FROM THE BLOG

B890 – Tweak-a-doodle-doo!

(I’m not sure what the chicken joke is about)

New build! tl;dr is it fixes a bunch of stuff, runs faster, new heads, should be a bit easier for newbies.

Knights can destroy all solid wood blocks.

Just jab or slash at the blocks. We removed the requirement that the blocks were “cracked” because it seemed to confuse a lot of players. Wood is now quite the liability, get stone structures up where possible.

Potential optimisations to Config File operations, and to the Help Text.

These aren’t 100% complete yet – you if you used to get a lot of lag in the beta, that will hopefully be fixed or decreased with this change – if it still lags for you, we’d appreciate it if you could press F1 to disable help and report to the forums if this does or does not make your game run faster. If it does help, then we’ll put more work into optimising the help interface.

New player experience improvements (thanks Contrary).

These are mainly fixes and tweaks to Princess mode. If you encountered the bug where you couldn’t play the last level it is time to play it again!

Particle optimizations

The particle collisions (mainly used for picking up coins at the moment, may be properly exposed later) are now much, much faster, and completely ignore any non-pickable particles. This means that picking up coins is much faster on both client and server. A bug was identified in the server particle update code as well, and the coin drops are now partly synced (not 100% for bandwidth reasons), so picking up coins from the ground should work, at least most of the time

CTF fixes and improvements

Some of the funnier bugs with CTF are now fixed, like “capturing” the flag with a circular saw. Other issues are on their way to being fixed – wood doors and structures are now more vulnerable, catapult rocks now do some serious damage to stone doors, fire arrows will burn things down with much less of a delay, the flag returns faster when it’s near team-mates, and the messages in the chat console have your name attached to them if you picked up or captured the flag.

New Heads!

7 new heads (more if you count per-gender) have been added to the game. This includes the 2 community choice heads chosen by the community, as well as some miscellaneous heads and the migrant heads.

All in all it’s a bunch of changes that make the game run faster, play better, and hopefully reduce the overall number of bugs. Be sure to report any new bugs on the forums

Changes 886-890:

[modified] more cache friendly particle update
[added] blob gibs have random timeout - means they vanish in sequence rather than all at once.
[added] new base png loader from jackitch
[added] some sync to coins drop
[fixed] minimap outlines
[modified] minimap uses 100% same code for creation and per tile update - fixes consistency issues
[modified] water and fire are overlayed on map, not 100% alpha
[fixed] water and fire minimap sync on net
[fixed] terms of use being tricky
[fixed] config files not saving properly (helps reduction broken)
[added] further optimizations for helps
[added] blinks for helps when they happen
[modified] knights can destroy all wood blocks
[modified] knight can chop through wood door faster
[modified] spikes are destructible by knight
[modified] a bit more aggressive beginner mooks
[added] reintroduced grain from grain plant as edible food
[modified] more respawn time in Princess mode
[added] princess mode: on next map you start as previous class
[modified] archer AI sometimes stops when retreating
[modified] polished the trap level in princess more
[fixed] last level of princess mode not appearing
[fixed] chat text on hover being unreadable
[added] more damage from catapult to stone doors
[fixed] fire arrows not showing in air
[fixed] camera scrolling when mouse of window
[added] kills and scores to challenge
[fixed] time highscores formatting in challenges
[fixed] slam dunk to saw captures (lol)
[added] archer grapple help icon
[fixed] fire arrow teleporting to 0,0 on client when hit door
[modified] tweaks to improve netcode
[fixed] competetive button not pressed from start
[added] chomp sound to shark
[fixed] password appearing way below browser
[added] fire arrow burn time is 5 secs
[added] ctf flag returns faster near teamies
[added] catapult rocks die from too much smashing
[fixed] archer can always get arrows from tent, even if he dies during resupply time
[fixed] archer "drops" an arrow at end of legolas
[fixed] wierd flag doesn't capture bug
[modified] new community maps
[added] 7 new heads