Posts on Sep 2011

Go vote!

So, this little thing:

http://adrenic.net/?page_id=284

So, we’re losing on this poll, and they spelled the game’s name incorrectly! Not a great start, but considering there’s less than 200 votes on the board we can turn this train wreck around with your support!

Voting us up takes ~5 seconds, get in there! Vote KAG! Tell them the spelled the name wrong in the comments for bonus points! Support your country Game! … Oh, and us, too 😉

Edit: Huzzah! We’re on top and they fixed the name and it’s thanks to you guys!

Thanks for your support guys!

Edit2: Yikes, AoS is catching up! If you haven’t voted yet, hop to it! It’d be good fun to win this thing.

This weeks sneak peek

Sneak peek into what I’m working on this week all explained in a nice picture.

Other than that I’ve started exporting the game rules (like what happens on score, how much points for doing stuff etc.) into a script file.

MM

Call to arms!

This from one of our Guards, Neat:

Red, and blue, the biggest recorded single battle ever yet. We now have a 128 player server. It may have crashed at 60 players the other night but I think it’s worth a try to get as many people, hopefully the maximum number in at once.

If posted to tumblr and facebook and this forum, I reckon we can get 128 people at any one time and keep it going for a while (presuming it doesn’t crash, they’re going to work on the issues)

Kag is not tennis, Kag is WAR.

Help us iron out the networking bugs by tweeting/spamming facebook/mailing your grandma about this and playing on that huge server, we want to see some epic recordings and hear some amazing tales, and most importantly bug reports when it dies detailing when, how and why 😛

MeteorVPS 128 Slot is the place to be!

Have at it!

Geti

Build 158 released!

Oh this was a bad one. It seems like the big guys, like us and Apple are having problems these days :). But I was faster to fix it!

I noticed the amount of players online suddenly dropped so something was wrong. Servers and clients have to patch. Please restart to auto-update.

Changes 157-158:

– fixed not being able to connect to server after some time of server running

Features Coming!

This picture basically outlines 5 things we want to get done alongside the October event, some after, some before:

• Gendered players – not much difference between them, but being able to select Male or Female as part of your player customisations will help us be more inclusive as well as getting some variety onto the battlefield. After that we’ll include customisable heads – including hats helmets and haircuts for paid players.
• Workshops – Arrow and Bomb workshops pictured here, allowing construction of those items and potentially upgrades to them later on.
• Mechanisms – Spike and Arrow traps that you can attach to pressure plates and levers to allow forts to be more easily defended and to give builders a more interesting engineering task than 10-ply walls. These will be paid only.
• Wooden Buildings – A cheaper faster option than stone that will actually very likely be required before “upgrading” a tile to stone. A lot of work will have to go into balancing this, but I’m alright with that. We may add stone doors at the same time.
• Fire! – Bombs, fire arrows (and perhaps a few other things later on) will be able to set fire to wooden buildings. We’ve devised a way to make “putting out” flaming buildings possible without water that basically involves cutting out the flaming parts. Fire will give players a genuine reason to upgrade from wood to stone – fire hazards are a real concern you know 😉

Not pictured:

• Coins – a system representing the work a player has done for the team, you’ll drop coins upon dying and gain them from building, killing enemies, capturing flags, and manufacturing items. You’ll be able to use them to buy items (including bombs and arrows) which will provide a much better self-balancing system than the current resupply on spawn.
  That means no more endless stream of suicide bombers!

We’ve got more plans, but they’re not concrete so I’m not posting them. Feel free to ask questions in the comments – I’ll be watching this post over the weekend.

Geti

Build 157 released!

Changes 156-157:

– added “nocollapsing_nearspawn” variable to game rules file (CTF/gamemode.cfg)
– near spawn collapses prevention works for larger structures only (>15 blocks)
– fixed collapsing issues again
– fixed unbuildable spots bugs
– fixed crash reason
– fixed not being able to return to menu after disconnect
– knight image files height correction

Build 156 released!

Another quick patch. We’re ironing everything out before the next major builds that will bring some awesome new stuff. In the meantime the major bugs are being eradicated, I’m especially proud of fixing the collapsing issues. Should look much better now!

