Posts Taged king-arthurs-gold

Why games fail at first contact

I believe any kind of entertainment is a failure if it doesn’t give you direct pleasure at first contact.

In computer games you often get a title screen and company and publisher credits which you can’t skip. You press space, enter, escape, smash the keyboard. Can’t skip it. Gotta watch the carefully rendered animation made for some ego-centric publisher to show that it was his money put into the game.

The first experience of a game like this is – frustration. This theme continues, later with menus and long loading times. You put up with it because you paid money and now you believe it will be worth it.

Most likely it won’t be. Because if the game developer wasn’t conscious of serving you frustration right at the beginning, then how the hell can he be conscious of serving you other feelings – like fun and excitement?

I believe a game should just rocket launch you into action. You don’t have time to wait. You want to play it – right here right now. You want instant satisfaction and instant pleasure – at first contact. You run it, you touch it, you control it. You dive straight into the game world – It feels good. You’re having fun. And that’s how it should be. And this is how Cartridge will feel.

MM

Hotfix for Build 1026 – Server Disconnects

A hotfix is slowly rolling out that should fix a bug resulting in everyone being disconnected from servers. An upgrade isn’t mandatory but will obviously benefit server owners. We apologise for the games likely ruined occasionally by this bug over the past few days.

Have fun!

Max/Geti

Build 1026 minor patch – added Japanese servers

Hey,

We’ve just added 2 new official servers hosted in Japan. This patch changes their colour in the server browser. 

Regards,
Furai/Lucas

Build 1026 – Miscellaneous Improvements

This build has many nice new features for all:

image

  • Colour Coded Server Browser
    The server browser now displays official servers in gold, and modded servers in blue, so you can find the play experience you’re after more easily, and so it’s clear if any mods need to be downloaded without clicking anything.
  • Time-Based Vanilla-Only Filter
    The Vanilla-Only filter turns itself off after 1 day of play now, to help modded servers get more traffic.
  • Item Spam Prevention
    Thanks to a modified script by community member ZeroZ30o a bunch of easily-spammed items will quickly decay if there are too many in one spot.
  • AFK’s will Auto-Disconnect
    Thanks to community member Norill for the majority of this script. This is effective in CTF, TTH and Sandbox at the moment (and any other mode with rounds longer than 5 mintues)
  • Fixed “Simple” Lighting
    Mainly for TDM, where lighting is more nuisance than fun, but might also be welcome on small CTF servers, and will make the game run slightly faster for players with weak computers on those servers.
  • Fixed Bans, Whitelist
    Server bans and whitelist are now fully functional again.
  • Lots of Community Maps
    Maps from community members 8x, Asumagic, Joiken, Srgt_Sneaky-Pants and kodysch have been added to the TDM cycle to spice up that mode.
  • Map Shuffle More Random
    The map shuffle is “more random” (whatever that means), and the cycle is re-randomised each 15 minutes (rather than every 12 hours).

Full Changelog:

[modified] drop items on class change at shops (consistency purposes)
[added] a bunch of tdm maps from the community
[fixed] random map shuffle is more random now
[fixed] people being able to "cheat" unique/blank heads.
[fixed] game auto-restarting even when noautoupdate set
[fixed] ban reason strings not getting applied correctly ("/ban Sedgewick -1 Relentless griefer" should work properly now)
[fixed] IP banning local IP addresses (omits 178.etc block at the moment)
[fixed] whitelist/blacklist/ignorelist getting corrupted on load
[added] ability to color servers list box
[added] links to script docs in some txt files
[added] modded and official servers are marked with color
[added] non-vanilla servers should be disabled only for first day of playing
[fixed] massive typo bug in checking blacklist
[fixed] reloading security would not automatically "expire" any already expired bans for a few minutes
[fixed] ban time not checked at the time of joining, so bans lasted longer than they should
[added] script to automatically kick AFK players - thanks norill! (note: doesn't work on TDM or any gamemode with rounds shorter than about 5 minutes)
[added] Lanterns, Crates, Buckets, Boulders, Sponges automatically decay if spammed, adapted from script by ZeroZ30o
[fixed] no_shadowing bool in gamemode.cfg
[added] no_shadowing to TDM
[added] no "spikey" script CPU usage by staggering based on blob network ID
[added] 2 more 8x maps
[modified] maps are randomised each 15 minutes (previous over-randomisation was causing too much doubling up)

Have Fun!

Max/Geti

New Build This Week

We’re working towards releasing a new build of KAG this week, with many improvements for the average player, modders, and server admins.

