FROM THE BLOG

Weekly Log – TR Art, KAG Editor and Modding

Last week was a quiet one for progress we can share, but I’ll go over the details of what is shareable. Apologies for the post coming after the weekend again!

Trench Run News:

We’ve committed to the new art style. I’ll spend the next few weeks to a month getting the new graphics in-game, and refining any issues with them. It’s important to understand that this is not just a simple palette swap. The new art both expands the colours available and involves a lot of tile and sprite rework. We’re focusing on improving readability; as an example we’re having team colours on the characters – something that was impossible with the 8 colour art.

Team colours help immediately tell friend from foe!

On the gameplay side of things we’re making a few small changes to improve the reliability of game times. Endless stalemates from balanced teams are an issue in KAG; that’s something we’d like to avoid in TR. MM will spend this week swapping the Run mode over to a “Best-of” format. He’ll use the testing group to ensure this works out as intended. This change should shorten wait times and ease player fatigue.

KAG News:

Skinney has got some work done on the editor, “Cartographer”. He’s mocking up a few possible interfaces at the moment. It is not only a tool for creating maps, but also a moderator tool to help admins combat griefers and hackers. Cartographer should also help with building and testing clever mechanism layouts.

Verra has got some optimisation work under way, addressing how KAG interfaces with Angelscript. He has also fixed the “endless downloading” bug that prevented joining some modded servers. This turned out to be two separate bugs on different operating systems. On Linux, the bug was a file permissions issue. On Windows, it was misuse of a system function. Both issues caused the same symptom in different ways, and Verra managed to fix both. This should make the experience joining modded servers more enjoyable, to say the least!

Stay tuned for more!

Max