Blog – Page 3 – Transhuman Design

KAG Build 1714 – Resolution Fixes

28 December, 2015 Geti

Hey everyone!

This is a fix-only build for the rendering issues people were having using fullscreen and funny resolutions in 1711/1712. Please post on the forums if you have any more issues with strange rendering, with as much detail as you can to help us reproduce your issue. Logs, hardware, operating system and settings used would be a good start.

There is one known caveat to this – Windows High DPI rendering mode can cause the game to be cut off in fullscreen mode. The only fix at the moment is to instruct windows not to apply DPI scaling to KAG by right-clicking KAG.exe in your KAG directory, selecting properties, and disabling scaling in the compatibility tab, like in the screenshot below.

We’re looking into possible fixes from our side, but our build infrastructure and other compatibility concerns mean this will take a little more time than an afternoon.

Have Fun!
Max

KAG Build 1711 – Hotfix and Accumulated Changes

24 December, 2015 Geti

Hey Everyone!

Sorry about the server outages – turns out some of the holiday code was left in an unfinished state and as the day rolled around the servers started trying to load code that wasn’t there. This build fixes that issue as well as including all the accumulated changes since last build.

Overview of changes:

Ladders crashing/lagging server bug should be fixed, but needs proper testing.
Mines only ignore shields within the immediate area – so if you’re shielding and a team-mate steps on it, you can survive.
Trampolines spawned from map can no longer be picked up
Mine has slightly increased priming time
Many scripts standardised to use SetDamageToCarrier
Fixed “clbutt” issue with noswears
Coins from damage are capped at full health, so the overkill weapons dont give extra money.
Fixed Name Hover Offset in TDM

Sorry for the haphazard presentation of this build, we weren’t planning on making a release so soon but the crash issue has made it necessary. Thank you for bearing with us through this.

We’ll be checking the build’s stability as much as we can but most of THD is out of the office over the new year period. Let us know on the forums if you continue to have issues and we’ll deal with it as soon as possible.

Have Fun!
Max

Weekly Log – Hectic Month!

11 December, 2015 Geti

Hey everyone! Tis the season and all that, so we’ve been run off our feet with both work and personal life. Progress on Trench Run has been consistent though, and there’s a KAG build in the works as well. Sorry for the wait between posts!

General News:
Michal spent the last two weeks not working on Trench Run all that much because another game needed his attention. He’ll be working more on Trench Run in the weeks leading up to the new year. Max is having computer troubles and spent all of today migrating to an interim machine, but has made good headway on a lot of Trench Run features in the meantime.

Trench Run News:
After a less than inspiring turnout for the 2nd free preview, we’ve turned our eyes toward a supporter release. This release will have permanent servers and no time limit, but will require a payment to access. After that’s out the door and any (all?) issues are resolved, we’ll continue with free preview cycles.

The supporter release will be the first public release of a lobby with real content, including a bar, band, and coins to win from the games to spend. Depending on what sort of population we see, we may split each region into multiple lobbies. If the population remains modest, we’ll stick with one lobby per region to avoid splitting up players too much.

This week we got a heap of the lobby stuff working, including getting drunk (see the vine above). This will serve as a way for players to handicap themselves when playing with less skilled players, and in some cases to induce motion sickness.

King Arthur’s Gold News:
Verra and Skinney are both working towards a new version of KAG, but as they’re part time workers and it’s the holiday season, progress has been slower than usual.

Coming next build are much-requested changes such as mines not hitting through shields for anyone not touching the mine, fixes for ladders lagging servers to hell and back in certain circumstances, coin payment fixes involving overkill, and an end to the notorious “clbutt” when using the swear filter.

Have Fun!
Max/Geti

Trench Run Free Preview 2!

27 November, 2015 Geti

Hey everyone!

The next Trench Run Free Preview is here, this time for one weekend only – servers go down Monday 4pm UTC!

For this preview weekend the servers are hosted in EU. We weren’t able to get the backend set up on the USA box in time, sorry about that!

