FROM THE BLOG

Build 926 – Story behind the Build

It seems every game of KAG I play recently I have the same 3 nags :^)

• “pls geti add mor heads 4 me and i luv u
• "OMG I FELL THROUGH FLOOR!!! GETI FIX”
• “geti pls fix votekick its still broken plsssss”

Here’s the meaning behind these, and how I’ve addressed them this build:

• Even though each head is just 16×16 pixels with no gameplay benefit, apparently that means 16×16 pixels of joy to a lot of people. There are 6 new heads and the heads list has been rearranged to group them a little more sensibly. The new heads are Bomberman, a new “cut up” zombie head, a wounded knight from a distant land, a dubstep music man, as well as two new male hairs, female versions of the bandana and headband heads. A lot of heads have also been updated (check out the samurai head).
  Also: there’s a free slot in the menu just waiting for one last head before the steam release to be slotted in, if you see me ingame feel free to suggest something cool, as long as you get back to the game immediately afterwards ;^)
• We’ve had a look at two things that might be causing the physics bugs – if it’s one of them, there’ll be spam in the console about a limit being exceeded every time it happens, please pass that on to us if that is the case. If it’s the other, it should be fixed or happen much less frequently. Either way, one step closer to less weirdness and more focusing on the game – report back in the thread with any changes noted. The fix that has been performed is likely to slightly degrade performance, but we can’t have such strange bugs just in the name of the game running quickly.
• Votekick has been recoded entirely in scripts, check out the scripts for information on how to bind new buttons into the main menu (!!!) and how to kick players from inside a script (it’s as easy as a single function call!). You can now vote with just a quick click, and it should be a little more risky to abuse since if your vote fails you will be kicked out of the game. Vote next map has also moved to this new system as a simple example of fairly modular code – this means modded servers can use this system to make votes for anything they please – you could have a vote everyone turns into chickens if you really wanted! None of the legacy code should have any affect any more, if it does, please report it as a bug.

Hopefully this addresses those three main concerns directly and sufficiently; we’ll be looking into the next emerging concerns soon of course! (I expect performance to be the major one, sadly)

Other notable changes this build:

• Chicken colour in map changed to hex 8d2614 – if you have custom maps with chickens, please double check you update them correctly or there’ll be some red doors there :^)
• Can change your name – currently, only with /cl_name in the console. This is to facilitate the name changing feature in steam, we’ll have to figure out rules for abuse.
• Platforms and doors have rotated versions available in png loaders now, for those intricately complex maps you’ve always dreamed of.
• Script exceptions will not crash the game any more – they will show up in the console for debugging, but the script will be disabled and the engine will keep on trucking, resulting in “something weird” in game if something bad happens instead of KAG locking up.
• Steam integration starting to be visible/causing issues, haha. The steam API stuff should be off unless you run the game with “steam” command line parameter (including overlay, etc) but some of it may not be checked properly, be sure to report any issues with this!
• Lots of fixes, as always!

MM and Shadlington and FliesLikeABrick have all been working through the weekend and all this week on the steam stuff, it’s looking very close to ready, so that’s exciting. I’ll get MM to post more news as he has it since he’ll be better informed on exactly what’s going on than me.

Full Changelog in the previous post.

Max/Geti