[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU9nOXZ6cXs?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

How to craft a raft - upcoming features in KAG 1.0

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Royal Guard vs The World: January 4th

Holiday 9.99$ Promotion & Internal Beta Announcement

December 21, 2012 - To celebrate the holidays, we’ve decided to lower the price of King Arthur’s Gold to $9.99! Huzzah! If you already have a Gold account, thank you! Consider gifting it to a friend.

To buy gold account which means getting full access to all the features + full version when it is out, just go to this page (CLICK). You can pay with PayPal, Amazon, Google or Mobile phone.

Other good news includes King Arthur’s Gold officially entering the beta phase!

Working right through armageddon, we’ve finally completed the new engine and all the content. The game is looking better than ever, with many new features including: new art, a new game-mode, completely rewritten water simulation, mountable vehicles, dynamic soundtrack, and lots more.

Of course, the most important addition has been the implementation of the insanely powerful AngelScript scripting library. 99% of the new gameplay mechanics have been created using this language and virtually all aspects of gameplay can be customized by the community.

We can’t wait to show you, but it’s still a little too early to release it to the public. In the meantime we’ll be doing internal tests and we’ll have some gameplay videos to show you soon, followed by a preview of the scripting engine, with a public release of the beta to come shortly after. The wait won’t be much longer - We promise!

Happy Holidays!

KAG Team

Vote for KAG on IndieDB now

Hey, you should vote right now for KAG on IndieDB for the Game of the Year Award. We are in the top 100 list of the best indie games of the year. Just open this, scroll down to the big vote button and CLICK it: 

http://www.indiedb.com/games/king-arthurs-gold

There’s just a few hours left, so do it now, especially if you’re not sure you already voted or not.

Announcing King Arthur's Golden Holiday Giveaway!

For ten days, starting today and ending on Christmas, we’ll be giving away a golden key each day to two of our most loyal subjects. What does this key unlock? The best holiday gift of all of course! Access to all of the wonderful features of King Arthur’s Gold!

Follow these simple rules and if you’re a good boy or girl (and a bit lucky), you’ll be filling your home with the joyous sounds of zombies moaning and powder-kegs exploding during the holidays!

1. Like/+1 our page on facebook or G+.
2. Join our steam group which you can find here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/kag2d

Winners will be chosen from our Steam group at random each day and contacted via Steam (by user gC.Furai), so make sure your account is active!

Even if you already have a gold account, you are still eligible. Because what could possibly be a better gift to a friend than a gift of gold?

Be sure to let all of your friends know about this contest. If this is the first time you’ve heard of King Arthur’s Gold - download and play for free here: http://kag2d.com

So, good luck, and happy holiday wishes from everyone here on the King Arthur’s Gold team!

- Lucas (Furai) & Dave (SirSalami) on behalf of the KAG Team

Winners are (Steam Username Listed):

15th December - David934, I’m Kill You
16th December - [GmT]☢numbers☢™, Ozone Parrot
17th December - CoolcatHedgehog, the_gotham
18th December - debruynvince, earthboundsss
19th December - PumpkingSlice, Kevinatoranator
20th December - MuShRo0m, [kabrňák] Woodbin
21st December - Angron, Caukes
22nd December - Nighthawk, SkyHigh420
23rd December - General Sam, [K]yuu
24th December - [WG] Trollax, pokeblue

Congratulations!

Disclaimer: This promotion is in no way affiliated with Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, or Steam. Rules are subject to change.

ArL - Arthurian League

Some of the more stable and prolific clans and players have organised something very special, to play out over the next 5 months or so, a league of competition between the champions of KAG!

We’ll have 42 matches spread over the course of 5 months. If this first season goes good, stuff will hopefully get permanent.

So, there’s a while to wait before the games begin; keep it in the back of your mind, and discuss the league in THIS THREAD

Max/Geti

[gallery]

Just another day in the world of KAGDev :)

Classic Update - Stability and Increased Modding

Yes yes we all want to see the scripting build out; However, this classic build is the culmination of another few weeks of fixes “when I get time”, working closely with SirSalami, Rayne, Downburst, Arcrave and Strathos. Be sure to chase them around if some variable wasn’t tested enough ;)

This build contains a list of all config variables, something a lot of you have been asking for for a while. It also contains quite a few new variables, including some variables specifically for roleplay/progression servers and one for the DK server (I’m sure you call can guess, if you’ve played it and thought “man I sure do wish those cheaters couldn’t crouch to dodge…”)

• list_of_config_vars.txt added


• fixed stomping being instakill sometimes


• fixed screenshot alpha issues


• some lighting issues fixed


• fixed lose wood while mining gold


• hopefully fixed permbans from console and added appended messages: rcon ban griefer -1 “NEVER COME BACK HERE AGAIN”


• fixed able to teamkill by suiciding


• Added knockback_scale to class config


• Allowed banning specific classes at the tent (allowed_at_tent for each class config)


• added knight_reset_timer_on_hit, for Raron who owes his eternal allegiance


• Updated autobalance logic + fixed typo in balance_teams_on_nextmap


• Added collide_when_crouching


• Added stomp_strong_damage, stomp_weak_damage and stomp_vel


• Added builder_hit_damage, knight_jab_damage, knight_slash_damage, map_indestructible and map_bedrock_indestructible


• potential fix for wraiths from nowhere bug in ZF


• fixed abusable console command

Build number should be B590

DISCUSSION THREAD GET ON THE FORUMS YALL

Enjoy

Max/Geti

EDIT: Hotfix pushed to one missing check for the fix to max_bombs, and a bug with mats at tent.

EDIT: another one for an autobalance related crash, hopefully the last for the night but hey, this is Sparta/KAG so anything goes.

Guro-claws' Happy Christmas Funtime Giveaway + Teasing

So in the spirit of Christmas I have decided to give 25 premium accounts away. I was planning to do an advent calender with like 1 premium account giveaway per day but I’m too lazy so we’ll just have to pretend. I will be giving premium codes away periodically until December 25th seemingly at random. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your pets. Whatever. It’s on. If you know a lovely fellow who deserves a premium account code but doesn’t use the forums, direct him here!

