Blog

The great KAGoween Tournament

Some higher-ups in the community have been working hard to get together a Tournament between 4 of the larger and better known clans – MOLE, YB, BoW, and POWER.

Its a 5v5 fast CTF tournament with rules similar to the Action Servers (vanilla with better bomb jumps), with some extra restrictions on class changes, class numbers and a small number of units.

The action will start today (or tomorrow, depending on where you are), the 27th of October, at 21:00 UST

The games will be streamed and commentated on by WanderMark and Contrary via twitch tv »here«! This will help take the load off the servers that a pile of open spectator slots would create, at the cost of a few seconds of latency for the audience.

There is a forum discussion thread for those that want to smack talk, place wagers on who’s best (actual gambling not endorsed by us in any way, etc etc), here.

If this goes well, WanderMark is confident they’ll be hosting more open and larger contests in the future, with the possibility of gold accounts and of course a dramatic ego “extension”, so be sure to show your support and say you want more of them 🙂

Max/Geti

Dev Peek: Boat and Shop Art and Discussion

Rooms:

We’ve committed to a few large changes for the default setup for rooms.

Firstly, they’re 8×4 tiles in size now.

Secondly, they come in a few subtypes rather than there just being a whole discrete workshop for each task. This lets us ensure construction flow a little more strictly; we’re debating whether tech will be needed for workshop upgrades or not at the moment.

Most of the subtypes will have some default functionality – for example, a carpentry room will always have a carpentry bench and be able to perform basic carpentry stuff, but will require an upgrade to build siege weapons, or boats. An agriculture room will always have a nursery, but may have a larder for storing food/spawns or may have its seed generation output doubled.

The subtypes are:

• agriculture
• barracks
• library
• carpentry
• masonry
• quarters

Most of these are visible below:

Quarters are an exception to this – they’ll come with a bed, and can be claimed by one player. From then on, they’ll act as a spawn for that one unit – this means a team will have to construct infrastructure for its players to have a regular forward spawn point (you’ll be able to spawn back at the home port after ~30s otherwise).

This applies for WAR mode only of course.

Note that because all of this is implemented in the scripting language, server owners can mod it back to the old 3×3 style of shops if they like. We want to structure the game a little more and focus on making one mode work very well rather than trying to make a lot of content work across the board.

Boats:

Here’s the 5 basic boats we’re planning on implementing  (There may be one larger “Galleon” boat but we’re having trouble figuring out how it’d actually get in game being so huge… So we’ll see)

I’m going to drop their (current) names, and you can speculate about their functionality 😉

• Log Raft
• Dinghy
• Arrow Dingy
• Covered Launch
• Support Boat

That’s all for this week, hope you’ve enjoyed the peek 🙂

Discuss here.

Max/Geti

Build 548 – Classic ~Final

Classic Update:

We’re coming up to a very large release of KAG, but in the mean-time theres been a lot of stuff addressed in classic (the current playable iteration of the game) that warrants a new release! There are likely to be a few bugs slipped through the net, but it’s felt very solid the last few test rounds. Be sure to report bugs in the thread and on mantis.

Full Changelog:

• fixed extra spike and gurgle sounds occuring after getting spiked or drowning, then getting hit.
• fixed 120 stone in catapult from bomb bug
• fixed trees leave copies of their top behind when blocks have been placed above them
• fixed lighting is team biased
• fixed attack timer reset upon getting hurt
• bombs now hurt through the holes they make, and through bridges
• all damage goes through bridges now
• fixed “vote next map is actually vote reload map”
• fixed cant attack around corners (tentative fix)
• fixed bottom line of map is empty
• fixed % causes issues in chat window
• REVERTED TO CLASSIC LIGHTING (NO DARKNESS) IN NON-GOLD SERVERS
   
• added no_shadowing boolean in gamemode.cfg (defaults + forced to true in non-gold servers and false in gold servers )
• fixed crash in security if a null player was present

Hopefully the number of fixes is re-assuring to those that seem to think we’re not listening to bug reports – Some of these fixes have been sitting in the repo for a good 30 days now, and were just never pushed by accident 😉

What’s coming next?

We’re working hard on the scripting side of things – combat is coming together again, a lot of things have been re-animated and re-polished, most of the syncing issues have been abated, and the API should be handling multiple games soon, if it isn’t already 🙂

We’ll do another round up of things we’ve been working on and give some more pretty pictures next week, collating that kind of stuff takes too much time for me to set aside at 11:22 PM, heh.

Discussion here

Max/Geti

Cortex Command hit 1.0 on Friday!

Apologies for the plug for those hoping for more dev screenshots, but our friends at Data Realms have finally hit the “full version” milestone for a project that’s spanned over a decade, and I think that’s worth a post.

Cortex Command is a game about brains in bunkers controlling bodies trying to blow up the other brain in a bunker before the other brains bodies perform the reciprocal blowing up. Its physics heavy

There’s an epic launch trailer here but I cant get it to embed in a text post without the tumblr theme blending it for now. Click through if you’re interested!

The game is now available on Steam here, as well as directly from DRL (DRM FREE!) here. It’s just under twenty bucks via both, I think there’s a 10% sale on on steam at the moment though for cheapskates 😉

Give it a try if you like tactical physics sidescroller stuff (or anything with gratuitous gibbing and destructible terrain).