Changes since last time:

More Servers! 2 skirmish and 3 run servers for dramatically increased capacity. Tell your friends!
New Backgrounds and some colour tweaks.
New Run Maps with a more easily defended “finish line” and simpler terrain. This means there should be much fewer run-by wins.
Changes to Skirmish Maps.
Run renders the distance for both teams (if its 150m or less) so you can see who’s winning the race.
Experimental Commando Changes:
- Spamming slash slows your movement speed to make more tactical stabbing required.
- Flashbang is a small area instead, and you have 3 uses.
Experimental Medic Changes:
- Medic drops combined supply + medkit rather than healing with touch.
- Medic gets one supply per 5 seconds
Experimental Engineer Changes:
- Crates are thrown in a straight line when moving rather than an arc.
- Can jump off the rocket.
Lots of minor bugs fixed!

Known Issues:

Chat still sucks – we haven’t had time to get the 10-way chat system up yet, but its top of our priorities for next time around.
Medic GUI sucks 🙂
Medic Resupply seems buggy and has problems with healing the enemy
Commando Flash is less useful – we’re considering a proper flash grenade if the area-flash is going to stay.
Commando Flash is visible at end of round temporarily.
Engineer Rocket is still “Laggier than your mother” – we’re working on a new firing system to make it lag-agnostic but it didn’t make it for this release, sorry!
Engineer Crates still suck – we’re looking for good alternate abilitites. I’ll tell you about our plans soon to get your feedback.

Preorders:

We’ll be putting up preorders once we have a supporter version ready for consistent play. We dont want to sell the game before we’ve settled 100% on a price and can offer something in return for the money – we’re still not 100% that this will all work at a larger scale.
If you want to support us, there are some things you can do other than buying the game!
- sharing the game on social media
- getting cool gifs and screenshots for us to share
- reporting bugs
- getting excited!
That should keep you busy until we can get something more permanent into your hot little hands. Lets just say we’d love to make it a Trench Run Xmas!

That’s it! Get your friends on board and see how those servers hold up!

Cheers,
Max and Michał

Trench Run – Free Preview Build Available!

13 November, 2015 Geti

Hey everyone! You can download the online preview release of trench run here!

This preview is in the EU region – there will be preview weeks in US and AU regions in future, but for this week we’re afraid most will have to deal with some lag. Pick the more ping-friendly classes: assault, medic, and commando.

Bring your friends or make new ones in the lobby!

Unfinished content:

Menus, GUI, and Settings
The menus and gui are a placeholder currently, and a lot of settings (most importantly your name on start) dont save themselves. This will be addressed in future versions, however the number of options is likely to remain very minimal in any future preview releases.
Engineer
The engineer in general leaves a lot to be desired. The rocket riding is fun but causes issues with hit registration a lot of the time. The rocket itself desyncs a lot. And the crates need a total rethink. In short, expect a lot of changes to the engineer.
Medic
The overall design of the medic class (defend, resupply and heal – hard support) is good, particularly when teaching someone else the game – but the GUI and presentation in general needs some love.
AI
The AI is borderline drunk in many cases. You’ll want a human 5v5 for best experience (though 2 players can still have a fun skirmish)
Maps
The current maps are just a single example of the kind of map we have planned for each biome. There will be multiple maps per biome, eventually.
Chat
The chat system is an interim measure just to get anything at all in there (the KAG chat doesn’t work, there’s not enough screen real estate). It will be replaced with a system based on the faces that appear at the start of a Run game.

Stuff that’ll only be in supporter releases:

booze, cards, live band, and other lobby distractions
character skins
persistent coins
multiple lobby tiers
proper coverage of AU, US, EU regions
offline play

Known issues: (incomplete list, but this is the major stuff)

settings not saved (will be dealt with asap)
rendering tearing/glitching
pixel stretching when on non-default resolution
engineer rockets desync and sometimes dont do damage
clipping into walls with crates or rockets or very high speed from explosions causes problems
possible to double-up classes in run with some latency on join
sniper trail renders through tiles that it destroyed (with lag)
players sometimes desync dead (looks alive, but moves “glitchy” and is dead on their screen)
some sync errors in the lobby resulting in “weird” games – please report any exact circumstances you can find

Have fun!

Max & Michał

Weekly News – TR Preview Build Coming!

9 November, 2015 Geti

These last few weeks we’ve thought long and hard about the future of Trench Run.

