More Zombies Updates! Also, patch explanation.

I know, I know you all scanned every letter of that last patch for zombie related goodies and then punched your screens in collective rage at the lack of undead to slaughter. I hate no zombies just as much as the next guy.

The patch was forced by a few unsavoury types exploiting a bug that allowed them to impersonate both members of the staff and community. We took it upon ourselves to work a few of the fixes that we’ve had to postpone for zombies into the emergency patch. Mark-kicking now works again, netcode should be a little smoother, a few server browser bugs have been fixed…

Hopefully that addresses most of the issues until we can release the undead upon you (or you upon the undead, depending on how good at fighting you happen to be).

Speaking of the undead:

They seem to be packing their bags…

They should be on your doorstep in your autopatcher early February. Keep an eye out :) This will be a scaled-back release so that we can show you what we’ve got so far and take a break from working night and day on these guys - it’ll still contain hundreds of undead to heartlessly murder, wang dungeons (snicker) to explore and a collaborative focus, just know that there’s more coming.

A heads up: once they arrive the price of a premium account will increase from $9.99 to $12.50. The discount will therefore be 50%.

BUY NOW WITH PAYPAL
After payment you should INSTANTLY get a gift code to your e-mail. You can use this code to make your account FULL and get Zombies right the minute they arrive.

Geti

Free accounts from G+ to get the ball rolling!

Shadlington has set up a competition on the google plus page, the rules and where to sign up can be found here! Good luck!

Zombies progress

Today we were solving some gameplay issues with zombies. This mode is hard to do because the whole game world is random. There is a lot of issues that we must predict and make it work. This is NOT gonna be a dumb game like something in Flash where you just stand on a fort and mindless zombies come at you. The zombies are gonna be part of this random world and you are the intruder. This is going to be an adventure in its own right.

MM

Free Indie Game of the Year 2011 IGM - King Arthur's Gold

King Arthur’s Gold aka KAG is officially free indie game of the year in IGM’s Readers choice (click for official link). It seems players love the game already despite being in alpha stage. So this is just the beginning. Thanks to all that voted.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHzSPdIM2fo]

Voting has still not ended at JayIsGames so do that now (CLICK) and support your favorite multiplayer game! You can vote once a day so do it again if you have already.

Have fun!
MM

[gallery]

Completely random castles! Now with Wangs cutting through the terrain to form basic dungeons.

Wang Tiles

Today I explored the subject of Wang Tiles and Herringbone patterns.

These funny little beasts are used to create randomly generated castles, dungeons and ruins. Zombies need to inhabit something right?

Here’s a preview of the first day of work.

More live game footage soon, including dungeons and caves. 

Oh and some patches to the current public version too…

MM

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.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1e02dNLSCc?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

"Builder Fight" KAG game on the Aussie server, courtesy of Riletyface! Thread here.

From what I understand, both teams decided to have a round of builder-only fun, and as far as I can see, most players stuck to the rule and had a great game.

Could be something to try channeling while you wait for zombies, server owners ;)

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

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 3/4 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 

BUILD 262-263 RELEASED!

THIS BUILD IS A PREPARATION BEFORE THE NEXT BIG UPDATES INCLUDING ZOMBIES & WAR MODE

This means the goodies aren’t yet here but if you consider bug fixes and game improvements goodies then you’ll be really satisfied with this release. The most important changes in this build are:

• Changed workshop building to an UPGRADE MECHANISM using USE KEY [E]
  All rooms are 3x3 grids that you build with the generic room block. After you have an empty room, press [E] on the room and select the workshop you want to build.
  
  


• Outposts and catapults are built in the SIEGE WORKSHOP
  
  


• KAG map format which saves everything on the map (/loadmap /savemap commands eg. “/savemap plaza”)
  
  


• Faster network code. Many optimizations in this area you’ll notice a slightly lower ping.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, here is a detailed list. Read this (especially if you’re on a Mac).

Changes 228-262:

- new Swordfight map
- fixed some collision bugs
- fixed tents spawning underground
- map format changed to .KAG
- loadmap savemap - loadssaves .KAG files
- loadbitmap NAME - loads PNG map format from Maps/
- packet compression is back on
- arrows stick to bodies
- fixed rules time counter and display
- changed to larger font for catapult health and blocks menu resources display
- builder rectangle cursor doesn’t appear if not buildable and not diggable
- fixed ping times in server browser
- fixed favorites in server browser
- fixed server browser password prompt display
- fixed sort types list box
- fixed most bottom blocks on map indestructible bug
- added speedhack detection and prevention
- units are decreased on spawn not death
- Mac: fixed ingame web browser
- Mac: fixed screen options not saving
- Mac: changed team chat switch to Ctrl
- Mac: improve graphic performance on
- Mac: fixed game crashing when window larger than desktop
- fixed authentication mix up when two players from same host connect
- improved network code - slightly lower pings
- added server check for knight slashing
- slash takes 5% longer
- sv_compression variable works again
- fixed throw sound being played if trying to drop materials during warmup
- fixed client crash on map restart
- fixed trying to connect to full server
- units aren’t decreased in build time
- added nextmap command (restartmap works as it should now)
- Mac: fixed clipboard pasting Cmd+V
- Mac: fixed mouse button / shield problem
- fixed head config hack
- fixed bomb killing teammates
- improved offscreen objects netcode
- autoupdate can be canceled with ESC
- new linux dedicated executable works w/o batch file “./KAGdedi”

Changes 262-263:

- fixed kick and swap menus not scrolling
- arrows don’t stick to shields
- fixed unpredictable bomb throwing on high ping
- fixed unit_count=0 in gamemode.cfg (one life for all)
- fixed warmup counter display
- fixed quarters not healing if something in front of it

DOWNLOAD NOW

LINUX AND MAC USERS ARE ADVISED TO DOWNLOAD AND MAKE A FRESH INSTALL OF THIS BUILD.

Linux server needs to be launched manually with ./KAGdedi after autoupdate (chmod +x KAGdedi too)

New Release Imminent

We’ve been toiling to get everything converted for an interim release before the zombie release soon - We’re as keen for it to be out the door as I’m sure you guys are to play it.

We’re working out the last of the bugs at the moment and collating everything, so be sure to keep your eyes on the devlog so you know when to patch your game.

If you’d like to help out with testing, download the test build from this thread and be sure to report any bugs that you notice in the test build subforum!

Geti

Test build available

The testing build of the next KAG patch is available for testing for all 3 platforms.

http://kagforum.com/index.php?threads/test-build.216/page-75#post-47021

General testing notes:

Be warned that there might be unexpected bugs that won’t allow to play the game.

Please post bugs/opinions about the test version on that forum topic ONLY.

READING THE CHANGELOG IS MANDATORY. Asking stupid questions about the changes will result in kick. The changelog is located in the KAG directory in the file readme.txt, it will also be available here when I post it.

Zombies are switched off because this patch isn’t about zombies. They will come after this I promise.

MM