Sangfroid Montage - Tender is the Knight
For anyone wondering about the current state-of-the-art in knighting, this is it, set to nice music courtesy of KAG Player Sangfroid! Sick keg drops, massive streaks, and an unbelievable capture denial make this a must watch.
Forum Discussion here: https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/tender-is-the-knight.20734/
Enjoy!
Update on the THD.VG story + Patch estimates for KAG
Currently thd.vg is still not available, and the plan is for it to be re-aquired by us following the previous registrar going bust. We're looking for ways to speed this up, considering that we're the previous owner.
thd.vg emails will still not work as a result and will reply with that annoying MAILER DAEMON - FAILURE message. There's nothing we can do about this in the short term. The most important thing to remember is you can email [email protected] for support queries.
transhumandesign.net, transhumandesign.org and transhumandesign.pl have been registered (amidst quite a lot of intra-company debate about what domain to go with), and we're talking with the owner of transhumandesign.com about acquiring it - we're still debating what we should use as a core domain to avoid this big mess happening again; ideally we'd like a core domain that's short and uses a time-proven top level domain - the issue with thd.vg is a result of political issues surrounding the .vg TLD.
Our build server has been unavailable through this time, though Ryan/FliesLikeABrick and Joe/jrgp have been working on getting it going again so we can test and release updates.
A patch for KAG should make it out next week, luck withholding. Included in the patch are some boat changes (increased speed, ramming ability moved from war boat to long boat), some more CTF Map changes, votekick improvements (can abstain from voting, and the message is a bit smaller), a crash fix or two, a handful of community fixes to things like workshops and spike kills, and some minor modding fixes; more modding fixes will come in a later patch as a result of some side project development.
Max/Geti
New support email
Hey all,
Due to the issues we're still having with thd.vg's registrar, we have changed our support email from [email protected] to [email protected]. Please use [email protected] for all future help requests.
Regards,
Joe/jrgp
Brief outage this morning
Hi all,
Due to an issue with the ".vg" TLD, some of the KAG services (forum, jabber, API, update system) were out for roughly an hour or so this morning. Ryan and I were promptly notified and we resolved the issue as soon as we could. Also, be aware that none of the email addresses for @thd.vg currently work at this time. This includes [email protected]. We are currently working towards a fix/work around.
Please report any additional issues to [email protected] or [email protected]
Regards,
Your quiet neighborhood sysadmin, jrgp/joe
Build 1120 - Balance, Modding and Fixes
Hey guys, kinda small build this time but there's some nice little changes in there that will help server owners tweak their play experience how they like, and hopefully see a rise in novel modes.
- Config Vars TDM especially has benefited from the addition of more variables exposed through a config file - even the old RTDM mode is now possible through simple config file changes. CTF has also had most of its costs exposed through a config, though some of the more involved ones were left out. We'll see how much use they get before going the extra mile. Older players keen to play some RTDM again should be happy about this one anyway!
- TDM Tweaks TDM economy has been tweaked a little bit (as part of getting the config working) - there is a minimum of coins each round, but you can also save up in between rounds to help reward good play and allow for maps without a trader on them. The round plays a little more like counter strike now, on maps with a trader at least. We're seeing more item use overall, but not too much spamming of any one item (except maybe bomb arrows ;) Shops can be turned off completely from within the config file as well, and all costs can be adjusted. Traders are also always neutral, so they don't protect one team and hinder another (though they can be used as makeshift cover).
- Swap Channels Option Linux users rejoice! Lucas has added a swap channels option for those suffering the flipped audio bug.
- Spectator cam kicks in faster Small tweak, but those sick of looking at their corpse for 5 seconds after dying are in for a treat :^)
- Fixed "Corner Hitting" The longest standing bug still in KAG has been fixed! Hitting through corners is no longer a thing.
- Keg Tweaks Bombjumping with kegs has been fixed, and the keg is lighter. The keg dropping on hit is still in, as we feel this provides a much more interesting mechanic. It's been moved a little backwards to help with it getting shot off your back by arrows. Keg explosions are now also symmetrical, the "down" line of the explosion isn't strangely weak any more.
