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Short update on the Beta + screenshots

1. We are working like mad people on the beta nearly everyday
2. We aren’t posting any news because we are elbows deep in internal testing, so everyone that is testing is in the news loop (we neglected the public blog, but this will change when the official beta release happens)
3. The game has undergone ~4 massive gameplay re-iterations over the last 2 months. We are striving to make this the most fun, engaging and balanced multiplayer war game ever made.
4. I think we achieved this, that’s why I’m confident to post that we are there and the public release will happen this month or next month at most.
5. Here are some screenshots (no time for videos because I’m making an official beta launch trailer video which will show how epic this game is)

+ sneakpeak of the official press kit screenshots

• https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6397016/KAG1.png
• https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6397016/KAG2.png

KAG Beta requires you to buy the game to play. So if you haven’t done that already do it now here before the noob rush when the game becomes official and arrives on Steam 🙂

 http://kag2d.com/en/buy

It’s just 10 bucks and an infinite amount of fun + you can unlock it later on Steam.

MM

ARENA Open: SUMMER

Ej is currently hosting a 64 player, open qualifier tournament for the ARENA Open Finals.

If you aren’t familiar with the format at all:
It is going to be a 1v1 knight tournament with:
-vanilla combat
-1 bomb for every knight
-premade maps

Main changes from last time:
-64 slots
-Everybody, from anywhere in the world is allowed to participate.
-It’s going to take 2 days instead of 1

If you’re a tough knight and want to strut your stuff on the world stage, check out the thread HERE

KAG Radio starts this weekend!

A community run radio podcast is starting this weekend!

KAG Radio is a community-run Radio for you, offering diverse music every day, talk shows and interviews that include various community members, and events (giveaways, competitions and games)! Tune in tomorrow afternoon (U.K Time) at our website http://radio.kag2d.nl for the premiere of the Radio where we’ll talk about the Beta and current KAG news!

Make sure to tune in for some community fun!

Once again, the site is http://radio.kag2d.nl

Forum discussion here: https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/kag-radio-music-talks-events.13962/

Max/Geti

Take that, CPU Usage and Bandwidth!

We’ve been optimising our arses off for the past month or so leading up to release, and the good news is, it’s been successful!

We’re currently on the fence with regards to the JIT compiler, we got it working but it has two side effects: code ran slightly differently, meaning subtle, hard to find bugs were introduced to all scripts; and it C++11 support was required, meaning anyone on old debian or centos would be out of luck running the new game without patching their libstdc++ manually. We’re currently running without it but keeping it as an option in the future if we really need to squeeze more performance out – for the moment it’s looking like we wont need to though!

With all the fancy new stuff KAG beta does, it starts at ~8% CPU usage (mid range dedi box) for 1 player (0.1% for zero players because the game gets completely paused with a new serverside option).

Now, that might sound like bad news; fortunately, it scales really, really well with the number of players (performance is contingent more on the number of complicated objects in the game now, rather than number of players), with our server pushing ~10% CPU for 4v4 (about 0.25% increase per player).

This is largely due to a massive netcode rewrite that’s still partially underway. We’ve learned a lot about networking this kind of game over the past few years, and the way we were doing it initially (based on the quake 3 model) isn’t optimal for a game with a large number of objects – it’s fine for classic where the majority of objects are players, but in the beta the number of game objects is easily into the hundreds, with trees, bushes, inventory items… As such it has been almost completely gutted out.

Long story short, bandwidth up and down per player at 1kBs up, 3kBs down (client end, for 8 players), compared to before the rewrite 2kBs up and 70 kBs down. This means KAG beta outperforms KAG classic in bandwidth utilisation, even though there’s a lot more going on!

We’ve still got to sort out some desync and disconnection issues, as is to be expected with a large network rewrite, but it’s gone very smoothly so far.

We’re going to be crunching all weekend to see whether we can get something together for a semi-public release (hint: watch the forums) because all the major technical hurdles have been stomped, there’s just gameplay issues to iron out now 🙂

Max/Geti

Guards vs The World ON NOW

The Third Guards vs The World event is about to start, join the server in the next few hours for some high class fun!