– unlimited resources on warmup removed (get 250 stone and 100 in tent)
– fixed creative/sandbox mode resources
– when max resource limit reached item falls out
– fixed picking resource item when full
– added circle on player when freezed
– fixed flag scored when touched on flag carrier
– fixed unsupported resolutions in fullscreen
– fixed frozen players dying
– fixed server browser sorting
– sort selection in browser is saved
– teams open doors can’t be destroy by team members
– fixed collapsing issues (floating blocks & not all blocks collapsing)
– fixed crash on start for old video cards

Build 154 released!

Added a “Basics & Building” tutorial. This is something everyone starting with KAG should play first. Something like this might be mandatory to pass through in the future so that new players don’t spoil the fun for people already playing.

Fixed numerous most critical bugs. Please report if any of the mentioned bugs still remain.

Beware griefers! Mods can now freeze you by pointing at you with the mouse cursor and pressing [F3]. If you didn’t do anything illegal you can explain yourself during this time.

Changes 151-154:

– added “Basics & Building” tutorial
– added password prompt in server browser
– added moderator key [F3] to freeze a player
– fixed map tile desynchronization on game join
– fixed chat console not scrolling when joined game
– added infinite resources on warmup
– lowered amount of resources on round start (100 wood and stone)
– lowered amount of wood falling out of destroyed catapult or tent to 30
– builder automatically picks up stone and wood parts
– fixed castle background blocks requiring support
– fixed /kickid names display on Linux
– removed clantag brackets (default name separator is space; other chars can act as separator)
– cannot pull catapult while holding [F]
– fixed minimap dissapearing on death
– dedicated_autostart.cfg and mapcycle.cfg don’t get autoupdated
– fixed server map preview memory leak

Hotfix released:
– fixed 4 crash reasons

One “KAG Day”

I might or might not do this monthly or quarterly or whatever to see how everything changes over time. Here’s the rundown on new user registrations and total user logins per hour over one day recently:

(click for full size image)

That is what happened in KAG last Thursday. I picked Thursday because it marked the start of how the game’s population seems to be progressing – the day before had a large jump in registrations (see the log graph preview on the first graph above!) – and every day since then has been roughly the same in terms of activity both in registrations and activity (if you look closely you’ll see a higher volume over the weekend with some interesting spikes, but it looks to be continuing roughly the same)

User logins seem to peak around 2-4PM in a “KAG Day” (wherever that is) which is slightly after the peak in registrations. A “Dead” period (server population likely lower than 50) occurs from 11PM to 11AM.

By the sound of things the peak is probably when France does most of its gaming, which would overlap considerably with the rest of Europe. It seems to me that we don’t yet have as much of a presence as we could in the US, as logins are low apart from the EU spike. So, if you’re in the US, feel free to tell everyone you know good things about this game 😉 We could do with evening this graph out a little, I think.

…That’s more or less all I wanted to say about the stats we have at hand (we also have cumulative registrations and are looking into logging more so we can learn more about when/how you guys play), I hope someone gains some insight from this – see you all for more chatter about blue lines in a month or so!

Keep your eyes on the blog for some gameplay (and premium) related content coming soon!

Geti

“New Server Browser” build released!

Besides tweaking some things, improving the auto-updater and fixing bugs we have now a completely NEW SERVERS BROWSER!

Includes:

• pinging (sorting closest server)
• map preview (check and see what is going on the server before joining)
• sorting by map size
• better view of locked and full servers

Attention knights! You can’t destroy now castle backgrounds with a normal hit and you can’t destroy your teams open doors. This is to prevent random damage when fighting inside your castle. You’ll need a full slash to destroy the castle back wall.

Changes 142-151:
– new server browser
– server pinging
– server minimap preview
– optimized GUI rendering
– max server name length added
– server info limited to 144 chars
– client disconnects with message when trying to enter full server
– autoupdater reads another download URL if first one fails
– precache.txt doesn’t update in autoupdater
– block cursor always shows for archer & knight
– knight can’t destroy team open door
– knight can destroy castle background only with slash
– changed default team switch button to ALT