- Knight Shield Direction Unlocked The shield direction in air has been fully unlocked to allow shielding to the side while in the air more easily. The shield angle has also been subtly increased (not anything like what it was though)
- Longer CTF Build Time By default, the CTF build time is now 180 seconds instead of 120, so the pre game castles should be a little better prepared. We'll be observing the issues this might introduce with rushing being non-viable, but it shouldn't make too much of a difference.
Build should be out across all platforms within the hour. Be sure to leave your comments in the build thread on the forums.
As always, have fun!
Max/Geti
Build 1110
Quite a big balance patch this time, with a few experimental changes in the mix too. Let the changelog begin:
- Knight Shield The Knight shield angles have been tweaked a lot - they should provide less cover overall, meaning that more arrows and explosions are likely to hit their mark. Specifically, the shield angle has been reduced from a whopping 220 degrees to somewhere between 130 and 160 degrees, depending on what you're doing specifically with the shield at the time. Be a little more careful, knights.
- Kegs Kegs now can take much more of a beating, leading to less premature detonation. There's a catch, however - kegs now get dropped when they're hit, meaning someone can shoot or smack the keg off your back. People with kegs will need to be a fair bit more careful if they want to keep a hold of it; try to provide support for anyone on your team carrying them! Kegs also change their owner on getting picked up now, rather than on throw, so that the correct person gets the kills.
- Explosives Explosives now can't actually destroy ground blocks - they'll chew structures just fine, but will not remove any blocks The blocks will need to be removed by other means (sword, pick, drill, bolt, boat, pick your poison). This should help reduce the background terrain erosion a lot, and give builders more control over the flow of the battlefield, while still allowing blockades to be bombed down. Bedrock "eating" keg explosions should also be a fair bit better, and kegs should _not_ kill through walls that absorbed the explosion - of course, some dirt walls will not absorb the explosion even though they are not destroyed. This is experimental: we'll see how this goes, it might need a bit of tweaking, but we're tired of the massive erosion that happens to every map, every game.
- More Heads 6 new heads (3 for each gender) have been added; Gurren Lagann heads for everone sporting kamina glasses or anime avatars on the forums, messy red hair heads to service that niche, and sk8r boi/gurl heads for those who miss the bad old days.
- More Killfeed Icons No more Keg causing "fall" icon! The drill and saw icons are stlil missing though..
- Traps and buildings Traps and buildings should be a little more viable long-term, as platforms and wooden doors take less damage from swords, and trap blocks cannot be damaged by swords at all.
- Optimisation The way the run flags for each script are calculated has been optimised so that the checks are only carried out a maximum of once per frame per blob. We'll work more on optimising this as well, because there's still overhead associated with checking all of them even when they aren't needed.
- Cost Tweak Bombs now cost 25c in CTF; an even 100 for 4. Mines are now 60c so they see more use. Burgers are now purchaseable from the quarters/inn/kitchen, and the cost of healing items has generally been decreased. Archers can now shoot burgers to make ranged support via healing more possible (it works with fish too, but they can be tricky to come by in some games).
- Weight tweaks Corpses are now medium weight, so that lugging one around slows you down a little. Kegs are now heavy weight, so they slow you a lot.
- Run Through Doors Exploit Fixed Self explanatory.
- Fixed Smooth Shader First change by our long time support guy Lucas/Furai - the smooth shader should now work properly for all resolutions instead of just the default!
- No Light from Buildings This facilitates underground stealth bases more easily, and encourages lantern use.
- Modding Joining modded servers has been made less "scary" and annoying - the warning window only shows up on your first day of play. Servers are also flagged as modded less frequently, most notably maps, mapcycles and config files wont trigger a server as modded. Script changes will trigger a server as modded, as will any loaded mods (naturally). Hopefully the increased ease of joining and increased exposure in general will help kick the modding scene into gear :^) Mods verified with and uploaded to the API should now Auto-Update, though I'll leave it to Tom to explain the specifics in the thread as I'm not 100% clear on them.