~Guro

Seems everyone on KAGForums is getting into the Christmas spirit with competitions and giveaways out the wazzoo. Get in on the action and tell your friends!

CLICK HERE for the forum thread!

Re: Teasing

Don’t worry, we’re planning a Christmas present for you all as well :)

Nominate KAG for IndieDB game of the year 2012

The annual game awards have started on IndieDB/ModDb. It’s time to nominate your favorite games. So just click this button here, scroll a bit down to a big VOTE button and click it to vote for us. Thank you very much!

MM

2012 Indie of the Year Awards via Indie DB

Donkey Kong mode server (type donkey into the server browser to join) - here’s us winning the first map despite DK laughing at us the whole time ;) It’s gonna be interesting seeing what mods appear once the scripting build is out if people are building mods like this without any proper scripting support!

[gallery]

Art teaser post, since it’s been a while ;)

Build 580

Just a minor fix build to help SirSalami develop the default “official” config for KAG CTF, and to disable g_debug in public builds. Take that, abusers!

Another scripting dev update coming later in the week, so many networking bugs to fix :(

Geti/Max

Hotfix on Build 572

I just pushed another patch to build 572.  The build number is still 572.  Here is what was changed:

- fixed a bug with the new tcp rcon feature which caused windows servers to crash as soon as you start them

- fixed a bug where using /msg without any players in the server would crash the server badly

- improved autoupdate; autoupdate now reuses one connection for all files instead opening a new http connection for every file.  This creates up to an (estimated) 75% performance increase for small files, especially for users who are outside the USA or otherwise far away from the update servers latency-wise.

Build 572 Update - Remote RCON Administration

Hi All,

You may have noticed that an update just went out, still labeled build 572.  This update brings a feature that has been requested of me by many server owners - the ability to execute RCON commands without being in-game with a client.  This feature, which I have been referring to as “tcp rcon” or “remote admin”, allows you to connect to the server’s game port via tcp (with telnet or another client).  From there you can monitor/access console output as well as execute RCON commands.

I actually started the design of this feature months ago, but this past week I have been traveling and had time to work on it while I was on the train.

This update also contains a small memory corruption bugfix.

More information about this new remote admin feature (such as how to enable and use it) can be found in the wiki and questions/discussion of the feature can be found on the forums.

Discussion of this announcement/update itself can be found here.

Feels good to be back and actively working on KAG —

FliesLikeABrick

KAGoween Finals!

The finals are this week end, starting with the runners up match between YB and BoW at ~21:00 GMT and then MOLE vs POWER for the winners title at ~22:00 GMT

Discussion is ongoing here, including begging WanderMark and Contrary to host more events like this every few weeks! ;)

»CLICK HERE« to link into the LiveStream and be part of the event as it happens! Be sure to cheer on your favourite clan!

GET HYPE!

HOTFIX: Build 572

Hotfix coming as soon as it’s built, along with less sticky/slow water.

Fixes

• Spike strangeness


• Fall damage being applied wrong


• Water Slowness


• Any attacking through tiles


• Stomp no longer “sometimes hurts them, sometimes you” + higher stomp min height.


• Memory leaks

Additions

• Knights can surf


• Archers can stomp

Gold servers with water should be ~500% more fun and less full of stalemates, though buildings at the water’s edge are still powerful.

Get onto patching asap, especially those still on 548, we’ll be bringing all the servers for 548 down at some point soon.

Continue discussion: HERE

Max/Geti

Classic Actually Probably Final Build 569 + Insight

IF YOU SEE NO SERVERS AND NO AUTOPATCH, PLEASE DOWNLOAD AND REINSTALL KAG FROM HERE: 

http://kag2d.com/en/download

SOME BUILDS MAY HAVE BEEN CORRUPTED AND WILL NOT AUTOUPDATE. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY HASSLE CAUSED BY THIS SLIP UP, THOSE RESPONSIBLE HAVE BEEN SMACKED ACCORDINGLY.

More bug fixing went on these past few weeks, with both good and exhausting results.

• Support wierdness fixed + vars added
  - support_added_vertical = 1
  - support_cost_ladder = 8
  - support_cost_bridge = 4
  - support_cost_castle = 4
  - support_cost_wood = 3


• Fixed Beeping in console + potential crashes from that.


• Fixed bloody spikes are dark


• Fixed more % related issues


• Massive optimisations (50+ player servers shouldn’t beat up your CPU quite as much)


• added swap_team_cooldown variable for team switching (to prevent rapid swapping abuse, defaults to 1 min, a value of 1800)


• reworked autobalance logic a little (now based on time since join)


• added balance_teams_on_nextmap variable, balances the teams based on score at the end of each match (or should, this one may need more testing/attention)


• Fixed spikes blend players when moving sideways (slight push backwards added).


• Fixed shonky raycasts


• Fixed attacking around corners


• Fixed attacking upwards/downwards

Overall, this is largely a bugfix build again to help make sure the intermission before any public release of the scripting build is as enjoyable as possible :)

As an insight into development, a few words on where we’re at:

We’ve been working hard on the scripting build of course, but we’ve decided over the last few months to “do this right” - we could have finished the game in a matter of weeks a while ago by hacking in a ballista, porting the fire stuff to the normal build and adding a fire arrow item, but we decided to recode the vast majority of the game in scripts in order to gain experience with networking a scripted system, and to ensure the game can survive long after we can afford to continue working on it.

This means that there will be none of these legacy bugs will carry over to the final full version of KAG, and that any new or persisting bugs will be visible and able to be modded away or at least brought to our attention. Its been amazing seeing what modders can do with the current config-file based interface, we’re excited to see what happens once we throw a scripting interface with a large collection of examples at you!

Obviously, doing things the right way comes at a cost. We are currently actually months past our initial deadline - while we’ve been able to get around that and have the freedom of the game being “done when it’s done”, it still feels like it’s taking forever on our end, as well as on yours. Please don’t feel that we’re being lazy or that progress is not being made - Michal and I have been working furiously long hours (minimum 8, usually 10-16 hours each) every day for the last few months, suffering and working through burnout and illness (and in my case, the end of semester and exams at the same time). We want to see this done even more than you guys do, and we want to see it done right. Bear with us while we do that ;)

Discuss this post HERE

Max/Geti

For those that missed it, the most recent “Adventure of Meow” strip, which is a spinoff work paying homage to Shakespeare and Clumsy Builders alike. Click to expand. Thread Here.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asJCaqecxL0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

KAG now has automatic script and sprite reloading. This means game and mod development will be much faster now, cause you just Ctrl+S in an external editor and see the effects immediately.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

The great KAGoween Tournament

Some higher-ups in the community have been working hard to get together a Tournament between 4 of the larger and better known clans - MOLE, YB, BoW, and POWER.

