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Cortex Command hit 1.0 on Friday!

Apologies for the plug for those hoping for more dev screenshots, but our friends at Data Realms have finally hit the “full version” milestone for a project that’s spanned over a decade, and I think that’s worth a post.

Cortex Command is a game about brains in bunkers controlling bodies trying to blow up the other brain in a bunker before the other brains bodies perform the reciprocal blowing up. Its physics heavy

There’s an epic launch trailer here but I cant get it to embed in a text post without the tumblr theme blending it for now. Click through if you’re interested!

The game is now available on Steam here, as well as directly from DRL (DRM FREE!) here. It’s just under twenty bucks via both, I think there’s a 10% sale on on steam at the moment though for cheapskates 😉

Give it a try if you like tactical physics sidescroller stuff (or anything with gratuitous gibbing and destructible terrain).

On KAG:

We’ll be trying for weekly teaser posts while you wait, so stay posted. Sharing our news with buddies gives you karma, as always!

Max/Geti

Bringing it All Together

2 Weeks since last update? Better fix that!

This week we’ve worked on siege engines that you can jump into as a driver or passenger, farming grains and on getting combat feeling better and more balanced.

As always it hasn’t come free, as a few days were spent battling and eventually rewriting some fairly fundamental code to allow scripts to sync variables over the internet more or less painlessly – Thanks to Michal for his tireless work on that.

SirSalami’s also been working on Jazzing the site up a little to make sure it’s simple to use for someone who knows nothing about the game. More on that soon as it becomes ready for release or previews (I’ll leave that at his discretion).

The lighting code has been reworked to not be team-biased, less hard edged and to perform better on low-end machines, and classic lighting without shadowing has also been brought back. We’ve decided to make the later option mandatory on non-gold servers because they don’t have lanterns, which makes caves rather un-useful for anything other than blindly tunnelling towards the enemy base. While we realise this might be fun for some, it can still happen in gold servers.

The lighting update will likely make it out to public at some point next week, the huge update is still a few weeks off at absolute earliest though.

Discuss this post HERE

Max/Geti

Build 514: Mute/Ignore

I’ve just pushed build 514.

Its a smallish update, with one main focus: player muting/ignoring.

Muting and ignoring are the same thing – they stop you seeing what a person is saying – with the difference that muting is server-side (muted players have their chat blocked on the entire server) and ignoring is client-side (ignored players only have their chat blocked for you).

This will provide a way of dealing with abusive/spammy players without requiring bans.

More details:

There are menus for both of muting and ignoring, as well as several new rcon commands.

This is linked into seclevs – the feature ‘mute_immunity’ will prevent that player from being muted and ‘ignore_immunity’ will bypass a player’s ignore on that server (so you can stop players ignoring your admins).

You will receive a message that a player who is muted/ignored is speaking, but this will only play a maximum of once every 60 seconds.

You can find the file that contains the mutes/ignores in Security/ignorelist.cfg – its the same file whether its server or client. You can change which file you use in Security/securitysetup.cfg (the ignorelist_file variable).

rcon commands:

• /listmutes – list the players muted on the server
• /mute [name] [minutes] – mute the player for the given time (default is 15 mins, use -1 for permanent).
• /muteid [id] [minutes] – mute the player by id
• /unmute [name] – unmute the player
• /unmuteid [id] – unmute the player by id

The following commands are clientside only (so don’t use /rcon):

• /listignores – list the players you are ignoring
• /ignore [name] [minutes] – ignore the player for the given time (default is 15 mins, use -1 for permanent).
• /ignoreid [id] [minutes] – ignore the player by id
• /unignore [name] – unignore the player
• /unignoreid [id] – unignore the player by id

Other changes:

• Permanban option added to admin menu
• Autoupdate path is now hardcoded
• Changing any server browser filter will exit the ‘beginner’ sort (some people were getting confused why there were so few servers)

Shadlington

Announcing King Arthur’s Gold Single Sign-On and Garanis’ projects

Hey everyone,

While there haven’t been many updates to KAG itself over the past month or two, interesting things are coming on the infrastructure and API side.  Here is one that is nearing completion: King Arthur’s Gold Single Sign-On (SSO).

This is a side project that Teemo has been working on with us, which allows users to safely sign into certain community sites with their King Arthur’s Gold game account.  The site never is given your password, as you are logging into the King Arthur’s Gold servers and giving the 3rd party site a “token” to authenticate you with.

The first community site to make use of this is Garanis’ Server Browser, an awesome project which provides an enhanced server browser (gaining new features every week) and buddy list functionality, by making great use of the King Arthur’s Gold API. 

This post is to let community developers know that this SSO feature will soon be available to any site who wants to use it, and to let the community at large know that it is safe to use this mechanism to log into other sites even though it does not look like something official (yet). 

For users, here is what you need to know: it is safe to log into a site like Garanis’ Server Browser with your KAG account as long as the address in the log in window starts with  https://sso.kag2d.com.

If you are a community developer interested in using KAG SSO in your site, please PM me on the forums and I will work with Teemo to get you set up as soon as possible.  The feature is still in development and when it is officially done and supported I will make another post about it.  Here are the features planned:

• lightweight SSO or OAuth2
• The lightweight SSO will be done first and offer SSO via a redirect to and from our login form on sso.kag2d.com, and an API call to verify the token and retrieve account information
• With the token verification API call, you can have access to the user’s e-mail address (if the user allows it) and other account information (which is already public now, but this saves an API call)
• OAuth2 SSO standard – details on this implementation will come at some point.

We are also planning on supporting API-side buddy lists at some point, but for now there are great tools in the works like Garanis buddy list functionality.

I’ll be trying to post some more over the next week or two about more planned API features and other improvements we are making in the infrastructure that supports KAG, as this next release will really be a hell of a thing.

You can discuss and voice questions/comments/concerns about anything mentioned in this post here on the forums

Ryan/FliesLikeABrick

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