I think that's about it - quite a lot so there might be a few issues, but it should be fine for the weekend. Have fun!
Max Edit by Tom: Server auto-updates explained here
Happy Easter!
SSL issues patched up
Hello,
With regards to the recent Heartbleed SSL vulnerabilities that have been taking its toll on the Internet, our system administrators have patched our server infrastructure such that we are not vulnerable to any SSL attacks.
Cheers, Furai/Lucas
[Promotion] $12.99 for two copies of KAG
Hey,
We've recently been working on our website in order to bring you this promotion! This is an amazing offer - for only $12.99 you can get two copies of KAG!
All you need to do is to go to our main website and buy the game from there.
This promotion together with the newly released mod "Shiprekt" will make the best gift you can ever do to your friend!
Don't hesitate. Buy the game and play this amazing mod with your friend!
Cheers, Furai/Lucas
Play Shiprekt!
This is a full conversion mod for KAG. Our first idea was to make a simple top-down shooter like Asteroids. But what if you were free to build the ship from blocks? Furthermore what if these blocks were random like Tetris? Mix it with 2 other classics: Arcanoid and Bomberman and you've got Shiprekt.
We made this mod because we believe in making games that provide simple gameplay elements but combined with freedom and your creativity - bring an infinite possibility of action, total havoc and wreckage. In other words FUN.
Build Ships!
Wreck the Enemy!
How to get it?
Shiprekt is a mod for King Arthur's Gold. If you've purchased KAG then just launch the servers browser and pick a blue server that has this mod on. If you don't have KAG yet, get it here or on Steam.
How to Play: *Your Core (spawn) provides random parts *Use these parts to build your ship *Protect your Core *Destroy all other ships Cores *Avoid falling into water (ever watched Jaws?) *After losing your core you get switched to another team, this happens until there is one team left *(only) All players on the final surviving team get points - so play nice!
*[ WASD ] to move around *[ E ] when close to use ship components *[ SPACE ] rotates blocks while building. *[ LMB ] to punch boarders *[ SPACE ] releases all couplings (gray crosses) when sitting in a seat *[ SCROLL ] zoom in/out
(these keys apply by default only)
Have fun and let us know on forums what you think of the game.
Please share/tweet/facebook this link so more players come play!
Build 1085 - "Shiprekt"
Incoming Big Build!
Lots of KAG Tweaks, and AUS Official Servers!
First of all, the example mod "Shiprekt" is having its first public release! It's a bit rough around the edges but demonstrates a complete total conversion to top down ship building carnage!
List of "Shiprekt" Features:
- Full total conversion in a simple KAG mod. Join a server and play, no bullshit!
- Top down block based ship building, with per-block destruction!
- Totally Moddable! Want more blocks in the game? Add them!
A handful of KAG tweaks have gone ahead at the same time, either driven by Shiprekt development, community feedback, tester suggestions or sudden inspiration to change things up.
List of the major KAG tweaks:
- Spikes changes Spikes now stun on hit Spikes now hit when wallsliding or wall running These combine to allow some devlish 1 hit kill traps and a lot more vertical control when placed on wood blocks and mixed with trap blocks to save them from hurting your team. I'm very keen to see where this takes the building meta.
- No arrow slashing I decided I didn't have strong feelings about this and the majority opinion is that it's luck based and hurts competitive play, even if it does look cool.
- More Particle Functionality Modders will be happy to know that as part of Shiprekt development we added a heap of nice new functionality to particles, such as scripted callbacks and being able to get a handle to pixel particles. BV contains good examples of this new functionality, check out humangibs.as in particular as it demos all 3 of these.
- Various annoying exploits fixed A coin duplication bug and the infinite spawning traders bug should both be fixed, pending confirmation from public testing. The coin dupe fix is temporary, a proper solution will be done over the next week.
- TDM Tweaks -Trader menu in TDM stays open after purchase -TDM prices reshuffled to prevent a million spec arrow spams. Anyone who regularly (or even irregularly) plays TDM should be pleased with these changes.
There are also now Official Australian Servers, have a look for them in the server browser! Only took 3 years!