Its a 5v5 fast CTF tournament with rules similar to the Action Servers (vanilla with better bomb jumps), with some extra restrictions on class changes, class numbers and a small number of units.

The action will start today (or tomorrow, depending on where you are), the 27th of October, at 21:00 UST

The games will be streamed and commentated on by WanderMark and Contrary via twitch tv »here«! This will help take the load off the servers that a pile of open spectator slots would create, at the cost of a few seconds of latency for the audience.

There is a forum discussion thread for those that want to smack talk, place wagers on who’s best (actual gambling not endorsed by us in any way, etc etc), here.

If this goes well, WanderMark is confident they’ll be hosting more open and larger contests in the future, with the possibility of gold accounts and of course a dramatic ego “extension”, so be sure to show your support and say you want more of them :)

Max/Geti

♫♪ I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay, I sleep all warmup and I work all game! ♫♪

Behold - the Saw! Turns logs into wooden planks, and knights into sushi
(mileage my vary on quality of sushi)

Dev Peek: Boat and Shop Art and Discussion

Rooms:

We’ve committed to a few large changes for the default setup for rooms.

Firstly, they’re 8x4 tiles in size now.

Secondly, they come in a few subtypes rather than there just being a whole discrete workshop for each task. This lets us ensure construction flow a little more strictly; we’re debating whether tech will be needed for workshop upgrades or not at the moment.

Most of the subtypes will have some default functionality - for example, a carpentry room will always have a carpentry bench and be able to perform basic carpentry stuff, but will require an upgrade to build siege weapons, or boats. An agriculture room will always have a nursery, but may have a larder for storing food/spawns or may have its seed generation output doubled.

The subtypes are:

• agriculture


• barracks


• library


• carpentry


• masonry


• quarters

Most of these are visible below:

Quarters are an exception to this - they’ll come with a bed, and can be claimed by one player. From then on, they’ll act as a spawn for that one unit - this means a team will have to construct infrastructure for its players to have a regular forward spawn point (you’ll be able to spawn back at the home port after ~30s otherwise).

This applies for WAR mode only of course.

Note that because all of this is implemented in the scripting language, server owners can mod it back to the old 3x3 style of shops if they like. We want to structure the game a little more and focus on making one mode work very well rather than trying to make a lot of content work across the board.

Boats:

Here’s the 5 basic boats we’re planning on implementing  (There may be one larger “Galleon” boat but we’re having trouble figuring out how it’d actually get in game being so huge… So we’ll see)

I’m going to drop their (current) names, and you can speculate about their functionality ;)

• Log Raft


• Dinghy


• Arrow Dingy


• Covered Launch


• Support Boat

That’s all for this week, hope you’ve enjoyed the peek :)

Discuss here.

Max/Geti

Build 548 - Classic ~Final

Classic Update:

We’re coming up to a very large release of KAG, but in the mean-time theres been a lot of stuff addressed in classic (the current playable iteration of the game) that warrants a new release! There are likely to be a few bugs slipped through the net, but it’s felt very solid the last few test rounds. Be sure to report bugs in the thread and on mantis.

Full Changelog:

• fixed extra spike and gurgle sounds occuring after getting spiked or drowning, then getting hit.


• fixed 120 stone in catapult from bomb bug


• fixed trees leave copies of their top behind when blocks have been placed above them


• fixed lighting is team biased


• fixed attack timer reset upon getting hurt


• bombs now hurt through the holes they make, and through bridges


• all damage goes through bridges now


• fixed “vote next map is actually vote reload map”


• fixed cant attack around corners (tentative fix)


• fixed bottom line of map is empty


• fixed % causes issues in chat window


• REVERTED TO CLASSIC LIGHTING (NO DARKNESS) IN NON-GOLD SERVERS
   


• added no_shadowing boolean in gamemode.cfg (defaults + forced to true in non-gold servers and false in gold servers )


• fixed crash in security if a null player was present

Hopefully the number of fixes is re-assuring to those that seem to think we’re not listening to bug reports - Some of these fixes have been sitting in the repo for a good 30 days now, and were just never pushed by accident ;)

What’s coming next?

We’re working hard on the scripting side of things - combat is coming together again, a lot of things have been re-animated and re-polished, most of the syncing issues have been abated, and the API should be handling multiple games soon, if it isn’t already :)

We’ll do another round up of things we’ve been working on and give some more pretty pictures next week, collating that kind of stuff takes too much time for me to set aside at 11:22 PM, heh.

Discussion here

Max/Geti

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_Qp7sYXxE4?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

A wonderful “Lets play” style video starring Andy, Darcia (the not so best knight) and Dave/SirSalami. More dev info coming, there’s some in there from dave if you listen carefully ;) Enjoy!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMU3WFaXj7k?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

This is a glimpse of how the all new vehicles will look like in the full version of King Arthur’s Gold. Work in progress.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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.
  

Shadlington

Edit: added some more information, discuss here

Max/Geti

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)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slv7_W3FLto?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

This is how support will work while building castles in the upcoming big release.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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

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

What it's like to play a game as a Developer.

Unfortunately ;)

If you see us ingame, say hi, don’t spitroast us with questions.

(Source)

Blog post with actual news soon, just have to collate screenshots and changes (and fix a bug with sprite layers on actors…)

Max/Geti

New Installers/Packages

New installers/packages for Mac/Windows/Linux are now present on the download page.  We have been wanting to update them for a while, but technically nothing was broken and we had higher priority matters to worry about.  The main reason for updating these is to reduce the number of updates that new players need endure as well as changing one or two default config values.

If you have any problems with the installers, please PM me on the forums or e-mail support (support at thd dot vg).

