Uncategorized

B899 – Fixes and Eased Frustrations

(As a quick side note – Remember that KAG is on sale for $7.49 at the moment before Steam launch!)

This is obviously a fairly minor build, but it eases a few major frustrations people have had, mostly with building and digging.

• Builder can build on top of arrows, corpses and materials
  There may be unexpected side effects to this, but it should be nothing major in normal building, and removes some of the pressure when frontline building – no more clearing arrows or materials out of the way.
• Knights can dig through gold nuggets
  Like all materials though, they mats will be lost for good if dug by a knight – it just means they aren’t stuck if theres some nuggets in the way under a frontline wall.
• Sky less glaring, night less dark
  This is a somewhat minor one, but the sky is a little less glaring white, and night time isn’t completely pitch black. In light of this, a 15 minute day/night cycle has been re-added to vanilla Take the Halls mode. Note that you can change this per-server and per-gamemode in the standard gamemode.cfg, server hosts.

Full changelog:

[fixed] can build on open doors
[fixed] cant build on materials
[fixed] cant build on fired arrows
[modified] knight can dig gold
[modified] knight digging dirt stone takes same hits as digging constructed wood
[added] 6 stone from digging thick stone
[script][added] bind for CMap::isTileThickStone
[added] new sky gradient code - along with darker skyline overall for a little less "neon" and eye strain, and lighter night
[added] 15 minute day night cycle to default tth again
[fixed] archer rope sometimes renders off "to infinity"

Have Fun

Max/Geti

Not (yet) on Steam Sale!

To celebrate the time before we hit the Steam store we are making a 25% off sale for King Arthur’s Gold. This means you can play the new beta version for only 7.49$.

We are also part of a larger sale called Not On Steam Sale.
This is only until next Wednesday so hurry!

This is done by the guys that made recently the excellent racer Race to the Sun.

You can buy a variety of other indie games on that site that aren’t on Steam (yet) which you might not have heard of. So if it’s KAG or some other game spend a few bucks today to support indie devs :).

MM

Build 898 – Fixes, Changes, Balance

This is partly a “hotfix” type build, but also adds a few changes and balance tweaks. There are a few things that probably still need better testing, if there’s anything awry it’ll be patched again tomorrow.

The main changes are

• Kegs are more expensive in CTF but tear through structures doors, blocks, etc very effectively due to a few bugfixes there.
• Fire spreads from doors and platform tiles. This means door cases around the flag are quite a bit less effective, at least with normal wood doors. Kegs are still the ultimate breaching solution though.
• Knights take 3 hits to break wood tiles instead of 2.
  We’ll probably allow breaking other “natural” tiles as well, like gold and maybe thick stone, but with more hits and more feedback for each.
• Archer bow rotates visually to give better indication of charge state. This should help with some of the difficulties people were/are having with the archer.
• Fixed some camera bugs. There are still a few in, they’ll be fixed as soon as we can manage.
• Added a ding when hitting something that cant be damaged. This still needs some more filtering added, there are a couple of outliers like seeds and hearts which still ding cheerfully with every hit. This will of course be patched soon.

Understand that this build is a bit of a work in progress, but we figured that the gains of the fixes and balance tweaks outweighed the rough edges around a few of the changes. That said, there’ll likely be a build 899 tomorrow smoothing the majority of those rough edges.

Max/Geti

A Few Snags with the Patcher, Good Progress Otherwise

Over the weekend, Friday and today we’ve had a sort of a mixed bag of development.

The threaded patcher development has hit some snags – it works fine on my machine but not on MM’s, works fine on windows but not linux dedicated, etc. Because of the “one chance” nature of an autoupdate update, we’re going to hold onto the changes, potentially for another week, to make sure that there’s no-one stuck on an old build or with a buggy patcher. Lucky for you guys, it’s in its own dedicated branch for this exact reason, so it shouldn’t impede any other changes making it out.

In good development news, so far this week:

• MM and Shadlington are working on Steam integration
  Apparently this is going along fairly well, but valve’s API is “quite bad”, especially with regards to documentation. Does this give us an excuse to leave things undocumented? Only time will tell ;^)
• I’m working on balance issues and bugs
  I should be done with a lot of these by tomorrow for a quick, mid week patch. A lot of them have been usability concerns, but some are also straight number tweaks (demolition items more expensive in CTF being the major one there) and routine bugfixes.
• There have been a few “High Level” Map Changes
  Somewhat behind the scenes, but this change to the engine-side pathfinding engine opens up a lot of nice options for us – we’d like to expose the pathfinder more directly to scripts some time soon, probably accessible as a contained object inside each CBrain, potentially as a mod-managed self contained object (like the Noise and Random objects are). This should help with both vanilla and third party AI development.
• The onHitBlob callback was changed/fixed – attn modders
  due to an oversight many months ago, and vanilla code not relying on the “damage” value being correct inside this callback, the damage value inside this callback was the original damage sent by the hitter. It is now the final damage after all modifications have been applied. Something to be wary of, modders.

