FROM THE BLOG

Scripting Progress and Massive Rewrites.

That basically sums up the past few weeks. We’ve started moving literally all of the old content to scripted entities, which has required us to be pragmatic and basically wipe all the old hardcoded things. Every time we’ve come across something that needs to be done better, we’ve rewritten it. This has lead to many, many positive changes and a hell of a lot of work.

First of all, attacking is now fully directional, scripted, and a little less buggy (though I’m sure lag will help keep everyone angry about it). This means that your knights can now chop upwards, downwards and to the side, as well as slash in an arc.

Second of all, all classes have been moved to scripts. This makes it significantly easier to tweak how they work (both for us and for modders) but has also taken a lot of work, since the old “runner” code basically made KAG happen – all of the building code, emoticon code, hud code, attacking code (and so on) was in there. That was very rigid, but fairly simple to work with for us.

All the basic classes are drafted and “semi-working”, though there’s a little more to be done before we can even begin larger-scale testing, but they’re all working with team colours, animations, and layers.

Here they are decked out in drab grey, all ready for painting. Note the archer’s arm accurately reflecting its aim angle.

Sprite layers also let us piece together slightly more complicated sprites from various pieces, for example, the catapult’s arm and wheels can be separate layers, like so:

Workshops are also naturally fully scripted. The bank allows you to take out a loan if you’re low on coins, or deposit money for safekeeping.

Tom is now working on documentation for the scripting API, and Ryan has bought several new machines for our infrastructure to future proof against traffic spikes and help balance the load.

More previews coming as we build more content 🙂

Discuss these developments on the forums here!

Max/Geti