Unrelated, there may be one or two more hotfixes out throughout the day today.  You can find details on those in the 469 release thread on the forums.

-FliesLikeABrick

Build 469: Hotfix

Just to let you know I’ve just pushed a hotfix for a couple of issues that sprung up after release of 469:

- Fixed guards not having access to the admin menu

- Fixed everyone joining blue team by default when first connecting to the server

Shadlington

Build 469

Build 469 is out and is mostly made up of an assortment of seclev additions + several miscellaneous changes.

Notable things you might like include the ability to assign seclevs through the admin menu, the ability to restrict what classes/teams people can play with using seclevs and the ability to custom-define what levels of zoom are available to everyone (or even define this by class).

Changelog:

• Mostly fixed so that you can add extra classes without them defaulting to builder. Requires that you add an extra field to class config files called ‘tool’ that has the value ‘Knight’, ‘Archer’ or ‘Builder’. Name can be whatever you like now. Please try this out and report bugs with it (and any workarounds you find) because it hasn’t been tested very extensively.


• Made guard color overrided by admin_color in all cases (previously wasn’t on player mouseover)


• Strip out multiple consecutive white space characters in chat, replace with one space


• /login and /logout restricted to serverside only


• Removed editor zoom help text as it is no longer available


• Class restrictions (feature = no_class_[classname] where [classname] is the name of the class)


• Team restrictions (feature = no_team_[teamname] where [teamname] is the name of the team)


• Admin menu re-org (Admin>Team>Player>Moderator Action) + hide actions based on seclev immunity


• Spectator team in admin menu


• Spectator chat grey


• Added autoconfig option to allow the seclev feature join_full to work, sv_enable_joinfull


• Reserved slots, set with sv_reservedslots (feature to use in seclevs: join_reserved)


• Spectator slots, set with sv_spectatorslots (if set to 0, spectators just use regular slots - if you want to remove spectators altogether, remove them from seclevs)


• Join as spectator button added to browser


• Allow /login to work with no password set


• Freeze immunity (feature = freeze_immunity)


• Speedhack kick immunity (feature = speedkick_immunity) (this is a temporary fix to work around modded servers that have speeded-up their classes in such a way that the speedhack detection gets false positives)


• Seclev muting (feature = muted)


• Deny access with deny_join (will also kick if done mid-game)


• Fixed ‘x has been voted to be kicked’ bug


• In-game seclev assignment through /rcon /assignseclev or admin menu


• Added LoadSeclevs(filename);


• Added /rcon /reloadseclevs [filename]


• Disabled same account connecting to a server multiple times


• New gamemode var: max_zoom_out. This can be 1/2/3 and defines how many levels of zoom there are.


• 3 more gamemode vars: zoom_level_1, zoom_level_2, zoom_level_3. These set the cam distance at each of these zoom levels.


• These gamemode vars can also be added to class config files to override them for that class only.


• Non-fixed cam works at zoom level 1 now. Was forced to fixed previously.

Little extra info on how to set the zoom levels:
Default levels are:
max_zoom_out = 2
zoom_level_1 = 2.0
zoom_level_2 = 1.0
zoom_level_3 = 0.5

Bigger zoom (zoom_level_1/2/3 values) = more zoomed in.
Bigger zoom level (max_zoom_out value) = more zoomed out.

Discuss this update here!

Shadlington

Workshops Week

"But we already have workshops…", you’re thinking to yourselves.

Well, that may be true, but you don’t have workshops like we’re working on workshops. Literally all of the functionality is squirreled away in scripts, meaning that you can make workshops do whatever the hell you want them to do, build menus for them from nothing OR tweak the stock shops with ease. The workshop code will be a great place to start learning AngelScript for those new to C-like languages.

Technology research is partway done, the system reads and writes technologies properly but doesn’t quite update the menu of the research shop yet, that’s something for next week. :)
Here’s a shot of me tending my new garden. How quaint:

We’re thinking you’ll likely be able to hock possessions throughout the game on some sort of export market for coins, so those flowers would be uprooted quicksmart for some dosh. This means minecrafters aren’t quite as much of a waste of space, since you can at least sell the fruits of their labour.

Michal has been working his butt off recoding several of the internal systems to be simpler to work with via configs, especially with regards to how sprites are handled. Entities can now have multiple layers of sprites, which means that with some clever scripting, complicated animations can be put together with what would otherwise have taken hundreds of frames (naturally noone wants to sprite that kind of thing!)

The entire physics system has also been rewritten to a point where we’re mostly happy with it (and it’s much easier to work with, both in pure configs and with scripting). Some more tweaking will probably happen next week as we start working with characters.

We’re working on making classes and actors non-hardcoded at the moment so that classes can be added and removed fairly trivially. We might not have time to add all the planned classes by the deadline, but we’ll have the groundwork done to get them done afterwards if need be.
…It’s not working properly just yet though, haha.


Tom got his excellent Seclev code out this week and I got to add a few extra variables to water to extend its applicability to deathmatch, which will hopefully see some adoption soon. Pretty sure Rayne is cooking up a tide based RTDM server.

Discuss these developments here!

Until next week,
Max/Geti

Build 458

Build 458 is out and the main new feature being introduced is security levels, also known as seclevs.

The full details of what seclevs are and how you should use them are included on the wiki, here.

The gist of it is that server owners now have complete control over who can do what on their servers.

No more pesky logging into rcon is required, either. You can easily setup a seclev for your admins that will immediately give them access to their admin powers when they join your server, as well as a seclev with even more powers just for yourself. You can even setup a VIP seclev for your trusted non-admin users to give them slightly more access than other users (for example, not allowing users to mark players as griefers until you trust them).

You can find example files showing you how to configure seclevs in KAG/Base/Security. They all have the extension .example - if you make copies of these files and remove the .example part you will be left with a decent start point for configuring your own seclevs.

We are officially phasing out guards (i.e. we are no longer recruiting them), so it is strongly encouraged that server owners build up a list of trusted admins that they assign access to with seclevs.

However, guards still exist and you will be able to assign them exactly what admin powers you feel comfortable with them having, separately to your other admins (or, for example, take away a single guard’s admin powers).

