This week's cool stuff

Fwiw water and wood blocks preliminary implementation likely will make it into this week's release. We want to get a much faster dev turn around than we have been working on for a long time.

I'm super pissed off about how zombies has played out because each of the features there has required significant changes to some other part of the code - the kind of changes that take time. As such, progress was slow as hell, and even at the end of the day, some mechanics are in conflict with others, and there are still quite a few hacks in there.

This week we've got water drafted (some things might change but the core mechanic of a level of water, waves and drowning wont), wood blocks in and started work on dynamic castle blocks. I dunno about you guys but I feel that that's good progress, and the right way to be doing development.

Oh how I wish zombies mode was what we originally planned: zombies come, you build a fort and kill them for as long as you can. Reason being that that's basically what we have, only with party controls and >1 type of zombie, and 4 months fewer development time for other things than we'd like.



Actually, you know what, here's an insight into development for you.

Something a lot of you aren't aware of: we actually don't have years and years to make KAG into whatever we want.
We've got a deadline on it now, for external reasons, and want to work on other games, explore more ideas and make more fun stuff. We also don't want to change the game into something it's not - it will always be a fast paced team building fighting game.We'll implement some elements commonly seen in strategy games to make the flow of larger games a little more palatable and less random, but KAG will always be a fast paced game with a purpose, not yet another giant sandbox game.
If we can't get everything done in time, we'll be cropping out the features that add the least and change the most (read: the overworld side of things) because they aren't what KAG is about. It's about a few teams of people competing. If that means reducing the final price of the game, we don't mind. Cramming in more and more features just for the sake of having more stuff is how terraria ended up the way it is - a giant conglomerate of semi-related unrefined mechanics.
That's all well and good for a sandbox, but it's not the kind of game we want KAG to be - we want a game trimmed of fat, of unnecessary mechanics, a game that is just pure simple fun, easy to pick up and play but with a long road to mastery. We want to get it to a point where we can call it done, and have some time to polish things up as well.

We've got to the point where we no longer have the time to dream of very large, complicated systems like in an MMO, nor are we particularly interested in implementing them. Even if we wanted to go full MMO on KAG as it stands, we don't have the tools at our disposal at the moment. The engine is fairly simple to add new things to, but is very hard to change things in. We feel that we have time for just one more large scale change in the development of the game before it comes out of development proper and enters its maintenance cycle, and that is changes to the way buildings and support work. I'll go into that later, probably next week.

We can always revisit this intellectual property in future to make a more strategic, long term focussed game (which is actually the plan at this point) - but it certainly wont happen for KAG 1.0.

(inb4 OMG DESERTING KAG)

 

If I could like that >1 time, I would.

 

Guys, what does an overworld add to the game as it stands? Think about it. It's basically the same thing as large maps, but with a confusing switch between states and more server strain from multiple maps running simultaneously (-> a crapload of physics calculations).

If you want a sandbox, that's already possible, you don't need multiple maps bound together for that.
If you want an RTS, that's a completely different game and not something we're going to do with this project.
If you want a fast paced, team-based strategic pvp deathmatch game, you're in luck.

The fast pace and ease of play is a large part of what makes KAG fun. If we were to add an overworld, things would be very much slowed down (large world means more places for people to be, means less conflict means less action means more sandbox).

KAG has never been intended as a "true" sandbox game. Some sandbox play is possible, but we're focussed on more competitive/cooperative, faster gameplay. You'll be able to re-arrange the elements that we create to make PVE "adventure" servers, and if the tech system is vaguely fleshed out (something we'll need to prevent people being all LOLKEGS at the start of a game) you'll be able to extend it to include more technologies and longer research times for a much more strategy (and cooperation) dependent game.

I intend to replace the editor in the coming weeks with something able to place blobs, freeze time, teleport around, grab and move objects, edit the currently loaded rules _and_ choose how a map is saved - whether it includes specific rules or not, whether it embeds the configs or loads them from disk each time (and where from). This will give modders a lot more control in-game without the need to tinker with files, and will also allow them to distribute their work without distributing their configs (-> noone will know exactly how you did such and such).

Once we've got the game "done" we're also going to spend quite a bit of time sorting out at least a simple scripting interface, and opening a lot of things up to that, so that new gamemodes can be concocted, new object behaviours designed and generally a lot of awesome added posthumously. We're going to use KAG as a learning experience on how to do that correctly (from what works nicely and what doesn't) so that we can explore a few avenues in that direction in the future. I've learned a lot from modding Cortex Command for example, but there are some things that will have to stay hardcoded inside KAG. It's bad practice, but as I've said, we're on a pretty strict deadline here (not sure if it's legal for me to divulge the exact date publicly at this point, got to look over some papers).

 

No it wouldn't allow larger armies fighting, because currently KAG is limited by CPU usage for even 1 map with 50+ people on it. We'll be able to improve this, but simulating a larger number of maps and a layer linking them together would allow fewer players in-game than without.

Not only that, but massive wars are not necessarily a good thing - one player means so much less then, -> noone can have a significant impact on the game. With really long games, servers would suffer even more from griefing than they currently do - rather than ruining an hour of play, you'd ruin several days of play.

Terraria and Minecraft are very different games to KAG. People seem to compare them because you can break tiles, but those games have been designed for the entirety of their existence to be focussed on long games and sandbox play. KAG has been designed for shorter games and more action packed play.

Minecraft gets around the "large spaces" issue by allowing map streaming - currently, we haven't got anything like that implemented. We might be able to implement basic streaming at some point for when people want humongous maps, but for now it works for very large maps anyway, 1024-wide and above don't seem to cause that much extra strain other than being slow to load at the start of the game due to downloading like 500kb of uncompressed map (for a 512x1024 map). However, with compression I think this gets pushed down to something in the realm of 80kb or so because of the large contiguous areas of open air and dirt.

A 1024 wide map is gigantic. The only reason you'd need more space than that would be to fit in several "levels" of dungeons and so forth. With clever server administration and some basic scripting, these could be spread over several separate maps.

 

What Overworld adds in my personal opinion is the option for much larger games and more 'fun' in that way that it seems you would have more time for attacking and defending in funner ways. As you say however, too much work to be done anytime soon.

Things I really would want and care about personally:
Siege
Water/Fire
Scripting (Preferably with the ability to do a lot of stuff)
Movable blocks
Small blocks, large blocks (if possible) ;) Large cooler than small
Custom blocks able to be made (tied in with the scripting) so we can make things like stronger versions of doors, or team only travel solid blocks that go unsolid for the other team, aka make rules for blocks
Ability to add more colors to the game
Ability to play with more than 64 players on a map at some point again.