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WAR Mode, Full KAG and the fairly immediate future

What a mouthful.

People have been asking exactly what War mode is going to consist of as well as when this next update is coming out, asking for things like fire and boats. You’ll be getting fire and boats but you’ll also be getting a lot more.

Here’s an overview of what a War Mode map will look like, at this point.

Apologies for my handwriting 🙂

As you can see, the map is quite a bit more structured than the CTF maps are at the moment, with resources spread around the map in a more deliberate manner. The point of war is to help structure the game into something compatible with the playing style of most people.

War mode will contain:

• Home port for buying/selling materials
• No coins out of thin air (so the economy actually makes sense)
• Simple class progression (need to contribute to building to be able to swap early game)
• Farming for food -> spawns (means minecrafting is acceptable and benefits the team)
• Boats (allows water assaults and passing deep water)
• Fire (for burninating the peasants/countryside/flaxroofcottages)
• Tech Research (so you can’t just rush at the start of the game with all this new stuff)
• More Siege Engines (ballista, battering ram, canopy)
• No 10 minutes of spawning into enemy fire (home port dies, game over)

We won’t have time to polish the other modes to work with the new code, so we’re trying to make it encompass the majority of KAG as it stands, with a little more structure. There will still be TDM and a CTF without flags on spawn, but they might not be as complete as we’d like upon release.

We’ve been splitting all of the engine functionality up into nice, manageable components and ripping out all the hardcoded logic for the past month. This means that there’s no flag by default, the engine doesn’t know what bombs are at compile time, and movement code is all external.

As such, the whole game is basically being recoded, with some things left out or reworked, and a lot of entirely new things going in. It’s really an entirely new game.

Here’s a screenshot of how a knight standing in the trees now looks: NOTE THAT THE TREES THEMSELVES ARE A WORK IN PROGRESS art-wise.

We’re actually on the fence as to whether we call this next release “King Arthur’s Gold” since it’s so far removed from the classic game. We’ll definitely be splitting the game into Classic and Full Version though, and everyone who’s paid for the game will obviously retain access to the game. We just feel that there may be some confused people coming back to the game, but I guess that’s life.

There are two more pieces of good news behind all of this rework:

1. I get to eliminate all of the old, very strange bugs by starting with fresh code 🙂
2. You get to use the same tools we do to make fully networked mods.

Yes, this does mean you can make bisoncopters. I don’t think many people will be holding that against us though.

More info and screenshots as we have them 🙂

Discussion here

Max/Geti

Build 507 changelog

Sorry about the delay – seems we had a bit of a miscommunication about who was going to post what.

This is my best attempt at a changelog – once Geti is back online he can fill in the bits I’m missing.

Changelog:

• [#708] Fixed username bans not working
• Autobalance is back, now with three new vars to control it:
  • do_ingame_autobalance – should the teams be balanced other than on join?
  • autobalance_tolerance – the tolerance of the autobalance
    
  • red_team_size_ratio – how much larger red team is meant to be

• support_factor variable added, scales how far all blocks can go horizontally (default is 24) – I’ll be adding more variables to control this per-block but it lets you allow some skybridging if that’s your thing.
  

Hotfix build 507

Hi all, 

Build 507 is out with some bugfixes and small changes.  Shadlington pushed it out just before going to bed or leaving for the day, I’ll get him to post here with a changelog tomorrow.

Note: There was an issue with the autoupdate system, but it is fixed now.  All server owners and players should restart KAG to pick up this update.  This is why any clients on mac and linux updated, but saw no servers (meanwhile servers and windows clients had no idea a patch was out).  This is because we recently moved all of our sites and systems to new servers: from one aging server to 4 new ones (much much faster, we can handle many more players and more growth now).  I’ll be posting about that project soon.

Ryan (FliesLikeABrick)

Patches today (B489)

Fixes!

• Fixed Solo not working
• (hopefully) fixed #700 zombies not working
• Fixed Flag “passing” to people

The RTDM maps have also been updated – SERVER OWNERS BE CAREFUL IF YOU WANT TO KEEP THE OLDER MAPS OR YOUR MAPYCYCLE IF YOU’RE RUNNING FROM /BASE/RULES/RTDMMAPCYCLE.CFG!