There have also been changes to the way in which blacklists/whitelists are stored.

securitysetup.cfg has now been moved to KAG/Base/Security/securitysetup.cfg and inside this file you define the file paths to your whitelist/blacklist. If you copy the contents of your old securitysetup.cfg (in KAG/Base/Scripts) to KAG/Base/Security/blacklist.cfg (or whatever file you define in securitysetup.cfg) then your bans will be preserved. If you were using a whitelist, copy to whitelist.cfg instead. In both cases, you shouldn’t need to worry about adjusting the formatting, that should all be sorted out the next time you start the server.

Additionally, the way you login to rcon has changed - there is now a specific command for it. If you want to login, use /rcon /login [password]. You can also logout now using /rcon /logout.

There has also been a change to the way we check if you have accepted the terms or not, so don’t be surprised if you are required to accept them again.

There are also a few other fixes included.

Changelog:

• Added security levels (see blog/wiki)


• Moved location of securitysetup.cfg to Base/Security


• Moved white/blacklists to their own files (paths defined in securitysetup.cfg)


• Changed logging into rcon to use /rcon /login [password]


• Added /rcon /logout to logout of rcon


• Modified /reloadsecurity to reload seclevs in addition to black/whitelists


• Added /printseclevs for printing seclevs


• Fixed respawn timer behind chat window (#152)


• Potentially fixed memory leak with water

Discuss this post here!

Shadlington

Hotfix for beep abuse

A hotfix has been pushed out to address the beep issue that is being abused increasingly wide across servers.  Servers do not need to be restarted for this fix to work for all clients, so you only really need to restart/update your server if you are running it in a console where you are hearing beeps.

-FliesLikeABrick

The Adventure of Meow

The KAG team have been wanting to share the excellent work of xiaojin67 for some time! This comic will give you a taste for what the comic is like, very tongue-in-cheek and always relevant to the game in the strangest ways:

The series has progressed to the point of a regular continuous plot now, and you can view the whole thing on the forums here!

I might be posting more of these on the blog from time to time to keep those too scared of the forums vaguely up to date, we’ll see.

Max/Geti

Intrusion 2 is out!

We’ve been scheming with a few other like-minded indies about getting the word out about each-other’s games, and one of those has hit a fantastic milestone of actually being 100% done and out!

Its always nice to see an ambitious project by one guy actually make it to the finish line, so without further ado, here’s the trailer:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJZAzNKZBew?feature=player_embedded]

http://www.intrusion2.com/

The trailer pretty much explains what happens in the game (Metal slug, but with physics behind everything and a sprinkling of crack), but there’s also a demo to noodle around in and the game is ten bucks to buy for keeps.

If you’re interested in the tactical physics sidescrolling stuff that goes down in KAG, you might want to check this out to tide you over as Michal and I go into crunch on this next update. (Yes, that means soon, no, it doesn’t mean immediately, it’s not even in the tester’s hot little hands yet.)

More dev news coming once workshops are ported over to the new systems, or when progress is made with seclevs, whichever comes first :)

Max/Geti

A little something that I carved out today. What you see is the draft of the new inventory menu with some placeholder stuff in it. When you hover your mouse over a button a little display will show. As you see you can format this however you like with colors and by adding icons. This is all fully scriptable and writing it is as simple as making a string like “by a sleep to say we end$ROPE$” - which displays a rope icon at the end.

MM

A Mad Week, Deadline coping Plans.

We’ve been recoding a lot of the engine this week, which has been both good and bad (as illustrated by Michal earlier, haha). We’ve made a lot of hard decisions re: what will make it to the initial “release” version, and what won’t. More information once it’s all 100% finalised.

We’re having to do some harsh optimisation on the blob blocks, as on lower end machines castles made of them were quite laggy due to all the necessary physics collisions to keep the castle up. We’re having to rework the map code to allow us to “settle” placed blocks into that map after a short period of time. This means that the sprites need to be moved into the map file, which is why the map code needed rewriting.

Unfortunately this negatively impacts modding a little, as modded blocks won’t be able to settle - sadly, we don’t have time to go about performing this optimisation in a way that’s efficient for both vanilla content and modded content - however if used in conjunction with slightly modified vanilla blocks (the stats of a block are able to be modified, but any visual changes won’t make it clientside for now), most block modding goals can be achieved. We assume that the majority of modification will happen with regards to interactive elements that shouldn’t be made to settle anyway.

The core parts of Gamemode Scripting and Menu Creation have also been exposed to the scripting engine.

As a side-note - ground slopes have been added, which make natural hills much simpler and smoother to navigate.

We’ve plotted out exactly what needs to get done to the day and are on target for our deadline, which is good news for you and for us. It’s going to be rough, but we’ve left a few weeks spare in that timetable for the inevitable delays that creep in.

Feel free to join in the discussion here!

Max/Geti

Network stabilized

The aforementioned network issues should have now stabilized, please report on the forums if you see any new issues.

KAG Network Outage

There is a partial outage with the network provider that delivers connectivity to the datacenter where the KAG servers are.  This started within the past hour, you may see intermittent connectivity problems as the matter is resolved.  I will post back with any updates or when we have the ‘all clear’ from our ISP.

FliesLikeABrick

Unconnectable servers no longer displayed in the server browser

Hello all,

The server browser will now no longer list servers which time out upon being joined.  The API will test that a server is connectable before listing it as joinable.  Servers which are not connectable are still listed in the server database, however they are flagged as such and are not sent to the client (the server browser in the client requests only servers which are connectable).  For example:

https://api.kag2d.com/servers/connectable/1/current/1 only lists servers which are active and connectable

https://api.kag2d.com/servers/connectable/0/current/1 only lists servers which are active and not connectable (currently none listed)

The server console currently will not show an error when this happens, however I will work on adding that in an upcoming build

Also while deploying this I cleaned out the server database and minimaps to do some other testing.  Any server owners whose servers are currently missing minimaps in the browser just need to join the server for a minute or restart the server (either one will work).  In general I won’t do this in the future, but I wanted to do it now to test out some new code paths introduced in the API update.

Another thing that will be broken are peoples ‘last played’ - those will not show any recorded action/”last played” until the player is active again.

FliesLikeABrick

So, I’m rewriting how blocks work, so they can be loaded from scripts and carried as actual objects. It’s going really well as you can see :D

MM

Seclevs, Blocks and Physics Headaches

This week, things have happened!

