Habborator Nice to know

This is our obligatory tips & tricks page. Boring if you’ve read a couple, but if you haven’t, we tried to focus on a good presentation of well known facts ;).

Design is meant to be looking like the Habbo purse did. Past sense, as in v24 the purse got integrated into the catalogue. Quick, let's save its interface for history’s sake. This is what it looked like:

Anyway, click sections on the right.

Typing some regular emoticons will help showing emotions of your Habbo. Nikkie demonstrates:

We’re just waiting for some version of the hotel where we will be able to use ‘:p’ and stick out our tongue…

There’s a couple of simple keyboard tricks, on a Windows PC, to really enhance your Habbo experience.

First, if your speech preference is set to ‘speak’, but you want to get out a one-time ‘scream’ message to for instance your cat, hold down a SHIFT key while pressing ENTER.

Secondly, a real timesaver, hold down the ALT key while selecting furniture, to be able to move it around quickly, and keep yourself from running after it all the time.

Holding down the SHIFT key while clicking on the “Go” field of public spaces (only) in the navigator will not take you there, but get you a dialog detailing the people that are inside that space.

Joining HC will get you two useful commands. Type these (a colon + command) in your speech bar and a dialog will appear. These were intended for use by staff only, in early years, later added as bonus for HC members.

:chooser

…will get you this dialog, detailing who’s in the room. Click any name to quickly select that person (or pet). And there’s

:furni

…a similar command that will give you a list of all furniture in a room. Very useful if you want to pick that one piece out of your stacking masterpiece. And since v22 there’s

:events

…does what it says, pops up the events window, and works for everybody. Now we know toolbar has a button that does exactly the same, but if you were typing anyway, could be useful.

:im [habbo] [message]

Another new command since v22 is ‘:im’ (Intra messaging). Doesn’t work without name of a Habbo, content of the message is optional. Spanner/Zatley notes you can now send messages to offline friends ;). And starting v24 there is ‘:ig’, which will open the dialog to free gaming.

For completeness’ sake, there used to be another command, clearly not intended for users either, called ‘:performance’. Gave some info on how responsive hotel was.

And yes, staff & moderators have some more commands helping them keep things neat and safe (if interested, here).

 

Want to take a screenshot of your Habbo events ? If you’re on a Windows PC, your keyboard has a “Print Screen” key - it will put a screenshot of your screen on the clipboard, so you can paste it into any graphics program. If you hold down the ‘ALT’ key while hitting that key, it will not capture whole screen, but just the active window (better).

If you’re on a Mac(intosh) press Command-Shift-3 to capture the entire screen, or use Command-Shift-4 to drag with the mouse and select a smaller capture area. Your screenshots will be saved on your desktop (format seems to differ with OS version, we don’t use Macs). If you want the screenshot on the clipboard instead of saved, hold down the Control button too (e.g. Command-Shift-Ctrl-3).

From the web: “Macintosh computers running OS X include a screen capture utility called Grab that is quite a bit more versatile that Print Screen. Grab is located in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. Use the menus to capture the whole screen or just a small section of it. You can even set a 10-second delay so you have time to arrange things on the screen perfectly!”

If you’re running a fansite, or are a reporter or something, taking a bunch of screenshots quickly can come in handy. I’m not aware of many freeware tools on the Mac (but it might be there), on Windows there’s loads of tools to get this done. A very decent tool, freeware, is done by an old friend, Darrell L. aka redllar.¹ It’s called FGWndGrab, and just lets you follow that infobus session or VIP visit. Hit your key combination everytime you want a screenshot and they get done and saved without you doing anything, any format, different options for selected parts, with watermarks, comments, very fullfeatured.

¹ Above link is a direct download link. Redllar has regrettably taken down his page, while I (Luucaz) still enjoy his tools. Couldn’t resist to share this one, please don’t spread/make available, just enjoy.

The font in which for instance spoken text, subtitles and missions are displayed is called ‘Volter (Goldfish)’. It has a couple of special, grafical characters inside that are often used - so-called ‘Altcodes’. For these you need to hold down your left ‘ALT’ key on your keyboard (check if ‘numlock’ is enabled (little light on your keyboard), else press corresponding key). While you do that type the numbercode on the ‘numpad’ (block with numberkeys on the right). Release the altkey and the symbol should be visible.

Depending on language- and keyboardsettings codes might/might not work. Try the alternatives. Want them in a popup ?!

You don’t really need to be envious of HC members and their ‘:chooser’ command. Someone in the door flooding your room ? Click the part of their speech bubble with their head in to quickly select that person and click ignore/kick.

Nice detail not everyone is aware of, the outline color of these speech bubbles/background color of the head is taken from the color(s) of the shirt a person is wearing.

 

Our Laurensh1 was, like all of us, in shock when he found that after introduction of v19, one feature of the search option in Navigator stopped working. It used to be so that if you only entered a space - ‘ ’ - result would be a list of oldest rooms inside the hotel. Friend of his found an alternative, and he did some investigating and found some more. Advanced search in v19:

This stopped working in v20 and still doesn’t work in v21. Since it seemed well planned we’re still hoping it returns. v22, the backward slash, ‘\’ (as described below), seems to work again.

The underscore, ‘_’, can be used as a wildcard. A search for ‘l_ve’ gets you rooms starting their names with ‘løve’ continuing with ‘lavendel’ up to ‘live’ (liver/liverpool) and ‘love’ (alphabetically).

If you start your search with a percentage sign, ‘%’, this tells the search feature to go look for this specific character combination anywhere in a room name (excluding owner names), displaying them oldest first. A search for ‘%huone’ (Finnish word for ‘room’) will almost certainly get you some old rooms created by Sulake technical staff. As such, you can now use this character to search for oldest rooms in any hotel, by just searching for ‘%’ only.

Then, if you start your search with a backward slash, ‘\’, this tells the search feature to only look into room names, not include room owner names, that start with this character combination. Entering ‘\Love’ will get you the ‘Love shack’, no ‘Everlasting love’.

Note search is case independent (‘l_ve’ equals ‘L_VE’), use of them always ignores owner names (search for ‘Whatwasit’ to see the famous room, but searching for ‘Wh_twasit’ won’t get you there) and these can be combined. A search for ‘%h_one’ still gives you a listing of old rooms by Finnish technical staff, but if old enough, other room names become visible, for instance containing the words ‘throne’ and ‘fishbone’. Last silly remark, ever noticed that after an unsuccesful search (no results), you get transported to last succesful search (if any) after a while ?