These are the result of some collaboration with the guys hosting the major community Aus servers to move their ever competent admins over to an official capacity, and keep the Aus community strong in the face of them running low on funding. As always the official servers are hosted by Joe/jrgp. We'll be working hard to keep these servers up to the same quality as the old community ones.
Have Fun!
Max/Geti
Preparing to Launch!
A tiny manned torpedo launch - sorry for the ugly gif compression!
Some people were asking about how disconnected ships are possible, so here's a gif explaining one of the many ways - you can also simply build blocks in the water without connecting them to your main ship, and blocks can become separated through destruction as well.
This gif is particularly fitting cause we're preparing to launch the mod today, we're testing the changes that have been made to KAG and making sure the mod works more or less out of the box, and doesn't break your normal KAG install.
All things going according to plan (hahaha, yeah right) we'll hopefully have it in your hot little hands tonight.
Have Fun!
Max/Geti
Build Delay - Sorry!
While there was meant to be a build out today with the modding example, a whole heap of new features, and gold names for the Aus Official servers, it's been delayed.
We'll be doing our best to get it out on Monday, but we haven't had enough time to test the changes to KAG "proper", and the mod example needs a bit more cleaning until MM's happy to let it into the public hands.
We're in disagreement about what's fun at the moment and I think it'll be much more productive to come back to it after the weekend than make some knee-jerk reaction that could cripple the game.
Sorry to disappoint anyone waiting on the edge of their seat. Delays happen.
Have fun!
Max/Geti
Mod Example Video
THD Tester Norill today recreated the classic game "Left" in the upcoming example mod "Bomb Voyage!". We've done this a few times already during development to test out the physics but to see it happen emergently during testing brought a happy tear to our eyes :')
More Mod Progress - Content updates
Towards the end of last week we were gearing up for testing, however some networking issues got in the way of getting it in the hands of testers, unfortunately. We'll hopefully get that together over the next day or so, since we'd like to have the mod done by the end of the week.
Lots of progress was made on content though!
Bombs cause devastating explosions!
We're going to add a nice delay to bombs to reduce the number of accidental explosions that are happening, but they're quite functional so far.
Cannons firing!
The defense given by solid walls is invaluable. The cannons must be carefully aimed to take out tiles, but will kill players on any collision. They can be used to remotely detonate explosives as well!
Cannons can also be used to remove tiles you don't want - this could be extended to torpedo or bomb or fighter boat release systems.
Cannons need to be carefully placed to get a good amount of shooting angle in - this usually means they're fairly exposed too, allowing retaliatory fire!
Sharks will keep players out of the water.
We decided drowning was no fun, and sharks were more fun. 'Nuff said.
Have Fun!
Max/Geti
Example Mod Progress + Gifs!
Hey guys, progress update on the still unnamed big example mod!
Figured seeing stuff in action would be most interesting for you guys, so here are some gifs:
Building - demonstrating the "tetris" aspect (sorry for the janky gif recording)
The ratios of each type of tile are currently just for testing; there should be far fewer seats in the mix in the final game. Tweaking the ratio of each part is trivial, and might be moved to a config file for easy server-side configuration (for servers with 50% bomb blocks in the mix, for example).
Out of control ship
This little "fighter" ship's pilot was accidentally munched into one of the propellers, but it stayed active, forming a collision hazard for anyone nearby!
Tiny test torpedo
We don't have the bombs working just yet but with propellers and building working they're up next, along with cannons! Ship destruction effects are currently super rudimentary but they'll get some love in the next few days. The "pilot" here probably should have been killed in the collision.
Still to-do graphically is some way of orienting yourself properly with the world as it's currently very difficult to understand what direction you're moving in without a point of reference.
We've also got to bind a few things in the engine (like the background colour of the world) and potentially fix the parallax layers to work with rotation (though that might take too much time for this cycle, as the issue is due to the way the whole thing is coded, not a one-line bug).
As you can see progress is coming along fairly quickly, and we're hoping to be able to have a game with the testers on friday after nutting out what needs to be done sync-wise.
Have Fun!
Max/Geti