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Pets and achievements – weekly news

Hey Everyone!

Been a while since it’s been “just a plain old news week”. Quite a bit has gone on both in KAG and Trench Run, so lets get down to it!

Trench Run:

This week we focussed on getting a bit more out of the pet system, with each pet having a toy that it likes to play with. These items are consumable/temporary like basketballs but let you interact in a unique way with each pet, which increases the tamagotchi factor a little. We’re unwilling to make the pets “need” food and attention at this point as that’d make people sad, but the option is there for those that want a little bit more to do in the lobby. The dog’s frisbee is my favourite!

The croc also finally has animation frames, so there’s that.

Not your average entourage

There was also work on commando functionality, and work on the drunk shader effect.

Drink distortion is a little less predictable, and affects the whole screen!

We’re looking at getting the game onto steam more or less “ASAP” – there’s not too much more that we want to do with it other than content, and steam will let us get a better idea of a realistic audience to cater to, by bringing more people for you guys to play with and getting the game into the hands of people who don’t follow THD as closely.

More costumes are also underway, more word about them next week!

As always you can buy Trench Run here: https://trenchrun.thd.vg/ – every purchase supports our work, and the more people you tell, the more people there are to play with!

KAG:

Norill and Skinney have both been working tirelessly on Steam Achievements implementation. Norill has been writing the code for each achievement and Skinney has been drawing the images needed for the little pop-ups.

Here is a selection of the icons:

In total there will be 64 hand-pixelled icons for 64 interesting achivements to unlock!

We hope the completionists out there will have fun collecting them all!

Have Fun!

Max & Michał

Trench Run Build 10 – Engineer Tweaks, Coin Changes, More Costumes

Hey everyone!

The engie is still no slouch!

New build is here addressing most of the issues with the Build 9. Engineer balance has been addressed a little, many bugs have been fixed and some more lobby content has been added.

• Engineer now has limited bombs (3) so they cant camp forever or afford to spam them.
• Engineer bot is no longer afraid of everything (still not wonderful though)
• All bots forage for ammo when out instead of continuing to mash the trigger
• Added class costumes and femme bounty hunter costume
• Helpful Billboard added – will contain game news and shows new players which way to go for games.
• Reworked coins – limit is 200 coins, 2 gained coins per win, prices of permanent items adjusted upwards as a result. This makes consumables (beer, cigars, music) more affordable in the short term.
• Coins given for ties other than total stalemates in Run. No coins will be paid for all-timeout games but in cases where each team has at least 1 point, both teams will be paid out.
• Cooler looking fireworks
• Added warning about costumes/pets replacing existing ones.
• Strange Crashes and spawning wrong objects in solo after disconnecting from online fixed (at the expense of loading time for now)
• Player information not held on lobby server between games (avoids cached information making people think they “didn’t get paid!”)
• Engineer remote bombs dont reflect bullets any more
• Fixed weird “stepping forever” noises in lobby (it was the bouncers entertaining themselves)
• Fixed cant shoot someone crouching from above as sniper
• [Experimental] Added background to hover messages to make them much more legible. Might be best to remove these from the small in-game ones but keep them on the shopkeeper explanations
• If trying to pick up someone elses pet it says who the owner is.
• Score cap in skirmish is 8 (slightly longer games and fewer 1-round matches)
• Added friendly bot names
• Fixed missile “grabs” other explosives – now they explode.

As you can see, there’s a fair bit changed, but it’s mostly little stuff. We hope you enjoy the variety available from the class skins and the less dominant engineer. Next build the class will likely be renamed, but we’ve yet to settle on a name. Look forward to seeing you in-game!

Reminder that you can buy the game here for a mere $8!

Have Fun!

Max & Michał

Trench Run Free Weekend (5th to 7th February)

Today we’re happy to announce the next Trench Run Free Weekend!

It will run from the 5th to the 7th Feb 2016 (so you can join a server this very moment). Set aside some time to play the game, particularly if you haven’t had time yet, as it’s almost finished!

Free Code: c181933f78095bf13dfd786a45f072db
Download Here: https://trenchrun.thd.vg/en/download​

The free weekend code can be redeemed for this weekend only, and will be removed from any accounts after the event is over. There is no separate build to download, just grab your OS version the download page! Redeem your code in the user panel after logging in on the Trench Run site. You’ll find all the required info on our forums.