Tom has been working on Security Level code, which will allow server owners to build their own tiers of moderators, with a very fine level of control over exactly what each level of user can do. Join in the discussion here

Ryan has moved house, driven for many, many hours and almost yelled at his cats. He’s got some more API security work to do but naturally has had more limited time than usual to work on KAG. Hopefully moving the rest of his stuff goes smoothly.

I’m over in NZ with my family for a few weeks, which means I’ll have even worse ping than usual if I see you ingame. I’ve been accused of being a hacker ingame already, please look for the purple name and hair before you start pointing fingers ;)

In actual development news:

Michal and I have been working primarily on physics rewrites for this and last week, and it’s been exhausting, especially for Michal, who has had to bear the brunt of the programming work, especially recently.

The majority of the kinks have been hammered out though, and now things like this are possible:

Note the lack of lighting on the constructed blocks - that’s still work in progress.

They’re also not settling to the grid yet because the support mechanic isn’t 100% finalised - we’re pretty set in the implementation though, and it should be done this weekend.

Most of the block behaviours will be defined in common scripts that can be used as examples, and to quickly add functionality to modded blocks and the like.

Behind the scenes of the above image is the new (also work in progress) inventory system. Here’s a sneak peek:

(Apologies for the strange pixel warping, shot taken on a years-old laptop)

We’re going to have to play with how this affects game balance because a builder with a full inventory is holding a fairly gigantic number of blocks.

We’re likely going to split off classic at the point of this next release so that it doesn’t get any of the changes to the underlying structure, as they affect movement and game balance a lot - we’d like to be able to move forward drastically without destroying what we’ve already got, so classic will stay preserved as a separate game (kind of like what Mojang were doing with minecraft a few years ago with classic/creative, survival and survival multiplayer, not sure what the deal there is now).

The movement behind the game is now more physically designed, which means that you keep your momentum in the air and that there is no kind of velocity cap. This is very important for things like jumping on trampolines.

We’re excited for what ramps, trampolines, building momentum and so on will do for race/jump maps - I’ll be looking into coding an actual race gamemode so that a competitive gamemode that doesn’t necessarily involve killing each other can exist.

We’ll keep you posted with more developments as they happen, no date for you guys yet though I’m afraid :)

Discussion for this devlog post is HERE.

Max/Geti

Maintenance complete

The planned database maintenance is complete - the extra time, planning and optimizations led to it only taking 5 minutes to execute.

There will likely be more maintenances like this over the next few months as KAG’s infrastructure is improved and expanded to support future growth.

-FliesLikeABrick

Database Maintenance is starting

The database maintenance I wrote about last week will be beginning shortly (behind schedule).  Please re-read the details of that post and spread the word :)

I will post back here when the maintenance is complete.

FliesLikeABrick

Progress, setbacks, boats and ropes.

This week has been long.

Well, long for me as I had my final exam as well as a lot of work to do. Very glad to have that out of the way.

Tom and Ryan have made fantastic work on a new, more secure, less annoying installer that can be easily rebuilt each build so that no patching is needed after an install.

Ryan has worked on more API code and a lot of in-game sanity checking (more stability, less console output spam, less data loss…) as well as proper quick join functionality and the client/server understanding what maintenance mode means.

Michal and I have worked a lot on the scripting side of stuff. We want to get this as stable as possible before releasing it to you guys so we’re holding it while we make sure the design is solid and re-implement a lot of the existing content as purely scripted content - this makes it easier for us to track down bugs and makes sure that you guys have some solid examples to work off while the documentation for the scripting API is lacking.

We’re also discussing whether a physics reimplementation is a good idea at this point - currently the objects themselves don’t have mass or drag, just velocity caps and radii - which can lead to a lot of weird stuff and makes configuring new objects and emergent behaviours hard. Its a lot of re-work though which eats into other development time.

Michal got a quick video together of him testing rope attachments out. It’s going to be interesting seeing how rope physics sync over the network, but you can also already do excellent things like swing from ropes attached to pulleys above, and (with some quick modding) water ski as a knight shielding down behind a speed-boat! This is a really exciting time, as it’s going to open up all sorts of possibilities - both for modding and for the vanilla game.

Watch it here: can’t embed, sorry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-AbLEnN1lo

There’s been some talk of these new “menus” and how some people are unhappy about them - we personally think that the pie menus are incredibly obtrusive and break up gameplay a lot, and hate the disconnect between picking something up when there’s only one thing and picking something up when there are many things. This new icon-based interaction system means you’re never pulled out of the action when trying to grab something quickly, or quickly buy bombs.

We know that it’ll be met by some opposition, but as it allows for custom, scripted interaction points on a per-object basis, we don’t think you’ll mind too much :)

Discuss here!

Max/Geti

Hotfix on 428

This is a small hotfix build which does the following:

- Adds client/server understanding of a ‘maintenance mode’ for the KAG API

- general error message improvement around certain API calls

- Fixes #606

- join-related API calls in the client and server now use persistent connections; server joins should be noticeably faster

A reminder - please read the previous post regarding Monday’s planned downtime to everything.

-FliesLikeABrick

edit: one more patch being pushed out that does the following:

- fixes a regression from the #606 fix above, this will be addressed more next week

- Server browser favorites now work again

- Quickjoin has been completely revamped.  this post explains the logic in the new one.  I know I’ll be using the quickjoin all the time now, it prefers favorite servers but has decent logic for selecting others as well.

- Fixed (workaround) sv_goldonly spam in server console in non-gold servers as well as the issue with wood blocks showing up for builders in non-gold servers.  A better fix for this will come next week (requires a netcode change so it will come with a build number change)

Important: Planned maintenance 09:00 UTC Monday, June 25th

Hello all,

The aborted maintenance from earlier this week has been rescheduled for Monday, June 25th at 09:00 UTC and should be expected to take up to 3 hours.  During this period, the following systems will be down:

• The King Arthur’s Gold API including client logins, server listing, server joins, minimaps and other server/player status information.  During this time the API will respond 503 Temporarily Unavailable; calls will not hang or time out so all systems should fail gracefully.


