Blog

Bye bye Disqus!

As good as Disqus is for quick blog comments, we’ve decided to detach it from the devlog.

We’ve decided that we want to cut down on the number of accounts that you guys need to maintain, therefore we’ll be moving discussion of the devlog posts to the forum announcements section from now on.

We’ll be setting up a bot to crosspost from tumblr to the forums soon and potentially auto-link into the devlog post, but in the mean-time we’ll be setting up the links manually, so expect some delay in the posts getting across – If we’re taking far too long feel free to make the copypaste yourself, forum staff 😉

Forum thread here.

Help out on the Wiki!

Are you an experienced KAG player with a bunch of free time and a drive to help new players learn the game?

kagwiki.com needs more love!

Hit up this thread for pages that need updating and to learn the system that everyone’s using, then either click here (or join quakenet’s #kag.wiki if you’re IRC savvy) to get organised and start putting together some quality knowledge!

The wiki (and hopefully the ability to edit it) will soon be accessible from inside the game so it’s important that it’s in tip top shape before then but we can’t get it in shape without you guys! It’d be great to see more people lending a hand there, so hop to it!

Geti

Main Menus overhaul

This has been something that I have been postponing for a long time and there never is a good time to do it. Well now it is because I think the benefits are worth it. I am completely redoing the main menus as well as the auto-update launcher.

Players on Linux and Mac OSX don’t see the autoupdate in the black console that’s why the next version will have a nice graphical interface. (btw. haven’t yet found the reason for the crashes on OSX, working on it…)

Main menus will be completely new, much more intuitive and easy to use. There will be a couple nice things added like a “Quick Join” button if you don’t want to bother with the server browser and just quickly join the estimated best server.

These changes should be ready for next week.

MM

Some Changes to run by the Community regarding Builders and Bridges

So you know that point in the game where you’ve just got your tower repaired from the last wave of enemies, cleared away any mess and you’re back inside? I can’t think of anything that ruins that more than spammy enemy builders.

I’ve just come out of a game where we spent 40 minutes or so repeatedly clearing drawbridges and ladders from our base, only to have an enemy builder come back and spam another 10 or so before getting killed. It’d then take us time to clear those ones out again by which point the builder would be back, spamming bridges at our wall.

Now, this doesn’t strike me as fun. At all.

As such, a few proposed changes:

• Builders would only build while standing still (ie on solid ground, not pressing any buttons, not getting attacked) – this means no more jump building, no more spamming stones while running away in tunnels, etc. Ladder or bridge scaffolding would probably be more or less necessary to build a big castle or even a tall wall.
• To compensate for castles being harder to build, the builder’s construction radius would be larger, perhaps almost double what it is now. Ideally you’d be able to build quarters and a roof for it without having to move.
• Constructed Blocks would no longer get support from background dirt, only natural blocks would – this means castles in caves can fall down if they aren’t held together with background stone walls like outside. Basically, tiles underground would work the same way tiles overground do. The background dirt would just prevent overhangs of dirt from falling down.

I think this will make battles involving builders far less frustrating, and will make structures underground far less overpowered, as well as drawbridge- and ladder-spamming being less effective because the builder in question will have to actually be standing still at the bottom of the wall, not jumping at it spastically.

That said, I might have overlooked something, so I figured I’d run it by you before we make the changes. What do you think?

EDIT: A revised #1:

• Builders have to charge up to build (based on the block they were building, ladders would take less time than stone blocks) and have limited movement while charging (much like a knight when charging their slash) (the time taken would be based on a serverside variable so that you can have instant building in some servers).

The build radius would still probably be increased to prevent the need for jump-building.

Geti

KAG Minecraft Art

I thought this was funny enough to repost here (from the forums):

MM

And finally, he’s also done the archer:

Glad to have such a keen community!

Geti

Some updates!

This has been a fairly hectic weekend!

Both days (which aren’t even finished yet, barely beginning in some parts of the US) have seen record traffic with a anywhere between 200 and 1000 logins per hour! This has seen the masterserver throw occasional tantrums and server owners complain of a hard kick in the bandwidth. Cheers to TotalBiscuit for the feature and to all those who’ve bought the full version over the last week!

On that note:

The Aussie servers went down at some point today and it’s still not quite clear what the issue is to me – I knew we were getting close to pushing the bandwidth cap over but I’ve heard tales of memory leak issues and I cant even ssh into the server at all to check, so sorry to any australian players! We’ll try to find a solution over the coming week, but it’d be great to see some fan-run servers pop up in the mean time so we can have some low latency fun.

There’s a guide to hosting a server here for those interested: http://kagwiki.com/wiki/Server

More news coming this week about our plans for the next release. Sadly, we’ve had to put off those undead things again for more pressing matters – getting the game more friendly for new players.

OSX build on the horizon too, had some… enormous bugs that’ve slowed the release.

Geti

Hello new players!

We see a new big wave of new players again. Greetings to all of you! I hope you stay and enjoy the game because I promise you incredible fun times!

The game currently has limited tutorials and no introduction. So if you get right into the game and figure it out congratulations. It’s definitely worth it so give it a try. We’ll be adding new tutorials and single player challenges in the near future (like zombie mode!).

It’s worth reading what this game is about and seeing what you can get when you buy the full version of KAG. It’s a good idea to do it now, since this is a pre-order and you get a 60% discount!

KAG is a work-in-progress. If you run into trouble head on to our friendly forums. You can ask for help or post your own game idea suggestions. The forums use the same account and password as the game so it’s easy!

You can also directly talk with the devs, that is me (MM) and Geti on IRC.
Server: Quakenet
Channel: #kag

You should subscribe to the blog feed or join the KAG FACEBOOK PAGE and come back frequently because we have new updates every week on average!

Master Playing Up

The master server that controls kag2d.com, kagforum logins and the ingame logins is playing up so KAG mightn’t work until we can get it fixed. Sorry for the delay, we’ll get it working again as soon as possible.

Geti

Unfortunately this happens whenever there is a big spike of new players. Master authentication is temporarily turned off. This means you won’t see yourself as a premium player nor guard until this is resolved.

MM

Build 203 released!

A quick patch hopefully solving some most important issues. Also added the long awaited server name on scoreboard and all players have a little class icon next to their names so you can quickly see how much of a given class is in the team already.

Changes build 200-203:

– added server name and address in scoreboard
– added class icons next to player names
– sword strike knockback is half power
– removed semi-stun from hit
– clash doesn’t work on slash
– less stun on fall
– game is not rendered after alt+tab
– unit_count can use floating point variables
– unit_count = 0 – no respawns; unit_count = -1 – unlimited respawns
– added sv_deltacompression variable (set to 0 in dedicated_autoconfig.gm to improve performance at the cost of bandwidth)
– sv_compression temporarily disabled (always true)
– limited CPU usage

MM