We want to get a public build released as soon as possible. However, we want to stay away from the “open alpha” preview style that we used for KAG and the division in the community that that caused.

In effect, we want to dodge a messy fate.

Instead, we’re planning a free, time-limited preview build. The build will only work for set periods, but you can play as much as you like during those periods. During initial testing, we’d be opening it for a week at a time. After release, probably one weekend each month or fortnight.

We’re still hammering out the details and hitting implementation hurdles. The plan was to release it last Wednesday, but each release candidate has had too many issues upon entering testing. We’ll see how it goes this week and keep you posted.

There is no single player mode available in the preview build. The preview build is only able to connect to one “test” region. The test lobby is capable of both “skirmish” and “run” games. The preview build will replace the current demo build, and will patch over it. It will (hopefully!) form a much more PC-relevant, online look at how the game plays, and we’re looking forward to sharing it with you!

Stay tuned!

Max

Weekly News – KAG Update for Halloween

30 October, 2015 Geti

Hey guys, trying to keep up the rhythm of the weekly updates! Let’s get to it!

Trench Run News:

We’ve got some big news about the future of Trench Run, but we’ll save it for next week. This week has been huge for KAG, so I won’t steal their thunder!

King Arthur’s Gold News:

This next patch coming is a double-whammy of requested features and fixes and halloween spookiness. This is probably the biggest release largely handled by the interns, so please, give them your support!

We had a lot of laughs testing out the spooky event features!

Verra has merged in a plethora of modding and server hosting enhancements.

Fixed the infamous “infinite mod redownloading” bug
Render account avatars in-game
Lots of AngelScript error improvements (errors in #includes output correctly, lines matched to errors correctly)
Memory leaks and file handle leaks investigated + fixed where possible.
Limited the size of the backlog kept in console (very important for stability of long-running servers)
Removed the printout of blob creation (-> drastically reduced log size)

Other miscellaneous fixes and extensions to the engine include:

Sound volume getting set 100% all the time
Music “bursting” at the start of each track
primitive character name tab-complete in the chat box
extended TCPR functionality

Skinney and Verra have worked together on several gameplay changes as well:

Halloween content and a new “holiday” framework for recurring events.
Trampolines now cannot be folded, have a “reset time” before they can bounce something else, and work while held.
Mines do substantially more damage to tiles, ignore shields, and can be converted between teams if you pick them up before they deploy.
Arrows do not collide with other projectiles.
Spawning issues in CTF are mostly fixed, including spawn timers resetting and spawning at contested points.

As always, these changes are not final or inflexible, but we’d like you to give them a good thorough play before giving any feedback.

Full Changelog:

[modified] scoreboard name color
[modified] Holiday.as, increased holiday length of all holidays
			to 3 days (one day either side).
[added] gregs, and necromancer tricks.
[updated] madracoon head
[fixed] builder placing blocks will inventory open.
[added] spooky ghosts.
[fixed] another case for spawning on converting vehicles.
[added] Mine icon to kill feed
[modified] Arrow.as, arrows don't collide with other projectiles
[modified] mine; blob_damage(+0.5), map_radius(+8.0),
			damage ignores shields, can be picked up by
			enemies while not primed (changes team and owner)
[added] new common script, GenericDestruction.as
[updated] CTFShops to use new script, GenericDestruction.as
[fixed] spawning at old spawn if under raid.
[modified] repsawns menu closing after one click.
[modified] respawn menu locks with under 2 seconds to spawn.
[fixed] type missmatch in ctf gui
[modified] trampolines now setVelocity to a flat value
[fixed] path resolution for interactions icons on linux.
[added] server browser minimaps
[fixed] infinite redownloading bug.
[fixed] swapping to spectator messing with votekicks
[fixed] sound getting set 100% all the time
[added] primitive tab complete to chat console
			uses usernames of all connected players (as lowercase)
[fixed] music is too loud for a split second on starting
[fixed] interaction icon path resolution on linux.
[added] player avatar image access
[added] CDriver::hasShaders for testing if you should bother
			doing shader related stuff (or avoiding doing stuff
			that relys on them to look good)
[added] tcpr() function to print just to tcpr (with optional
			debug stuff to print it too) to control bandwidth
[script][added] bool GUI::hasIconName( string iconName )
[fixed] File lock causes assert if applog hasn't been initialized.
[modifed] added library linking to nolauncher/forceupdate/runlocalhost
			for linux clients.
[modified] filelock to have an option to turn off error reporting.
[script][modified] default scoreboard doesnt render if script scoreboard used
[fixed] file permissions issue.
[fixed] Mods folder path.