• The King Arthur’s Gold homepage including registration and account access


• The King Arthur’s Gold forums will be taken offline


• The King Arthur’s Gold bugtracker


• The King Arthur’s Gold wiki may be available but slow to respond

This maintenance is primarily to update indexes on a few key tables in our database to aid in future growth without performance concerns.

If you participate in any community sites, please spread awareness of this planned downtime to help reduce impact.

Please direct any questions, comments or concerns to this forum thread.

-FliesLikeABrick

Map/Server Ingenuity by OnR

The guys at OnR have done something very interesting with a map in their server, [FR] OnR Server - 24 Slots (click to join, gold only), that really tests how well you understand the details of how movement and jumping work in King Arthur’s Gold.

You can see from the minimap above that this is not your typical gold server - but rather a maze which relies on very precise and calculated moves to get through all of the obstacles.  I saw this while scrolling through the server browser and decided to join, and before long 3 of the 4 devs were on there grunting and groaning and trying to get through it all (Geti surely would have joined us but he just went to sleep).

Kudos to the person who took the time to design this map, and we look forward to seeing more of this as we release features over the next month which further enable custom game modes and server configurations/modifications.  

(Side note: the new server browser properly deals with custom game modes - so if you have a modification on an existing one, by all means change the game mode in gamemode.cfg and it will show up as a new filterable game mode in the game mode filter list)

If server side scripting goes as planned, it will enable community developers/server admins to take an idea like this and turn it into a thorough game mode - things like having a timer/race aspect (perhaps with the water slowly rising to penalize those who fall behind), writing to custom log files or a custom API to generate logs/statistics, custom endgame scenarios without having to manipulate flag captures, and so on.

Discuss your dreams about the endless possibilities of server modification/scripting at the forums

edit: It sounds like BlueLuigi, MOLE and possibly others have done something similar in the past - so consider this a hat tip to them as well :)

Hotfix on build 428

A hotfix for build 428 is on its way out, a few small changes:

- Fixed issue with big (40+ player) busy servers running out of object IDs (and kicking everyone/being unjoinable) after a few hours

- Some optimizations related to how object IDs are looked up (in theory lower cpu usage on servers with a lot going on, in reality not much of a difference)

- removed ‘Blob Loaded’ log/console messages

- Fixed wood blocks not showing up in gold CTF and zombie modes

Also, we are in the process of generating updated installers for download on the website.

The new Windows installer no longer contains the OpenCandy advertising stuff - we discussed it and decided that any revenue from that is not worth the damage to the game’s reputation and concern that may arise over the safety of installing KAG.  I will post again when the new installers are complete and available for download/linking

-FliesLikeABrick

Build 428

Build 428 is on its way out with some important (potential) fixes:

- fixed rcon admins/guards crash on certain collapses #267, #469

- fixed unable to join busy server (lots of objects)

- fixed crash on camera shake (sometimes)

- Removed use of in-game browser, links now open in normal external browsers

- pressing enter in the username box at login now submits the form 

- slight changes to how ping timing works in the browser, might yield more correct results

It is possible some of these issues are only partially fixed - the nature of these bugs means that they need to be tested in public for a while before we know they are fixed.

It is also likely that these fixes resolved some other bugs.  If you have submitted any bugs to the bug tracker, please test them (even if you submitted a long time ago but the report is still open) and add a new note to your bug report saying if the issue is still present or not.  

Discuss on the forums here

-FliesLikeABrick

Maintenance Debrief/Lessons Learned

The maintenance referenced in the previous post did not go as planned - it took significantly longer than expected due to load on the database server — KAG has grown quite a bit since this type of work was last done, so my “dry runs” of this work on a test setup did not properly reflect what would happen in production.

This maintenance was cancelled after 1 hour without success and will be reattempted in the near future with the following changes:

- I will  take the forums, homepage, and bugtracker offline for maintenance using a page that will show or link to information explaining what is going on

- The maintenance will be announced repeatedly in the 24-48 hours leading up to it

- I will roll out a KAG update which understands when maintenance is going on based on a signal from the API so that error messages can inform users what is going on instead of timing out

Thanks for your understanding as we work to improve KAG and prepare it for the future :)

FliesLikeABrick

Ongoing database maintenance

Some maintenance is being done on the main authentication database - you may be unable to log into the game/site/forums or list/join servers until this work is complete - hopefully in the next hour or so.  This is to resolve a performance issue with the KAG API.

Future work will hopefully be scheduled and announced further ahead of time - my apologies for any inconvenience.

This should be completed by 12:15 UTC.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh52OahYxIw?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

Time-lapse video from my server with a test version of WAR mode.

More time-lapse videos on the official KAG Youtube channel, subscribe now!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Minor Build 424

Build 424 is on its way out which has two purposes:

- A number of API calls made from KAG servers to the API were changed such that they do not cause lag spikes on the server in certain situations.  The server should also deal better with the API being unavailable (if it is completely unavailable, people will not be able to join but the players already in the server should be fine)

- There have been a handful of changes/hotfixes since 421 came out, so it is time to bump to the next build number to ensure everyone has the latest and greatest

If you are a server owner and have noticed any new problems with this build (or can state for sure that certain netcode hangs/crashes are no longer present), please head over to the forums and speak your mind in this thread.

FliesLikeABrick

Hotfix on 421

I just pushed a hotfix for build 421, it’s almost entirely behind-the-scenes changes:

- Removed a lot of old master code.  Client and server will no longer connect to master.kag2d.com.  This also potentially fixed some stability issues in the server and the client as well (possibly fixing the server browser crash reported by some Windows users)

- Slight change to browser UI

- Changes to browser help text

- kag://address:port/password now works on Windows

- /path/to/kag join server:port [password] now works on all OSes.  This in combination with kag:// should open potential to a lot of new scripts/tools which use the API to do things as people have started discussing on the forums and IRC

- client login code is 100% new, interface no longer freezes when you click the login button

- servers no longer attempt to upload bots to the API as players present in the server (whoops)

-miscellaneous code cleanup

Also, I created a new subforum for community development discussions/brainstorming and to create a dialogue between community devs themselves and the KAG developers. This is where requests from community developers should make informed requests about things like desired scripting hooks, API calls/data, etc in addition to any of the usual developer-developer technical talk.  So far it’s just me posting a few things, but by all means join in!