That’s more or less it since last patch, figured keeping you guys in the loop especially re: the API change was a good idea. More when we have more to tell you.

Max/Geti

B893 – Automatic Mod Downloading

This update introduces automatic mod file downloading from the server you join.

I hope this will show how easy KAG + modding is. Making a mod on your server is really as simple now as:

1. Say you want to add bunnies on your server.
2. Go to this thread and download this bunny rabbit mod by Skinnet from the modding forums.
3. Unpack the bunny into {KAG}/Mods/Bunny
4. Open {KAG}/mods.cfg and add the line Bunny at the bottom of the file
5. Start your dedicated server
6. Wait for people to join (it will autodownload the bunny for them)
7. Spawn bunnies for them with the chat command !bunny

That’s all, I really hope we see some awesome modded servers in a while. 
Be sure to check “Modded” button in the server browser because by default it filters them out (so the game is noob friendly).

Changes 890-893:

[added] automatic mod downloading on join server

[fixed] coin drop sounds

[script][added] MapFlags.as for convenient setting of tilemap flags from script

[fixed] wall run on doors and trap blocks

[fixed] archer continues to grapple after going through tunnel

[modified] smoothened the fixed camera very much

[fixed] bugs with flag base sector not being in the right place 

(doesn't vanish completely any more, but gets much smaller to prevent "flag cases" from being really hard to break)

[fixed] doors and trap doors wall running

[fixed] idle server pausing broken

What’s next?

Challenges? check

CTF? check

What are we working on next?

Of course:

• tweaking gameplay
• fixing bugs
• making the game run faster
• adding new maps
  

But you know us? We have fire in our bellies and can’t just stop. The major things you should expect this week are:

• Mod downloading
  This means any mod used by the server in the Mods folder and specified in mods.cfg will be automatically downloaded for everyone on joining the server. Awesome! We are doing this in a no bullshit manner. I’m just providing file download functionality and the rest is handled by you, humble server owners, mod makers and players.
• Faster patcher
  We all know autoupdating is too god damn slooow. Geti fixed this by making the patcher threaded. There’s still a bug that needs fixing but should be ready along with mod downloading (which is nearly done, just needs testing)
• Steam integration
  We are heading full force towards the biggest milestone – launching KAG on Steam. Existing players will be able to launch KAG from Steam and automatically login and bind their existing accounts. New Steam customers will be able to join the game in the same manner from Steam without the need of creating an account on kag2d.com
• Steam launch
  This will happen next month.
• Zombies?
  We (main devs) aren’t directly creating this. I can say they are coming along. The sprites are already done by Geti and they look sweet. Zombies should come in some way or the other after the Steam launch.

Have fun!

MM

Hotfix for B890

Just quick fixes without changing the build number. Update your servers please.

[fixed] can select invisible heads

[fixed] princess03 map having wrongly placed end

[fixed] possibly the osx collapse crash

[modified] reduced fall damage by half

[modified] lowered wave respawn in TTH to 8

[added][server] sv_gamemode = TTH switches to WAR automatically

[added] specific crate unpack help
[added] help message for help messages :p

[removed] competetitive/cooperative buttons from servers browser
[added] sorting by player count as default in servers browser

B890 – Tweak-a-doodle-doo!

(I’m not sure what the chicken joke is about)

New build! tl;dr is it fixes a bunch of stuff, runs faster, new heads, should be a bit easier for newbies.

Knights can destroy all solid wood blocks.

Just jab or slash at the blocks. We removed the requirement that the blocks were “cracked” because it seemed to confuse a lot of players. Wood is now quite the liability, get stone structures up where possible.

Potential optimisations to Config File operations, and to the Help Text.

These aren’t 100% complete yet – you if you used to get a lot of lag in the beta, that will hopefully be fixed or decreased with this change – if it still lags for you, we’d appreciate it if you could press F1 to disable help and report to the forums if this does or does not make your game run faster. If it does help, then we’ll put more work into optimising the help interface.

