itch page coming soon!), I ended up incorporating an implementation for parsing OOG metadata by Andrew Wilkes (A.K.A. GDScript Dude), and when I came back for Hive Time's beethday patch this year, it felt like it made sense to bring that in here as well.

I've added a little music player UI loosely inspired by WinAmp. It has three states with varing levels of visual prominence - an out of the way "iconified" mode, a collapsed mode with a play head, and an expanded mode with the track name visible. In all states, mousing over the logo will show a tool tip with the currently playing track (or a notice if no music is playing). It'll also stick to the edges of the game window when expanding/contracting too.

Chat integration

One quick last minute addition for the patch is a !reverse command that makes a chat user's bees fly backwards. Whee!

As always, a very big thank-you to everybee out there who's played, shared, or supported Hive Time. Have a lovely end to 2023.

Enjoy!

- Cheese

Full changelog:

  • Added in-game music player
  • Added MarqueeLabel
  • Added reverse chat command
  • Added music_player binding (defalt M) for toggling music player iconified state
  • Added hide_music_player setting
  • Added skip_music_metadata setting
  • Added Nymphs' Garden game substitution
  • Updated audio metadata for Beeing Together (Original Version)
  • Updated audio metadata for Drop That Bee Like It's Hot
  • Updated audio metadata for The Patter of Tiny Feet
  • Updated audio metadata for (S)warm up 1
  • Updated audio metadata for (S)warm up 2
  • Updated audio metadata for (S)warm up 3
  • Updated MusicPlayer to emit track_finished, track_started, and pause_changed signals
  • Updated MusicPlayer to load OGG metadata
  • Updated musicGap to be 30 seconds
  • Optimised fade_background_tint() slightly
  • Removed debug skip music track shortcut (M)
  • Fixed buzz command interrupting conga dance