Details: https://forum.thd.vg/threads/trench-run-free-weekend-on-now-5-7-feb.25070/

By participating and posting on the forums you’ll help us improve the game before the launch! See you at the bar!

TR EU Servers Down Today

Hey Everyone,

There will be some down-time for moving the servers around – TR servers in Europe will be down for a few hours today.

Coins should be preserved this time around for users in that region.

The servers should be back up by morning CET, we’ll let you know if there are any bigger delays coming. Hopefully noone is majorly affected by the move. USA servers will remain online throughout.

Cheers,
Max

KAG Build 1741 – Mines and Coins

Hey everyone,

A smallish build this time, just adjusting a few changes that made it in last time without proper testing. There’s been quite a bit of work done behind the scenes on new menus, but they aren’t quite ready yet.

Coins per have been adjusted – the amount paid is now 10 coins for a kill, and 5 coins per heart of damage inflicted. This is a big increase on last build’s unexpected economy adjustment, and should ensure everyone can afford bombs, special arrows and all those fun things.

Mine timer has been reduced to 1.5 seconds but only ticks while the mine is on the ground, or in water. This means no tower-tossing mines into a battlefield for free kills, but should make it easier to set up mines on the front line in most other cases.

You may still have to be sneaky with your mines, but it’s not 3 seconds wait any more, and you should be able to afford them!

A few crashes have also been fixed, but many OSX issues are still there I’m afraid.

Full Changelog:
[modified] high dpi scaling disabled - a different solution will be looked into
[modified] re introduced coins on kill (10). coins per damage changed to 5.
[modified] mine only ticks while isOnGround() or isInWater() and reduced priming time to 1.5 seconds
[modified] ctf interface to have an extra null check.
[script][added] bool CHUD::hasCursor()
[added] file checking and exception handling to the news reader to help with osx crashes
[added] file matcher uses its own seeded RNG (not possible to set seed now but gives better distribution anyway)
[fixed] possible crash when pasting data
[dev] debug for keypress in osx
[dev] fixed shader not found spam for failed to compile shaders (just report error once and still add shader, keep shader off)
[script][added] DrawIcon with scaleX and scaleY params
[modified] filtermodded to "dont care" by default
[modified] gender is psuedo-randomly assigned at game initialisation time

Have fun!

Max

TR Build 8 – Medic and Commando, New Maps, First Costume, and More!

Hey guys and girls,

I’ve decided to keep the build info separate today as the KAG one isn’t through testing yet. TR has a few issues still, but has been moved across accounts on the USA server, and the improvements are still playable. Bear with us on the known issues.

Changes:

• Medic now starts a heal timer on anyone touched, which can be reset by any damage. This improves your chances of getting revived even with poor communication (eg: bots/new players) but reduces the medics ability to heal while under fire.
• Commando Flash Bangs are now a grenade that can be thrown at the enemy or dropped at your feet. There are some issues with these that need tweaking but they’re much better than the self-flash.
• Engineer crates actually do damage (engineer is still a contended design though – I’ll talk more about that on the forums)
• New maps for all biomes in Run, which should give it a little more variety.
• Coin GUI for win/loss in Run mode.
• Costumes in Lobby, available for purchase from the VIP bar. There’s only one for now (a simple super hero suit) but now that the code for it is working we can add more and more. We’re aiming for at least 16 different costumes as a base. They are not visible in-game for gameplay clarity and ease-of-development reasons. Costumes are persistent within a region (like coins).
• Default Gender is generated randomly at first launch. This determines your un-costumed appearance in the lobby, and can be changed with /cl_sex in the console or autoconfig.cfg.
• Fixed a bunch of exploits and small bugs that don’t really need repeating.

Known Issues:

• All coin amounts have been reset on USA. Sorry, this is as a result of the account switch over and we’ll try to avoid this in future.
• Leaderboards should be persistent and properly sorted, but dont seem to be rendering properly. We’ll fix this as soon as we can next week.