On KAG:

We’ll be trying for weekly teaser posts while you wait, so stay posted. Sharing our news with buddies gives you karma, as always!

Max/Geti

Bringing it All Together

2 Weeks since last update? Better fix that!

This week we’ve worked on siege engines that you can jump into as a driver or passenger, farming grains and on getting combat feeling better and more balanced.

As always it hasn’t come free, as a few days were spent battling and eventually rewriting some fairly fundamental code to allow scripts to sync variables over the internet more or less painlessly – Thanks to Michal for his tireless work on that.

SirSalami’s also been working on Jazzing the site up a little to make sure it’s simple to use for someone who knows nothing about the game. More on that soon as it becomes ready for release or previews (I’ll leave that at his discretion).

The lighting code has been reworked to not be team-biased, less hard edged and to perform better on low-end machines, and classic lighting without shadowing has also been brought back. We’ve decided to make the later option mandatory on non-gold servers because they don’t have lanterns, which makes caves rather un-useful for anything other than blindly tunnelling towards the enemy base. While we realise this might be fun for some, it can still happen in gold servers.

The lighting update will likely make it out to public at some point next week, the huge update is still a few weeks off at absolute earliest though.

Discuss this post HERE

Max/Geti

Build 514: Mute/Ignore

I’ve just pushed build 514.

Its a smallish update, with one main focus: player muting/ignoring.

Muting and ignoring are the same thing – they stop you seeing what a person is saying – with the difference that muting is server-side (muted players have their chat blocked on the entire server) and ignoring is client-side (ignored players only have their chat blocked for you).

This will provide a way of dealing with abusive/spammy players without requiring bans.

More details:

There are menus for both of muting and ignoring, as well as several new rcon commands.

This is linked into seclevs – the feature ‘mute_immunity’ will prevent that player from being muted and ‘ignore_immunity’ will bypass a player’s ignore on that server (so you can stop players ignoring your admins).

You will receive a message that a player who is muted/ignored is speaking, but this will only play a maximum of once every 60 seconds.

You can find the file that contains the mutes/ignores in Security/ignorelist.cfg – its the same file whether its server or client. You can change which file you use in Security/securitysetup.cfg (the ignorelist_file variable).

rcon commands:

• /listmutes – list the players muted on the server
• /mute [name] [minutes] – mute the player for the given time (default is 15 mins, use -1 for permanent).
• /muteid [id] [minutes] – mute the player by id
• /unmute [name] – unmute the player
• /unmuteid [id] – unmute the player by id

The following commands are clientside only (so don’t use /rcon):

• /listignores – list the players you are ignoring
• /ignore [name] [minutes] – ignore the player for the given time (default is 15 mins, use -1 for permanent).
• /ignoreid [id] [minutes] – ignore the player by id
• /unignore [name] – unignore the player
• /unignoreid [id] – unignore the player by id

Other changes:

• Permanban option added to admin menu
• Autoupdate path is now hardcoded
• Changing any server browser filter will exit the ‘beginner’ sort (some people were getting confused why there were so few servers)

Shadlington

Announcing King Arthur’s Gold Single Sign-On and Garanis’ projects

Hey everyone,

While there haven’t been many updates to KAG itself over the past month or two, interesting things are coming on the infrastructure and API side.  Here is one that is nearing completion: King Arthur’s Gold Single Sign-On (SSO).

This is a side project that Teemo has been working on with us, which allows users to safely sign into certain community sites with their King Arthur’s Gold game account.  The site never is given your password, as you are logging into the King Arthur’s Gold servers and giving the 3rd party site a “token” to authenticate you with.

The first community site to make use of this is Garanis’ Server Browser, an awesome project which provides an enhanced server browser (gaining new features every week) and buddy list functionality, by making great use of the King Arthur’s Gold API. 

This post is to let community developers know that this SSO feature will soon be available to any site who wants to use it, and to let the community at large know that it is safe to use this mechanism to log into other sites even though it does not look like something official (yet). 

For users, here is what you need to know: it is safe to log into a site like Garanis’ Server Browser with your KAG account as long as the address in the log in window starts with  https://sso.kag2d.com.

If you are a community developer interested in using KAG SSO in your site, please PM me on the forums and I will work with Teemo to get you set up as soon as possible.  The feature is still in development and when it is officially done and supported I will make another post about it.  Here are the features planned:

• lightweight SSO or OAuth2
• The lightweight SSO will be done first and offer SSO via a redirect to and from our login form on sso.kag2d.com, and an API call to verify the token and retrieve account information
• With the token verification API call, you can have access to the user’s e-mail address (if the user allows it) and other account information (which is already public now, but this saves an API call)
• OAuth2 SSO standard – details on this implementation will come at some point.

We are also planning on supporting API-side buddy lists at some point, but for now there are great tools in the works like Garanis buddy list functionality.

I’ll be trying to post some more over the next week or two about more planned API features and other improvements we are making in the infrastructure that supports KAG, as this next release will really be a hell of a thing.

You can discuss and voice questions/comments/concerns about anything mentioned in this post here on the forums

Ryan/FliesLikeABrick