Posts on Jul 2012

Network stabilized

The aforementioned network issues should have now stabilized, please report on the forums if you see any new issues.

KAG Network Outage

There is a partial outage with the network provider that delivers connectivity to the datacenter where the KAG servers are.  This started within the past hour, you may see intermittent connectivity problems as the matter is resolved.  I will post back with any updates or when we have the ‘all clear’ from our ISP.

FliesLikeABrick

Unconnectable servers no longer displayed in the server browser

Hello all,

The server browser will now no longer list servers which time out upon being joined.  The API will test that a server is connectable before listing it as joinable.  Servers which are not connectable are still listed in the server database, however they are flagged as such and are not sent to the client (the server browser in the client requests only servers which are connectable).  For example:

https://api.kag2d.com/servers/connectable/1/current/1 only lists servers which are active and connectable

https://api.kag2d.com/servers/connectable/0/current/1 only lists servers which are active and not connectable (currently none listed)

The server console currently will not show an error when this happens, however I will work on adding that in an upcoming build

Also while deploying this I cleaned out the server database and minimaps to do some other testing.  Any server owners whose servers are currently missing minimaps in the browser just need to join the server for a minute or restart the server (either one will work).  In general I won’t do this in the future, but I wanted to do it now to test out some new code paths introduced in the API update.

Another thing that will be broken are peoples ‘last played’ – those will not show any recorded action/”last played” until the player is active again.

FliesLikeABrick

Seclevs, Blocks and Physics Headaches

This week, things have happened!

Tom has been working on Security Level code, which will allow server owners to build their own tiers of moderators, with a very fine level of control over exactly what each level of user can do. Join in the discussion here

Ryan has moved house, driven for many, many hours and almost yelled at his cats. He’s got some more API security work to do but naturally has had more limited time than usual to work on KAG. Hopefully moving the rest of his stuff goes smoothly.

I’m over in NZ with my family for a few weeks, which means I’ll have even worse ping than usual if I see you ingame. I’ve been accused of being a hacker ingame already, please look for the purple name and hair before you start pointing fingers 😉

In actual development news:

Michal and I have been working primarily on physics rewrites for this and last week, and it’s been exhausting, especially for Michal, who has had to bear the brunt of the programming work, especially recently.

The majority of the kinks have been hammered out though, and now things like this are possible:

Note the lack of lighting on the constructed blocks – that’s still work in progress.

They’re also not settling to the grid yet because the support mechanic isn’t 100% finalised – we’re pretty set in the implementation though, and it should be done this weekend.

Most of the block behaviours will be defined in common scripts that can be used as examples, and to quickly add functionality to modded blocks and the like.

Behind the scenes of the above image is the new (also work in progress) inventory system. Here’s a sneak peek:

(Apologies for the strange pixel warping, shot taken on a years-old laptop)

We’re going to have to play with how this affects game balance because a builder with a full inventory is holding a fairly gigantic number of blocks.

We’re likely going to split off classic at the point of this next release so that it doesn’t get any of the changes to the underlying structure, as they affect movement and game balance a lot – we’d like to be able to move forward drastically without destroying what we’ve already got, so classic will stay preserved as a separate game (kind of like what Mojang were doing with minecraft a few years ago with classic/creative, survival and survival multiplayer, not sure what the deal there is now).

The movement behind the game is now more physically designed, which means that you keep your momentum in the air and that there is no kind of velocity cap. This is very important for things like jumping on trampolines.

We’re excited for what ramps, trampolines, building momentum and so on will do for race/jump maps – I’ll be looking into coding an actual race gamemode so that a competitive gamemode that doesn’t necessarily involve killing each other can exist.

We’ll keep you posted with more developments as they happen, no date for you guys yet though I’m afraid 🙂

Discussion for this devlog post is HERE.

Max/Geti