Posts on May 2012

Fighting the undead – Now with friends! (Build 393)

It’s a bad day to be a zombie…

Fortunately, most of our players aren’t zombies, so they won’t mind. 😉

ZOMBIE FORTRESS MULTIPLAYER IS OFFICIAL!

This means you can defend your fort with your friends without tampering with the server software too much, without repeated server crashes and with a nice new bot control interface.

Basically, use the R key to tell bots what to do. We think you’ll like the change, we’re leaning more towards this kind of interface than the pie menus in future. If we can find things to convert, we likely will. It feels much better interacting directly with the game objects.

A giant swathe of fixes is included, to AI (migrants now 40% less useless – can go through bridges!), to gameplay (reduced fall damage stupidness, reduced building weirdness, a bunch of misc exploits removed, particles getting eaten by bridges fixed, combat “lag” reduced…) and many general bugfixes (slow closing fixed, many server crashes fixed) – see the changelog for more!

You can also wear a kettle on your head, among other new heads. Hopefully this will help increase the diversity of premium folk’s appearance – We’re working on a skin colour option as well, just requires re-touching all of the actor sprites so I’ve been putting it off…

Big thanks to the testers for starting to get into the swing of things with testing, a lot of these issues would still be undiscovered and the mechanics unrefined without them!

Full Changelog:

“zf” = zombie fortress
– u_shownames now uses new player name style instead of big stupid one
– spectators with u_shownames see all player names
– spectators now see unit counters
– Fixed single character player names no longer crash the server (and are therefore allowed) (#327)
– Fixed full name not showing on linux/mac when someone changes teams (#151)
– Fixed username is not cased correctly after successful authentication. (#237)

– dropped the materials counter delay
– the blinks still take a while to go away but the counter is always up to date
– Fixed broken Connect To…. (#148 and #1)
– Fixed Looks like red builder is going to build blue tiles (#254)
– Fixed breaking a shop that is on background tile doesn’t give mats (#253)
– Fixed setting high duration results in ban for 0 seconds (#266)
– large bans (longer than 2 years) and bans with -1 time now result in permbans.
– Added expiry time to listbans
– Made bans case-insensitive

– changed/improved/added server side logging of game/player events

– Fixed – Archers deal massive damage to team catapults (#271)
– really fixed trap door+back wall = free money (removed hack) (#198)
– Fixed lost stone on removing trapbridge on background (#258)
– Fixed GOALTICKS independent ticktime mod operation in director.cpp
– Fixed Knights attack catapults when they use it (#81)
– Fixed various potential server crashes while fixing (#327)
– Various tweaks that may fix small bugs/instability – fixed
– KAG crash when closing KAG with server browser open (#333)
– addressed chat box/minibox background hardcoded, now takes center pixel colour. (#157)
– Fixed the listPlayers() script
– fixed abusable bug where spectators can block map start (#305)
– fixed more meaningful autoupdate failure messages for libcurl (#306)
– fixed the launcher menu text for the various sites sucked and fixed some of the URLs
– fixed can repair trap bridges with backwall (#205)
– fixed can repair other team’s door to be your own (only works blue->red) (#76)
– fixed about 3 related bugs/exploits
– fixed can’t slash shielded target sometimes (#276)
– fixed jumping on someone and slashing hurts you (#309)
– stomping does less damage to the stomper
– Fixed quarters don’t heal when there’s less than 0.5 hearts to heal (#353)
– fixed door breaking/fixing (#204)
– updates to how paper rendering works
– Fixed catapults dont hurt backwall enough, though haven’t done bridges etc yet (likely related to arrows) (#331)
– Lowered chat spam timer and inserted anti-spam message if you exceed it rather than failing silently
– Added sandbox room and tweaked sandbox to include it
– sandbox now has free items and shops.
– fixed server segfault due to API error conditions
– fixed quarters light not acting like a light
– fixed chests giving light by default
– bomb in zf costs 10 coins (was 20)
– more probability of zombie having coin
– disconnect issue should be fixed, please playtest for a while and see
– fixed client-side light in blob
– added constructor to APIPlayer, too much non-initialized vars bugs
– fixed free full version access
– bots attack dead zombies
– removed buildnum from launcher caption to avoid confusion
– collapse anti-grief doesn’t work for outposts
– fixed charged arrows dealing no damage when shot through bridge (#321)
– fixed knights don’t stop when ordered to go to zombies
– destroying castle blocks in zf doesn’t remove coins
– bots try to jump over kegs
– fixed bots not following orders when faced with zombies
– fixed throwing kegs into walls
– removed “buying” zombies from Portal 

DISCUSS ON FORUMS

Interrupt while we’re waiting

Still 2-3 things to iron out before the release so here is some Sunday fun for you all, while we are waiting for the new release.

This is something we’re trying to move away from which you’ll see in the next release with the new Party Interface.

And at first I thought this was a KAG meme 🙂

Cu later,

MM

Release Holdup – Should be out Monday

We’ve had a hold-up actually releasing the update because MM had to give a lecture for Friday and I’ve had family engagements all weekend – There are about 3 issues that need tending to before we can release the update.

The blog post has already been written, almost all of the testing completed, we just ran out of time getting it finalised and out the door. Hope to have it out Monday night.

Geti

Soldat is 10!

Holy crap.

I wont clog up the KAG devlog with talk about soldat, but you can read about the awesome work Shoozza has been doing and a note from MM about the game reaching a decade here. The 1.6.3 update has been (conveniently) released in tandem with the anniversary.

Could be time to play a few games for nostalgia’s sake, veterens!

No roundup this week as you’ll get a changelog with the release and I need to get back to fixing bugs rather than writing about fixing them 🙂

Spoilers: mostly zombies multiplayer fixes with some general gameplay and security fixes so that we can officially release zombies multiplayer. Also, more heads.

Geti

Just an informal reminder

People messaging admins, developers and moderators about bugs on the forums – please stop doing this! Use bugs.kag2d.com to report bugs! We don’t need the extra correspondence 😉

Geti

Combat fixes and Exploit patches

Here’s a roundup of changes, old to new:

• Made team unit counters work for “any” number of teams
• Fixed #271 archers deal massive damage to team catapults
• Fixed #198 trap door + back wall = free money
• Fixed #258 lost stone on removing trapbridge on background
• Fixed #81 Knights attack catapults when they use them
• Fixed #327 one character nicknames kick everyone from the server
• Addressed #157 chat box/minimap background colour no longer hardcoded, loaded from image. Sometimes breaks though, need to find a workaround for crappy graphics cards.
• Fixed #305 game wont start if there’s >1 spec but less than minimum players
• fixed #245 ‘report bugs’ links to bug tracker in game launcher
• fixed #306 useless autoupdate failure codes.
• fixed #150 casing error on smoke texture
• fixed #276 can’t slash shielded target sometimes
• fixed #205 can repair trap bridges with backwall
• fixed #353 quarters dont heal when there’s

There’s some experimental stuff going on with network smoothing and whatnot to try to reduce the “lag” that people see in-game, its having mixed results. Ideally there’d just be enough servers to go around though, and enough people playing at all times 😉

Obviously more fixes coming and more testing to be done.

Thread here

Geti