Have Fun!

Max

Weekly Update – Trench Run at PGA and General KAG Dev

23 October, 2015 Geti

Hey guys, sorry for the delay between posts – it’s been a hectic couple of weeks!

Trench Run News:

These last two weeks we’ve been very busy on expo versions of TR and on getting the new art finalised. Poznan Game Arena was great fun, with the THD booth heavily featuring Trench Run. This is the first event where we’ve shown the new graphics, and we’re happy with how they were received. People kept coming back to play more, but lots of people thought we should release it on a console. Maybe in the future we will 🙂 Butcher was also shown and lots of players had fun meating people!

The music also got stuck in everyone’s head, which is always a good sign!

PGA was a time for the polish branch of THD to touch base with friends, meet fans, host a TR tournament, wear flowers, and hit the dancefloor flying!

This week we’ll be getting back to finishing off some remaining unchanged graphics (stuff that isn’t used in skirmish) and refining the menus. We’ll get some more screenshots your way soon!

King Arthur’s Gold News:

Verra has been working on an attack/defense mod. You can see a longer video of a match here and discuss the mod here. Give it a look and get some feedback going his way!

New mode, same old chaos!

Skinney has been working more on the editor, as well as changes to trampolines. The trampoline changes allow more front-line use as they can be bounced on while carried, removes folding the trampolines, and prevents bouncing through the back of the trampoline. In particular, some of these changes will curb the effectiveness of trampoline cannons. Currently, trampoline cannons allow savvy builders to launch their team over the entire map in a way that’s very hard to counter.

Keep in mind that this is an experimental change, but we are fairly committed to changing this part of the meta-game. It’s a hard decision to make because we’re always happen when we see this kind of “KAG engineering”… However, when something like this settles as the winning dominant strategy, we feel something needs to be done.

That’s all for this week – looking forward to getting back to a normal news schedule over the next month. Stay tuned!

The Study of Humans at Poznań Game Arena Event

21 October, 2015 smk

[report 0x00000001]
[topic: the study of humans at poznań game arena event]
[authors: 0x00002e56, 0x00002e59, 0x00002e5A]

QUESTION:
We are studying the strong and weak points of human neurology to make their eradication more efficient. Our point of interest is the minimal complexity of lock systems needed to successfully encage most humans and the reliability of our test items designed to help assign lock level to a particular human mind.

FINAL CONCLUSION:
Based on our results below, it seems that all we need to encage most humans is a door opened elsewhere.

Weekly News – TR Art, Another Expo, and KAG UI

5 October, 2015 admin

Hey everyone, another busy couple of weeks both past and future!

Trench Run News:

Michal had a blast showing the game at Pixel Heaven! We won the “Best Multiplayer” Award and got to see lots of smiles and hear lots of laughter. Butcher was also shown, and was very popular with the more bloodthirsty fans!

Last week the first pass of environment art and effects got finalised. I also got custom palettes for each biome under way. These palettes give each area a unique feel by changing the colours. The Trenches are a brown, dusty wasteland; the Desert is bright and hot; the Forest is green and full of wet vegetation. Each of the 7 biomes has its own unique palette and soundtrack!

A sneak-peek at some of the palettes so far.

This week I’m getting to work on animations for the classes. I’m starting with the assault, but hope to have all five classes fully animated by the end of the week.

Some of the new animations for the assault class.

The following week will be polishing up the art ready to show again! We’ll be showing Trench Run at Poznan Game Arena From 16-18th October. If you’re in the area go say hi to MM, see the new graphics in action, and collect some loot! We’ve got lovely little badges of each class just waiting to brighten your bag.

KAG News:

Verra and Norill worked together on the new menus, and features for a new scoreboard. The new scoreboard shows player “cards” including the user’s forum avatar and role – so it’s clear if they’re an admin or developer. The cards may also show cumulative kills/deaths for that server in the future.

That’s all for this week, have fun!

Max