New player experience improvements (thanks Contrary).

These are mainly fixes and tweaks to Princess mode. If you encountered the bug where you couldn’t play the last level it is time to play it again!

Particle optimizations

The particle collisions (mainly used for picking up coins at the moment, may be properly exposed later) are now much, much faster, and completely ignore any non-pickable particles. This means that picking up coins is much faster on both client and server. A bug was identified in the server particle update code as well, and the coin drops are now partly synced (not 100% for bandwidth reasons), so picking up coins from the ground should work, at least most of the time

CTF fixes and improvements

Some of the funnier bugs with CTF are now fixed, like “capturing” the flag with a circular saw. Other issues are on their way to being fixed – wood doors and structures are now more vulnerable, catapult rocks now do some serious damage to stone doors, fire arrows will burn things down with much less of a delay, the flag returns faster when it’s near team-mates, and the messages in the chat console have your name attached to them if you picked up or captured the flag.

New Heads!

7 new heads (more if you count per-gender) have been added to the game. This includes the 2 community choice heads chosen by the community, as well as some miscellaneous heads and the migrant heads.

All in all it’s a bunch of changes that make the game run faster, play better, and hopefully reduce the overall number of bugs. Be sure to report any new bugs on the forums

Changes 886-890:

[modified] more cache friendly particle update
[added] blob gibs have random timeout - means they vanish in sequence rather than all at once.
[added] new base png loader from jackitch
[added] some sync to coins drop
[fixed] minimap outlines
[modified] minimap uses 100% same code for creation and per tile update - fixes consistency issues
[modified] water and fire are overlayed on map, not 100% alpha
[fixed] water and fire minimap sync on net
[fixed] terms of use being tricky
[fixed] config files not saving properly (helps reduction broken)
[added] further optimizations for helps
[added] blinks for helps when they happen
[modified] knights can destroy all wood blocks
[modified] knight can chop through wood door faster
[modified] spikes are destructible by knight
[modified] a bit more aggressive beginner mooks
[added] reintroduced grain from grain plant as edible food
[modified] more respawn time in Princess mode
[added] princess mode: on next map you start as previous class
[modified] archer AI sometimes stops when retreating
[modified] polished the trap level in princess more
[fixed] last level of princess mode not appearing
[fixed] chat text on hover being unreadable
[added] more damage from catapult to stone doors
[fixed] fire arrows not showing in air
[fixed] camera scrolling when mouse of window
[added] kills and scores to challenge
[fixed] time highscores formatting in challenges
[fixed] slam dunk to saw captures (lol)
[added] archer grapple help icon
[fixed] fire arrow teleporting to 0,0 on client when hit door
[modified] tweaks to improve netcode
[fixed] competetive button not pressed from start
[added] chomp sound to shark
[fixed] password appearing way below browser
[added] fire arrow burn time is 5 secs
[added] ctf flag returns faster near teamies
[added] catapult rocks die from too much smashing
[fixed] archer can always get arrows from tent, even if he dies during resupply time
[fixed] archer "drops" an arrow at end of legolas
[fixed] wierd flag doesn't capture bug
[modified] new community maps
[added] 7 new heads

Fan made trailers/videos of KAG Beta

Hey,

Few weeks ago Kouji held a competition. Its aim was to create the best trailer/video of KAG Beta. The winners were announced a week ago and it’s only now that I got some time to make a devlog post about it. 

The rankings were as follows (click on name to see the video):

1. 8x’s Video
2. TheDr’s Video
3. Crabmaster’s Video

Congratulations to all the winners and big thanks to all the participants. We hope to see more amazing videos like those listed above. 🙂

Cheers,
Furai/Lucas

A Note about Server Performance

Just wanted to mention about the server performance issues causing slowdown of bombs and similar.

This week we’ll be addressing modding issues where possible and doing and optimisation and bug fix run – no game features and probably not too much balance fiddling.

Reason being that as I’m sure you’ve noticed, 20 player CTF is too taxing on servers. One of the main reasons for this is the coins code – on top of being less than reliable for pickups, it’s also very badly optimised for the new engine with lots of game objects. The config files are also used in a very badly performant way in a few places in the game, which will need to be addressed.

Overall, next week should bring back 32 player games as a possibility for both client and server if we can deal with all the issues in a suitable way. We’ll also be fixing any glaring issues with CTF in a larger context.

For now, it might be best if server hosts would stick to 16 player CTF games at most to avoid the slowdown bugs.

Enjoy your weekend!
Max/Geti