As for this hotfix build on 421, you can discuss that in the other thread 

-FliesLikeABrick

New build with completely new server browser interface

A new build (still build number 421 since there are no netcode changes) is on its way out right now —

Shadlington and myself have been working hard over the past 3-4 days to build a new server browser that has some proper filters and search abilities. Here is a quick list of the new features:

• Search instantly for whole player names, partial server names, partial descriptions, partial IP addresses, or partial game mode names


• Filter in/out gold and passworded servers


• Show only selected game modes


• Shadlington build a custom control for selecting how many players are in a server. It is extremely intuitive and allows you to set the minimum and maximum threshold for how many players you want in servers. You can select everything from empty to full, or do things like “half full to almost full”


• The minimaps are now shown centered in the preview window (so you don’t see some meaningless piece of sky), though you can drag them around as always

You can find information on how these features work below (and a wiki page will soon be created with full documentation)

This is a few days of hard work for the new interface, but on top of months of work developing the new King Arthur’s Gold API which is the backend for the new fast server browser as well as the new authentication code that was rolled out a few months ago.

The API is used by things like this server browser as well as available for use by community developers. Another post should be coming on that in the next week or so as it is more ready for public use.

Much more should be coming in the near future in terms of finding friends and viewing who is in a server before you join it. This information is all already available over the API, in case any site/server owners or developers want to start using this data. Post in this forum thread if you are a developer interested in some API information.

Favorites are still a bit buggy, but we waned to get this new interface out and used rather than waiting longer just to fix something that has been broken for a long time 

Here is the quick overview of how the new browser works

How to use the server browser

Instant Search: If you enter text here it will filter the server list down to those containing this text in one of the following fields: name, description, game mode, IP address. It will also search the names of players on servers shown.  Only entire names are matched.

e.g. entering ‘Shadlington’ will find any servers with ‘Shadlington’ in the name/description or any that Shadlington is playing on.

Players (%) slider: Use this to set the min and max percent full you want servers to be.

e.g. set it to 1% min and 99% max to find servers that are not empty and not full, or set it to 50% to 99% to find servers that are ‘at least half full’.

Gold/Passworded servers: These buttons have three states - No/Yes/Doesn’t Matter.

Map Preview: This shows the current state of the map on the server. Note that it can be dragged.

For more information, go to the KAG Wiki article for Server Browser.

Join the discussion on the forums in here!

-FliesLikeABrick

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsQk0BqRVX8?feature=oembed&w=500&h=374]

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Hotfix Build 421

This build just addresses the “Mash C to Mine Faster” bug, and archers having a gimped first shot (which were the same bug, it turns out).

Update your clients and servers!

Faster server browser released

Build 420 is on its way out now, with it is a complete overhaul to the server browser and the way servers register themselves with the central list.  The server browser looks identical, though in the next release or two it will change in appearance and gain significantly more filtering functionality.  These now make use of the King Arthur’s Gold central API, which will be getting a post of its own soon as it becomes more complete and is ready for use by community developers. 

For starters, the minimap of any server can be found by going to https ://api.kag2d.com/server/ip/{IPADDRESS}/port/{PORT}/minimap such as https://api.kag2d.com/server/ip/67.23.118.185/port/50314/minimap .  The status of a server can be viewed in machine-readable JSON format at a similar URL, such as https://api.kag2d.com/server/ip/67.23.118.185/port/50314/status (note that the exact keys present are still subject to change, consider this a preview).  The server list can also be fetched in a machine-readable JSON format at https://api.kag2d.com/servers/current/1/connectable/1 (and append /build/420 to only see servers in build 420.  The next post on the API will explain all of the other filters available)

Here is a full changelog for this otherwise small release:

- server browser now uses API and threaded calls

- more colors in server preview minimap in server browser

- many server browser bugs fixed

- made arrows not damage at minimum velocity under water

- made arrows skip higher

- dirt no longer created for infinite support

- fixed dropping mats working always -> allowing inf mats on startup

Here’s what some servers look like currently:

[FR] Nemesis Clan WOOD-WATER Unlimited Lives

U13 USEast 32 slot FullCTF Gold:

Discussion on the forums here

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avaSdC0QOUM?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

Coming next major release in KAG

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Scripting in the works! Also, gigantic changes to Building and Fire, and Server Browser improvements.

We’re working on getting scripting happening per-component for all entities!

This means that complex behaviours can be programmed per-entity, rather than relying on hardcoded components to do it for you. This is good for us as it means we can iterate far more quickly on things like siege engines and such, but also good for modders as it means they can code their own animation logic and AI for NPCs, and make special items ingame. Next build is gonna be excellent.

Just a heads up to modders: Unfortunately, this means breaking compatibility with all existing config files - not invalidating them entirely, but they’ll require conversion. Conversion is as simple as adding “$script =” to the top of all of the component sections, but it needs to be done by hand to avoid mangling your configs. Once the release is out, have a look at the default configs to see how it’s done.

We’re changing the way building works at the level of the tilemap - all constructed blocks will be separate entities, and all dirt etc will remain on the tilemap. This means that blocks can be properly layered on top of each other, and that the support code can be optimised a fair bit as it wont need to flood through the entire map. This will also solve issues with (for example) bits of the map collapsing when they shouldn’t. Because blocks will have their own HP, this opens up the way for per-block resistances to different attacks, so knights will be able to grind down a stone block over time (read: 100 hits or so).

The cooler part of the constructed block changes is that we’ll be able to have multi-tile blocks to construct, like 2x1 column blocks that will break as one piece. This should give more variation to buildings, and allow some more complicated blocks to make their way into the game (such as traps, elevators and so on).

Fire has also started being drafted up in code, and while it’s early days, I’ve been having excellent fun burning down wooden towers with it.

Tom and Ryan are working on the server browser, which is now lightning fast, fully threaded and about 80% easier to work with.

We expect the conversion of map stuff to take a little longer, and there aren’t screenshots to show yet, but there will likely be some dev videos as we make progress. Figured you guys would like an update on what’s getting worked on other than continued balancing tweaks.

Discuss here.

Geti