New build with completely new server browser interface

A new build (still build number 421 since there are no netcode changes) is on its way out right now --
Shadlington and myself have been working hard over the past 3-4 days to build a new server browser that has some proper filters and search abilities. Here is a quick list of the new features:

• Search instantly for whole player names, partial server names, partial descriptions, partial IP addresses, or partial game mode names
• Filter in/out gold and passworded servers
• Show only selected game modes
• Shadlington build a custom control for selecting how many players are in a server. It is extremely intuitive and allows you to set the minimum and maximum threshold for how many players you want in servers. You can select everything from empty to full, or do things like "half full to almost full"
• The minimaps are now shown centered in the preview window (so you don't see some meaningless piece of sky), though you can drag them around as always

You can find information on how these features work below (and a wiki page will soon be created with full documentation)
This is a few days of hard work for the new interface, but on top of months of work developing the new King Arthur's Gold API which is the backend for the new fast server browser as well as the new authentication code that was rolled out a few months ago.

The API is used by things like this server browser as well as available for use by community developers. Another post should be coming on that in the next week or so as it is more ready for public use.
Much more should be coming in the near future in terms of finding friends and viewing who is in a server before you join it. This information is all already available over the API, in case any site/server owners or developers want to start using this data. Post in this forum thread if you are a developer interested in some API information.
Favorites are still a bit buggy, but we waned to get this new interface out and used rather than waiting longer just to fix something that has been broken for a long time

Here is the quick overview of how the new browser works

How to use the server browser

Instant Search: If you enter text here it will filter the server list down to those containing this text in one of the following fields: name, description, game mode, IP address. It will also search the names of players on servers shown. Only entire names are matched.
e.g. entering 'Shadlington' will find any servers with 'Shadlington' in the name/description or any that Shadlington is playing on.

Players (%) slider: Use this to set the min and max percent full you want servers to be.
e.g. set it to 1% min and 99% max to find servers that are not empty and not full, or set it to 50% to 99% to find servers that are 'at least half full'.

Gold/Passworded servers: These buttons have three states - No/Yes/Doesn't Matter.

Map Preview: This shows the current state of the map on the server. Note that it can be dragged.

For more information, go to the KAG Wiki article for Server Browser.
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It has not been looked into or properly reported yet - please report any bugs at https://bugs.kag2d.com and include the steps that are used to reproduce it along with the exact description of the symptoms (for example does it only show one server with the wrong minimap, or does it stay wrong until you repoen it?). Be as verbose as possible :)

 

There will be a few other improvements made to it in time (we still need to fix favourites and we'd like to get player list info into the browser), but I'm really very happy with it as it is now :)

 

Nice job adding player search guys, now I can find all my friends and play with them and they can't hide from me.

Just something I want to put out there, but is it possible currently to track people based on clan tag as well?

 

Currently clantags are not searched - that's a good point though. Shad and I will discuss over the next few days some of the other changes that might be worth doing as we continue to make use of the fact that we now know where all players are (well, once the servers finish updating).

Unfortunately (fortunately?) we have a lot more to do, so we can't spend much more time on server browser changes right now. We're going to continue to make changes which encourage community developers to write applications that make up for what KAG don't have though - such as getting kag:// working (so you can click a link on a server browser website or RSS feed) and getting KAG.exe -join working properly (so that 3rd party applications can launch KAG straight into a server)

 

Thanks, I will have that fixed in our next release

 

I will work on getting basic information about all of the calls into the wiki tomorrow - in exchange I want your help making them complete pages with all details that someone could want about the api :). I'll answer any questions you have as long as you promise that the information makes it into the wiki

Also, those who contribute to the wiki (in the API articles or elsewhere) are more likely to have their feature requests listened to, at least for API feature requests to me

edit:also you may want to take a look at this thread
https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/attention-community-web-and-app-developers.6837

I created that subforum today - any API-related questions, feature requests, implementation/usage questions, etc can get their own topic there