Uncategorized

Coverage Roundup for the New Year!

KAG’s been in the news more and more recently, which is encouraging!

Firstly, the Game Of the Year poll from JiG (Dont forget to VOTE :D) at the start of the week. Did we mention you can vote every day?

Secondly, we hear the game has been buzzing around on /v/ and reddit, and they’ve brought an influx of new, seemingly highly motivated players. Good to have you guys on board, be sure to keep it clean 😉

Indie Game Mag have released both a focussed feature of KAG and also put us in their list of 10 most promising indie games in alpha. We’re stoked that they’re so pleased with the game! If only they could have found some more up-to-date screenshots for the top of the prime feature post, haha!

Lastly, MM and I had an interview with the awesome Capsule of Capsule Computers. Get some insight into our thoughts in a more formal setting there.

It’s fun reading press about your own work, hopefully we see more over the coming months 🙂

Geti

BUILD 274 RELEASED

* BUG FIX ONLY RELEASE *
Doesn’t have anything new (like darkness), because that is still not finished.

Changes 265-274:

– fixed “reason 5” players ban
– fixed “COLLAPSED BY” console spam
– fixed giant holes in mountain maps
– fixed server browser crash after closing password box
– fixed server browser password box letters visible
– fixed / not working with autocomplete in console
– fixed some collision bugs
– ladder/tree climbing animation uses walk animation
– clients from server browser connect through sv_ip variable if specified
– fixed dedicated_server.sh being in DOS format
– fixed unit counter not appearing on first join
– removed adding 10 coins for placing gold bullion

A note from Geti about the new build and the current development angle, slightly out of context (full context here)

Firstly, we’re not planning on selling KAG or just dropping development any time soon.

Secondly, (I know this is going to frustrate a lot of people) the game is currently in alpha. That means everything is subject to change. Anything can and probably 70% of stuff will go through more change. Once the game goes beta, we’ll be doing focussed refinement cycles and finalising everything. I know it’s frustrating when there are bugs, but it’s also frustrating when development moves at a snails pace.

We’ve just done a bugfix release (interrupting zombie development work) to help appease the masses and to keep the game playable, but honestly I sat down and played public for about 3 hours today (on alias and off) and only a few bugs actually interfered with the game (squeezing, counter issues and some lag teleporting). The chat up the top bugs me a little, but that’s MM’s choice.

Thing is, when we sit down and tweak things and remove bugs for months and months, the game stops being fun to work on and you guys stop seeing any real progress.

As for reporting bugs, bugs.kag2d.com plus reminding me on IRC is the best way to go about it. I’ll forward them on if they aren’t already on the list of things to be fixed, as we have our own internal listing system. Most of the bugs that get reported are things we already know about and have scheduled time to fix, but it’s better to have duplicates than no reports either way.

Now, me and the community…

Of course I’ll stay around and chat with you guys! I’m not going to vanish, though as traffic increases I’m not going to be able to keep up with the amount of material posted (I’m having trouble as is). If it seems like I care about the community, it’s because I do – don’t forget that.

Hopefully that sheds some light on where we’re at and where we’re planning on going.

Community Links Request

Hey, we know some people have gone to the trouble of setting up specialised community sites for KAG (the excellent kag2d.fr managed by kiro (and depending who you ask potentially hapistorique) springs to mind) – We’d like to give recognition to those who’ve managed to help KAG make a splash and are requesting links to all active KAG sub-community sites.

Post ‘em here 🙂

Network lag after build 265 poll

Vote KAG! (JiG Best of 2011)

Hey, you know how cool Jay Is Games is right? Fairly cool? They certainly gave us a nice review a few weeks back.

It’d be pretty super awesome if you’d vote for King Arthur’s Gold in their game of the year thing. Be sure to check the box up the top when voting for it so that you submit a vote for game of the year, it’s on the first page about ¾ of the way down with a nice picture of the knight next to it, like this:

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

We’re sure you’ll follow your hearts on the vote 😉

(You can vote once per day, for those die hard vote a hundred times if they could kind of fans)

New engine news clarification

Some time ago I wrote about starting work on a new KAG engine. I haven’t spoken about it since then. So to clarify that…

I have started work on a new engine but realized after about a week of work that it’s gonna be more work than I expected. So I stopped doing that and decided to make a game engine live organ transplant.

What this means is that the skeleton of the engine remains the same but I am gradually replacing every component of the engine with new better code. I am doing this so that the game development does not stop for a couple weeks and we can all play and have frequent updates. For example the workshops are completely new code that interacts with the old code. The same with zombies. Eventually everything will be rewritten seamlessly and if you’re not interesting in programming you shouldn’t even care about this :).

Good news for modders is that all the new code is data-driven meaning every thing in the game has its own .cfg file in the Base/Actors directory. Every modifcation of those files works over network so there can be servers with completely different gravity, jumping, health etc.

Have fun,
MM 

Duel map with radiosity lighting

Here is how the old swordfight map presents itself with the new lighting model. As you see caves and castle interiors are darker. It is possible to make a room totally dark if you don’t build any holes or windows.

(click)

Lighting is pretty much done. Zombies are also half-way through. We should make this release this month.

MM

Real darkness

Today I worked on fun zombie AI. My favorite monster AI of all time is Doom II. I try replicate that wherever I can.

But most importantly I made real darkness on maps today. Meaning only surface areas have light. If there is a cave it is dark and you need a lantern to see inside. I’m not using ray-casting for the lighting like I did for example in Link-Dead. I feel that does not fit the pixel theme of the game and generally produces ugly effects. So we’ll have a nice lighting model that still makes nice darkness for creepy monsters to hide in.

MM

BUILD 265 RELEASED!

Most important fixes coming your way!

You’ll also notice the chat is now on top. It makes so much more sense to have that there, especially if you’re an archer shooting poor knights from top of a bridge.

(if you want to change this open KAG/Base/Scripts/config.gm
global cc_valign = 2; – for the old bottom chat) 

Changes 263-265:

– fixed native resolution in fullscreen broken
– fixed map collisions (not climbing, corner jumping etc.)
– chat console is disabled if no players
– unit counters changed to minimalistic numbers
– chat moved to top
– gamemode descriptions support line break (new CTF description)
– chat box position, transparency improvements
– chat box only displays under 140 chars
– fixed help texts not appearing during build time
– fixed not being able to build sometimes at some spots
– fixed buying bomb by spamming with left over coins
– fixed massive gold appearing under tent in older generator scripts
– fixed hole in map generator causing tower
– added flat map with hole in middle to deafult map cycle
– fixed 2 players from the same IP being authenticated wrong on master server
– Mac: fixed space appearing after pressing shift in chat

If there is trouble updating to build 265 download a fresh install:

http://kag2d.com/download