Deadline Announcement + Water and Wood almost here!

This has been a hell of a week!

The server's went down (twice, but in quick succession), and a compilation bug halted testing for 5 DAYS. Ryan (FliesLikeABrick) has had his work cut out for him there - He'll be posting soon about supporting very old versions of linux.

Despite all of that, the last few days have been productive.

First of all, some hard news that's come up in the last few weeks:

We're on an external deadline for getting the game complete, and the date falls fairly soon (actual disclosure of the date isn't legally possible at this point). As such, we've done some feature pruning and are knuckling down to get the game finished, to a point where we can stop developing it and just maintain, fix bugs where needed.

What this means for us:

We've got to clean up the buy page's "future features" list to reflect the changes in plans that we've made over the past few weeks. This is one of those times where we have to do what we wrote in the disclaimer and try to make the game perfect as it stands rather than incorporating features that are too time-costly or different from what we already have.
We've got to work quickly on getting features actually complete rather than drafted or planned.
We need to improve the modding and level creation side of things to help players build worlds to adventure in and fight over.
What this means for you:

No super-complex months to complete features like Overworld. As grand a plan as that might be, it's simply not going to happen this time around.
KAG gets completed sooner, in terms of everything on the premium poster.
Better, more focused modding tools.
I've written quite a lot in this thread, so if you're interested in the finer details and our personal reasons, have a read. The whole thread is do-able in 30 minutes or so.

I'll summarise the important part though: Our TODO as it currently stands is this - Making sure at least everything on the premium poster is covered.

Customisation - may or may not involve custom/user defined heads, will definitely include more built in heads + skin colour customisation.
More and more useful Siege weapons, some form of ride-able vehicles. (Almost all of these are sprited but not coded).
Fire + Water (Got water ~80% done, and wood blocks -> a fair bit of fire done)
Zombies (done, at least for now)
Game modes + Custom Game-modes (requires scripting work, but that's ok as we want to do that for some of the other areas of development to help speed up our internal work and give more options to modders)
Items + Item management (This one is gonna require a fair bit of re-work, but shouldn't be that much work if we're smart about how we approach it)
We understand that some people will be disappointed, but that's the reality of any creative work. Please know that we're not doing this out of lack of passion, far from it. We just need to get the game finished and don't have the time for grand schemes any more.

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On to something more cheery: Water and Wood blocks are almost releasable, Should be out early next week or perhaps this weekend if testing goes 100% according to plan (...it never does).

This should help spice up the full version a little. Apologies for the large shot, blame BlueLuigi and his massive HD KAG.



Water: You can swim, drown, skim arrows (and knights), and build bridges over it. Some form of water transport will be coming soon. The water level is saved into the .kag format, which we're working on making a lot more palatable to server owners. It only works on full version servers.

Wood buildings: These offer a cheaper, weaker alternative to stone blocks, and can be upgraded to stone later on. It's advised to make your non-vital indoor floors out of wood, and keep anything facing the enemy made out of stone. We're not adding Wood to the free game because we believe a balance has already been struck there - but in the full game, especially on water maps in bridge-building, wood is an invaluable resource. As such, trees now give a lot more wood per hit.

Shield-bashing: it's not nearly as crazy as it used to be, but it certainly helps that you can shove people out of doorways with it and it helps make knight combat less about slashing. The variables for it are currently in gamemode.cfg, and will be moving to per-class configs soon.

HUD Changes: Hearts are now above your head on hover, as well as immediately after you get hurt. We know this will seem like a shock at first, but it helps clear the screen of clutter. We'll be adding a topbar with vital stats etc as an option for those that want it, but we're moving towards a much cleaner interface (compare order pie menus with the order-lasso). Consider it a Work-In-Progress.

Gathering materials has also changed - you can now carry one stack of materials beyond what fits into your inventory, and furthermore, material stacks now have a sprite indicative of how many materials they contain. We've considered making them persist indefinitely on the map, but ultimately this opens the possibility for a lot of lag and server burden. We'll implement stockpiles soon to allow you to store materials and other items in a more friendly way.

The graphics of the map are a little different as well, which should help with visually understanding the terrain immediately. There's a bit more work to do there, but its presentable enough. Graphical mods of the map will need re-arranging because of this.

Some modding vars: Note that these aren't 100% final, so back up your configs and if you tinker, as always, be ready to re-do your work at a later date.

What you can build and how much it costs is now in a class config, check out the CTF builder files.

Full version server owners are urged to try out generator_ctf_lake.cfg as a map once the release is out, potentially with only 30s of build time - the lake coupled with the support requirement means builders need to dive and build pillars for a bridge across, which makes builders a necessary frontline unit and completely rules out early rushing. Personally, I've really enjoyed the testing games we've had there. We've got to work on some counters to turtling over the next week but I'm sure server owners will have a party with the variables in the meantime.