B844 - Cleaning up, Knight digging, Graphical tweaks

B844 is incoming, fixing everything introduced last build by untested changes and adding some much needed intuitiveness to knight digging among other things.
Knights can now dig in dirt and break damaged wood blocks by simply jabbing or slashing at them, no precise close aiming required.
Knight throwables are now shown behind their sprite rather than in front, which should make it easier to tell what they’re doing while throwing things. Small tweak, but it worked well in classic. Knight throwables also don’t swap selected type at the wrong time.
As a bonus, attacking inside ballistas, catapults etc should work fine now.
Trampolines are now very directional, which means there’s more engineering involved in making a knight-o-pult from one tower to the next. Should cut down on the number of 90 degree sideways trampolines being used to circumvent normal defences (at least somewhat). Balancing will be needed of course, but we’ll see how the public reacts first.
We’ve done some cleaning up of a few scripts and some engine code as well, nothing too drastic but should help reduce the number of bugs in the future.
Still outstanding is that bug with ladders through blocks and a lot of more miscellaneous stuff. We’ll see if we can make that before the weekend but it’s not super likely as its quite a complicated issue (tilemap containing actors overlapping other tiles).
As a small note, a few of the fixes made are not fully optimised, especially the one about hitinfos - these will be optimised more in coming days.
[fixed] trampoline not bouncing objects online
[fixed] server crash for real now
[fixed] possible to cross red barrier in vehicle
[fixed] chat colors in console
[fixed] hitinfos missing some times, need to optimise a lot though
[modified] trees no longer hurt players when they fall on them
[modified] trees hit ground earlier to prevent logs jammed in walls etc.
[added] tags for things that block knight attacks instead of some obscure check - fixed #1096
[modified] knights can break dirt without having cursor too close
[modified] back ladder zone on warboat is visible
[fixed] knight can attack through doors/traps
[modified] fixed water not going to the edge of the map
[modified] satchel sprite to be less like bread, needs complete overhaul
[added] behind when attached script for blobs to appear behind parent when attached
[modified] bomb, satchel, keg appear behind character at shoulder (like classic)
[modified] keg fuse is easier to see
[added] autoupdate_ignore_custom.cfg to default installation
[modified] water bomb behind when attached too
[added] more smoke effects when stone and wood destructed
[modified] pick spawn menu is in lower part of screen
[modified] pick spawn menu vanishes after clicking
[fixed] server LAG warnings not appearing in console
[modified] trampolines are much better for construction and still allow big jumps, might need TDM maps etc modified though.
[modified] trampolines have controlled height - press down for less bounce up for more.
[fixed] annoying knight bombs changing when you still have some of the currently selected one
[modified] chatcommon can summon scrolls with names that have spaces
[fixed] incorrectly handled non-truncated links from twitter - launcher bug
Have fun!
Max/Geti

Original DevBlog post.

 

Will there be no such things as vertical trampolines in the future or will there distance be reduce from what they were before and increased compared to now

 

Yay, now the trader can actually be used at game start and when you're losing :)

 

I'm going to miss this alot.

 

Please return the way bombs were before now it is really hard to see when the bomb is detonating. and if you put a shield on the 45 degrease angle and stand back to the wall you wont be able to see the bomb.

 

Tipping trees over on teammates, yeah that really was nice when you had someone annoying on your team.
"I didn't do that, it was a tree that did it."

 

Yeah I just loved the way you can use object to kill people, including the trees! Please bring this back.

 

I already love this build

 

It would be better if they improved it by having tree's not hurting teammates imo, so if you chop a tree and it hits a enemy it does damage, this actually worked a couple of times when I was in combat both sides of the fight.

 

You do realize it would take a lot of recoding because you have to change the way the tree logic will behave, not to mention bugs popping out of it, there are more important issues to be ironed out than having trees kill players.

 

this requires adding one line of code. please stop talking about things you don't know.

trees are too unreliable to be usable in combat. if you try to chop it down to fall onto the enemy you can't tell then it is about to fall. the result is falling too early or not falling until their knight comes close and accidentally falls it onto you while trying to jab (that happened to me twice).

its too random to be fun and just pisses people off

 

I don't think I've ever actually seen the trader have a meaningful impact on a game and while it does lend some meaning to gold it kind of pollutes the tech progression. But otoh trader get maimed in a lot of funny ways so w/e.

 

It was hilarious every time it happened.

Looks like we've entered the no fun allowed zone yet again.

 

Looks like we've entered shitpost complains zone yet again

 

Those trees must have killed you a lot, huh.

 

Why do we hold bombs retardedly now

 

The trader has pretty limited uses. Mainly just when you go down another branch of research and want just one item like the drill for example. Sometimes I really want to drill mid-game OR getting drill in the build time. For me that's pretty useful. Having him at the spawn hall makes that possible.