As always, you can get access to the online part of the game right now by purchasing at trenchrun.thd.vg for just $8, or get a 4 pack to share for $16 (half price). You can ensure the game runs on your machine by downloading the client and playing offline.

Have Fun!

Max and Michał

USA TR Servers Down Today, Updates Coming Soon

Hey everyone,

Regretfully, the USA TR servers will be down today in preparation for a new build. The EU servers will be available but we realise its the wrong time for them to be close to anyone awake. The USA servers are moving between accounts serverside so downtime is mandatory, and we’re going to use the chance to test some extra changes before we push them out to you guys.

Most of my day today will be spent updating servers and testing things are working properly, like this but with more coffee and terminal windows open:

The good news, of course, is that there’s a new TR build coming, as well as a new KAG build. Keep an eye out for more updates!

Cheers,
Max

TR Interim Build

Hey guys and girls, as some of you may have noticed there’s a new Trench Run build out, but no post!

MM had to get the build out in a hurry as things in the test build people were crashing upon joining a new server, but didn’t have time to make a post before leaving. We’ll be sorting out the hosting infrastructure properly over the coming weeks to avoid this kind of mess-up.

This build mainly features a full set of new maps in Run mode, Sniper changes (slower recycle and 10 shots of ammo) and more elaborate “login failed” messages.

It also apparently has some diagnostics for those having trouble entering things using the shift key on OSX, but MM wasn’t very clear about how that was supposed to work. You may need to run the game from the command line to check for debug output that looks like keycode (number) shift (number) – let us know if those numbers match when you press the shift key I guess? Sorry that I cant be more clear on this, I wasn’t left with much information.

There are a few crash fixes in the mix as well (in case anyone was trying to paste image data into the game and wondering why it crashed), though we’re still waiting to hear back on the OSX crash fixes.

Enjoy the build and let us know asap if there are any major issues you’re experiencing.

As always you can buy the game for only $8 at http://trenchrun.thd.vg/ – You’ll get download links by email once you link the key with your account.
We’ll make these easier to find soon, sorry for the hassle!

Have Fun!
Max

Trench Run Supporter Build Pilot

Hey Everyone!

Exciting news, today marks the pilot release of Trench Run!
This is a build for supporters that pre-ordered the game (you can still do that here!).
Some new features include:

• Play on  EU or USA lobby
• an initial implementation of coins economy
• drinking
• a band
• basketballs
• servers to support a symultaneous population of about 80 concurrent people having nonstop games.

If we start to see exceptionally high wait times, we can add more servers. By our maths that shouldn’t happen unless it goes seriously viral (tell your friends!).

Looking forward to meeting you in the bar!

We’ll be entering a more iterative development period as of this build. This means more regular updates with smaller changesets, to pin down any gameplay issues and bugs as soon as we can. While we’ll be less active over the new year period, early 2016 should be an exciting time for Trench Run.

For those that havent got a key, you can get one HERE!

Important limitations to keep in mind:

• If you skip reading this and then ask about something that’s already explained, you’ll look silly.
• Use your KAG or THD account or create a new one here
• This build has no free online play, though you can check that it runs and play offline without the need to log in. If the previous versions of Trench Run ran well enough for you, there’s no reason this one should be much different.
• Gameplay issues from last free test have not really been addressed (medic, engineer and commando actions will be improved!) with all the work to get the supporter release done. We will be addressing them as soon as we can.
• Some of the coin sync logic still needs work – as such you may not see your coin changes show up instantly. Coins are NOT shared between regions.
• Drunkenness is not synced properly at the moment – you will stay drunk as long as you keep the client open, with some limitations. Drink wearing off (and being re-applied if you try to get out of it early) will be implemented in later versions.
• We’re keeping it to one lobby per regions for now. We’ll be happy to add more once the game’s population can fill them.
• Skins are not currently available.

Despite these limitations, we hope the community will welcome a play-anytime Trench Run experience. We will be using the following weeks to gauge your interest and gather feedback on the game.

Please leave any and all feedback on the Trench Run Forums, which we’ll be reading carefully in the coming weeks.

Again – if you havent got a key, now’s the time to grab one HERE! (If something looks fishy about the website – try clearing the browser’s cache.)

Have Fun!
Max, Michał & Lucas