Posts on Aug 2012

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slv7_W3FLto?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

This is how support will work while building castles in the upcoming big release.

Patches today (B489)

Fixes!

  • Fixed Solo not working
  • (hopefully) fixed #700 zombies not working
  • Fixed Flag “passing” to people

The RTDM maps have also been updated – SERVER OWNERS BE CAREFUL IF YOU WANT TO KEEP THE OLDER MAPS OR YOUR MAPYCYCLE IF YOU’RE RUNNING FROM /BASE/RULES/RTDMMAPCYCLE.CFG!

Enjoy, apologies for the solo issues!

Max/Geti

Quick Fixes for Classic B488

We’ve been taking note of complaints from the community Re: classic gameplay, especially with regards to bomb jumping and shield bashing. I totally agree that some of the raw fun of the game has been lost due to balancing concerns without the option to players to bring them back.

There are now some variables in gamemode.cfg that allow some more nostalgic, fun mechanics to be reintroduced, like double-gliding bombjumps across the map and knight combat without shieldbashing.

These variables are:

  • can_shieldbash – exactly what it says on the tin (defaults to off)
  • can_glide_when_bombjumping – similarly, allows much further bombjumps (defaults to off)
  • bomb_jump_scale – scales the force of a bombjump. (defaults to 1.0)

Shieldbashing off by default is something we’re looking into – we realise that it makes shielding feel very weak but we also don’t want the current “surf to win” mentality that plagues RTDM to be a thing. Understand that with the engine behind classic, this is a very hard issue to solve since players locations cannot be 100% synced due to latency, -> someone colliding with you on your screen might not be on their screen, or on the server.

We’re looking into how we actually want to solve this but it’s not a priority compared to getting the full game complete, sadly. We figure with the option there, server owners can cater to people who do and don’t like bashing.

This release also has a fix to the dreaded “rcon crash” many people have been reporting – because of the nature of the crash it has been very hard to track down exactly what’s going wrong and to provide a fix, but thankfully we’ve been able to. Many thanks to Tom/Shad for his focus on this.

Ryan/FLAB has got some new hardware up and running which will help us manage increased loads now and in the future, a worthy investment.

Michal and I have been working furiously on getting more scripting progress done and have got physics more properly integrated, done some optimisation and started properly defining the entities. Work has been done on actor-actor interaction, forming joints between objects and improving the performance of structures.

We’ll keep you posted, hopefully with some pictures soon 😉

Discuss this here

Max/Geti

Scripting Progress and Massive Rewrites.

That basically sums up the past few weeks. We’ve started moving literally all of the old content to scripted entities, which has required us to be pragmatic and basically wipe all the old hardcoded things. Every time we’ve come across something that needs to be done better, we’ve rewritten it. This has lead to many, many positive changes and a hell of a lot of work.

First of all, attacking is now fully directional, scripted, and a little less buggy (though I’m sure lag will help keep everyone angry about it). This means that your knights can now chop upwards, downwards and to the side, as well as slash in an arc.

Second of all, all classes have been moved to scripts. This makes it significantly easier to tweak how they work (both for us and for modders) but has also taken a lot of work, since the old “runner” code basically made KAG happen – all of the building code, emoticon code, hud code, attacking code (and so on) was in there. That was very rigid, but fairly simple to work with for us.

All the basic classes are drafted and “semi-working”, though there’s a little more to be done before we can even begin larger-scale testing, but they’re all working with team colours, animations, and layers.
classespreview.png
Here they are decked out in drab grey, all ready for painting. Note the archer’s arm accurately reflecting its aim angle.

Sprite layers also let us piece together slightly more complicated sprites from various pieces, for example, the catapult’s arm and wheels can be separate layers, like so:
temp.png
Workshops are also naturally fully scripted. The bank allows you to take out a loan if you’re low on coins, or deposit money for safekeeping.

Tom is now working on documentation for the scripting API, and Ryan has bought several new machines for our infrastructure to future proof against traffic spikes and help balance the load.

More previews coming as we build more content 🙂

Discuss these developments on the forums here!

Max/Geti

What it’s like to play a game as a Developer.

Unfortunately 😉

If you see us ingame, say hi, don’t spitroast us with questions.

(Source)

Blog post with actual news soon, just have to collate screenshots and changes (and fix a bug with sprite layers on actors…)

Max/Geti

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