  • Bans and Whitelist Fixed
    A long standing issue with bans has been fixed, and the whitelist has also been fixed for those that want private servers. Bans by username, and IP should work properly again. As a bonus, ban reasons now work and are reflected in the blacklist file and under /listbans
  • Server Browser more Intuitive
    We’ve added colour support to the server browser, so official servers will show up gold, and modded servers will show up blue. This gives players more visual cues without clicking anything, so they’re better informed as to what they’re joining. The “vanilla only” filter will also automatically turn itself off after a day of being registered so that new players can more easily find modded servers.
  • More TDM Maps
    Exactly what it says on the tin 🙂 Many community maps, from 8x, Asumagic, Joiken, and kodysch have been included in the default map cycle, and a larger one from Sgnt_Sneaky-Pants has been included separately in case any hosts want to run a different TDM experience.
  • Mapycle Randomisation Fixed
    Hosts may have noticed that the randomisation was quite lacking before, it should be quite a bit more engaging now, especially useful for TDM or small CTF servers.

There are a couple of miscellaneous fixes in the mix as well, but you’ll have to wait for the changelog for those. Should be out on Friday if testing goes smoothly.

Cheers,

Max/Geti

Server for flagged people

We have set up a server for cheaters, griefers and abusers – it doesn’t mean that we encourage such behaviour, though. 

The banflags are disabled on it and everyone who was flagged for breaking the KAG rules (bad, bad KAGgers they are). Its name in the server browser is: KAG Official TTH EU (No banflags) 

Regards,
Lucas/Furai

Updates with no changes

We’re currently moving our repositories around, and to check everything’s working we need to trigger new builds, potentially more than once as everything goes ahead.

These new builds have no new content in them (sadly!), we just figured we should keep you in the loop regarding why they’re happening. Better safe than sorry and all that jazz.

Cheers,

Max/Geti

Build 1013

It’s official, we’ve crossed the 1000 build mark!

This marks more than a thousand days since we started working on KAG, quite a journey! We’re currently looking into things to do to celebrate, but in the meantime we’ve got another bugfix and maintenance patch to get things back in gear.

  • Knight Shield Stacking
    This is now a physical thing – you need to actually jump onto the guy shielding you. It looks quite funny, like a frantic scramble to get over a wall. This should fix the people shield-flying over the red barrier as well, as they should not be able to jump on top of each other ;^)
  • TDM Spawns
    TDM now works with multiple spawn markers. Players will randomly spawn at either of the possible spawns, for a more diverse TDM experience. We’re looking for some nice maps to add to the pool, drop them in the thread if you want them looked at :^)
  • Documentation work
    There’s been more work done documenting the CBlob class at http://doc.kag2d.com/ – the docs there are almost complete, we’ll be covering the sprite class next. It’s a very slow and exhausting job, so hopefully someone is getting some use out of it! Please leave feedback on what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d like to see, we’re kind of shooting in the dark here.
  • Community Sourced Fixes
    This build has two community sourced fixes and improvements, one from Verra expanding the timer.as functionality, and one from norill fixing mines “randomly” exploding your demolition shop. Thanks guys!
  • Misc Fixes
    I’ve also fixed a few miscellaneous bugs, including the misleading join message, which used to read “ has joined as ” – it now shows the correct “ has joined as ”. Sorry to anyone accused of impersonating as a result of this, I know I have a few times!

Have Fun!

Max/Geti

KAG Offline – Last 1 Hour

Hello KAGers!

King Arthur’s Gold APIs, site, forums and other dev-hosted services have been offline for approximately the last hour due to a large DDoS targeting our ISP.  This DDoS was not targeting KAG but was large enough (tens of gigabits per second) to take our ISP entirely offline.

The network has now recovered and all KAG resources are once again available.  We apologize for the disruption, this is not an incident we have a means to avoid nor is it something that has occurred in the past.

Game on!

-Ryan (FliesLikeABrick)

Discuss

Build 998 – modding fixes & spec cam improvements

This is a maintenance patch, just fixing a few issues.

I couldn’t fix some of the crashes people are experiencing. I need more information that’s why the crash reporter will now provide me with more info on the crashes. So if you get a crash send it and I’ll try to help.

Verra made some nice tweaks to the spectator cam. Shouldn’t cause nausea now :).

This patch fixes a big issue modders were facing. The file matcher in scripts was soft matching wrong files when using mods. These issues should be fixed. To fix it I had to make numerous changes, namely:

– sprites and sounds are not loaded randomly when there’s a couple matches – the best one is picked

– if you want to play random sounds use blob.getSprite().PlayRandomSound(“Pluck”) which will play Pluck01 or Pluck02 or Pluck03

– the file matcher takes the file extension into consideration and searches for the proper extension even if you didn’t provide it

Have fun!
MM

Changes 984-998:

[fixed] soft file-matcher taking similar files from Mods instead of Base

[scripting][modified] sounds and textures aren't loaded randomly with filematcher by default

[scripting][added] Sprite.PlayRandomSound(filename) for loading random sounds

[fixed] crashrpt not attaching logs
[added] last script calls to crashrpt

[fixed] death cam being too sudden and jerky (Verra's updated PlayerCamera.as)

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