FROM THE BLOG

Plan for the Rest of the Week

While MM is away I’ve been faced with a bit of a decision – do I work on CTF and delay the release of the current stuff further, or shelve it and try to get a patch out for TTH?

I’ve decided to go for the latter so that the archer changes can be trialled, the performance optimisations can be measured in practice and the larger map and angelscript issues (if there are any) can be identified.

To recap, the major changes that’ll be patched in are:

Archer changes:

• Archer has no knife
• Archer has grapple hook on right mouse button instead
• Archer can overcharge his bow to shoot 3 arrows in quick succession. Holding the overcharge too long
• Archer spawns with 30 arrows in almost all cases
• Archer arrows have implicit knockback (eg even on boats, shielding knights, siege machines)
• Archer arrows stun actors they hit if those actors are forced against a surface and the arrow is at full speed (allows combo shots if you manage to jump over a knight and full-speed shoot it downwards)

Large Engine Changes

• Angelscript version increase to 2.27.1 – might make some old scripts not work as intended or break some mods, check the console for errors and the behaviour of anything, especially anything using angelscript classes. This was actually quite a pain to do, it broke the linux build for a while.
• Tilemap underlying structure changed quite a lot – this one will only really matter to modders, it should be quite a bit faster CPU-wise though. Mods working with setting up tiles will need to pay attention to API changes.

General Changes

• Halls have units in them – this hasn’t been properly tested yet and will need some work, but the basic idea is that a hall will become easier to take for a time if people are spawning out of it faster than tickets regen.
• Halls drown when they have 2 or more layers of water in them – this state can be reversed with sponges. Drowned halls are for all intents and purposes the same as a neutral hall but you cant convert them until they are cleared.
• You can buy an extra migrant at a hall for 100 gold! The migrant is bound to the hall, not the team, so you can still take the enemy stronghold with 10 military supplies factories :^)
• Builders and archers start with the basics they need to survive and do good – 30 wood for ladders or blocking a door in the builder’s case, 30 arrows in the archer’s case.
• The starter has been cleaned up a little, the layout improved, twitter feed fixed, and it has manual resolution entry for those with non-standard resolution screens like on netbooks.
• Builders get materials when breaking solid constructed tiles. Short but sweet, makes forward building a little more feasible, and also less of a pain in the rear to “clean up” team constructions that honestly suck.
• Dinghies do no damage. “Sorry” to those that have been abusing this. Much sorrier for not patching it sooner :^)
• Servers are now split into competitive vs cooperative – we’ll make this a little more mod friendly asap but basically the modes are split based on how much fighting other people you’ll do.
• Save the Princess mode is now several separate levels, using the new “Challenge” Framework, which will be finalised soon to allow for campaigns to be built for cooperative servers.

That’s it, off the top of my head. so, quite a lot of changes, which is why I want to get it out before they keep piling up and another week goes by with you guys stuck with old bugs.

Feel free to give your thoughts in the thread, some of these are somewhat debatable and most of the game flow related ones have easy to tweak variables in the scripts for those that want to revert them – the archer knife being a notable exception to that rule.

More info coming soon, it’ll mostly just be cleaning and testing until friday though!

Max/Geti