Enjoy, apologies for the solo issues!

Max/Geti

Quick Fixes for Classic B488

We’ve been taking note of complaints from the community Re: classic gameplay, especially with regards to bomb jumping and shield bashing. I totally agree that some of the raw fun of the game has been lost due to balancing concerns without the option to players to bring them back.

There are now some variables in gamemode.cfg that allow some more nostalgic, fun mechanics to be reintroduced, like double-gliding bombjumps across the map and knight combat without shieldbashing.

These variables are:

• can_shieldbash – exactly what it says on the tin (defaults to off)
• can_glide_when_bombjumping – similarly, allows much further bombjumps (defaults to off)
• bomb_jump_scale – scales the force of a bombjump. (defaults to 1.0)

Shieldbashing off by default is something we’re looking into – we realise that it makes shielding feel very weak but we also don’t want the current “surf to win” mentality that plagues RTDM to be a thing. Understand that with the engine behind classic, this is a very hard issue to solve since players locations cannot be 100% synced due to latency, -> someone colliding with you on your screen might not be on their screen, or on the server.

We’re looking into how we actually want to solve this but it’s not a priority compared to getting the full game complete, sadly. We figure with the option there, server owners can cater to people who do and don’t like bashing.

This release also has a fix to the dreaded “rcon crash” many people have been reporting – because of the nature of the crash it has been very hard to track down exactly what’s going wrong and to provide a fix, but thankfully we’ve been able to. Many thanks to Tom/Shad for his focus on this.

Ryan/FLAB has got some new hardware up and running which will help us manage increased loads now and in the future, a worthy investment.

Michal and I have been working furiously on getting more scripting progress done and have got physics more properly integrated, done some optimisation and started properly defining the entities. Work has been done on actor-actor interaction, forming joints between objects and improving the performance of structures.

We’ll keep you posted, hopefully with some pictures soon 😉

Discuss this here

Max/Geti

Scripting Progress and Massive Rewrites.

That basically sums up the past few weeks. We’ve started moving literally all of the old content to scripted entities, which has required us to be pragmatic and basically wipe all the old hardcoded things. Every time we’ve come across something that needs to be done better, we’ve rewritten it. This has lead to many, many positive changes and a hell of a lot of work.

First of all, attacking is now fully directional, scripted, and a little less buggy (though I’m sure lag will help keep everyone angry about it). This means that your knights can now chop upwards, downwards and to the side, as well as slash in an arc.

Second of all, all classes have been moved to scripts. This makes it significantly easier to tweak how they work (both for us and for modders) but has also taken a lot of work, since the old “runner” code basically made KAG happen – all of the building code, emoticon code, hud code, attacking code (and so on) was in there. That was very rigid, but fairly simple to work with for us.

All the basic classes are drafted and “semi-working”, though there’s a little more to be done before we can even begin larger-scale testing, but they’re all working with team colours, animations, and layers.

Here they are decked out in drab grey, all ready for painting. Note the archer’s arm accurately reflecting its aim angle.

Sprite layers also let us piece together slightly more complicated sprites from various pieces, for example, the catapult’s arm and wheels can be separate layers, like so:

Workshops are also naturally fully scripted. The bank allows you to take out a loan if you’re low on coins, or deposit money for safekeeping.

Tom is now working on documentation for the scripting API, and Ryan has bought several new machines for our infrastructure to future proof against traffic spikes and help balance the load.

More previews coming as we build more content 🙂

Discuss these developments on the forums here!

Max/Geti

What it’s like to play a game as a Developer.

Unfortunately 😉

If you see us ingame, say hi, don’t spitroast us with questions.

(Source)

Blog post with actual news soon, just have to collate screenshots and changes (and fix a bug with sprite layers on actors…)

Max/Geti

New Installers/Packages

New installers/packages for Mac/Windows/Linux are now present on the download page.  We have been wanting to update them for a while, but technically nothing was broken and we had higher priority matters to worry about.  The main reason for updating these is to reduce the number of updates that new players need endure as well as changing one or two default config values.

If you have any problems with the installers, please PM me on the forums or e-mail support (support at thd dot vg).

Unrelated, there may be one or two more hotfixes out throughout the day today.  You can find details on those in the 469 release thread on the forums.

-FliesLikeABrick