Devlog KAG Build 2303 - More Flags, Fixes, Community Buttons and Pull Requests

This build is more of a "back on track" build rather than anything particularly groundbreaking, but there's a few gems in there and it's important that we keep the backlog small and manageable.

One change should help ease water-related frustrations a little...​

Here's a run-down of the major changes:

• More flags in the National Flags Head Pack!
  As requested on the forums, the flags of Iraq, Syria (+Independence), Libya, Mali, Tunisia, Austria, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, The Faroe Islands, Greenland, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have been added. Greece is coming next build. For those that missed it, you can pick up the pack on steam for the sweet sweet price of two bucks!
  
• Community buttons!
  The community buttons at the bottom of the main menu have been retouched. The new official (fan-run) Discord server is linked, IRC is labelled as such, and the official forums get a link too. Come say hi if you haven't already! The buttons could use some dressing up but they're more relevant and nicely arranged than they used to be at least.
  
• Sponge Buffs
  Water haters rejoice! As discussed on the forums, sponges last for 2 hits and reduce the stun time to 1/6 of a second.
  
• AFK kick works on wall-clock time instead of in-game time.
  This should prevent afks from evading the kick in TDM.
  
• Github Pull Requests Merged
  Thanks to Fuzzle for this month's community pull requests, and to makmoud98, AsuMagic and HkgStudio for their interest in contributing over on github!

The last few months there's been a few community-side shakeups as well:

• Maps
  There's been a few more map moderators assigned who have been reviewing maps like crazy. Check out the map submission forum for more info, a sneak peek at the accepted maps, and to have your say!
  
• Discord server rivalry
  Gamers seem to have embraced discord for their general-purpose comms, and the KAG community has been no exception. Multiple clan and unofficial discord servers had popped up. There's now an official (still fan-run!) discord in an attempt to unify this a little, with links to the more specialised servers there (clan discords in particular).

Next build will be about getting the recently accepted community maps in-game, and a bit of repo cosolidation - so that the pull request process is simpler for us and we can take more of them without hassle.

Have Fun!
Max

Code:

Full Changelog for those interested:
[modified] new sprites for some missing countries - iraq, syria (+independence), libya, mali, tunisia, austria, estonia, lithuania, georgia, faroe islands, greenland, cuba, puerto rico, dominican republic
[added] new/nicer community buttons at bottom of main menu (discord link included)
[updated] engine with new apiclient stuff
[fixed] afk kick working in game-time vs clock-time (means that someone afk across multiple short games will still be kicked - think TDM)
[modified] sponge reduces stun to 1/6 of a second and takes 2 hits with water to destroy
[added] cant build on currently collapsing tile spaces (prevents wasting materials, as those tiles cannot be modified until the collapse is finished)
[updated] merged PRs from github: 'fzzle/quarters-include-fix', 'fzzle/duplication-fix', 'fzzle/boatshop-menu-fix'
[fixed] incomplete implementation of archer quiver going invisible when sleeping in quarters
[fixed] splash doing a double-hit for force splashes (was interfering with sponges surviving a hit)
[added] c_write_console_to_disk and c_write_chat_to_disk for disabling logging
[modified] logging doesn't flush to disk (prevents slow blocking i/o for every line)
[fixed] a few missing heads in vanilla
[fixed] tcpr security issue
[fixed] slow star rendering on linux (thanks Norill!)
[added] CMap::isTileCollapsing in various flavours
[fixed] GotoURL could "jam" on hitting esc in main menu

 

You can check if a tile is currently collapsed - you can't modify such a tile (it gets ignored) until the block settles or smacks someone and it was causing problems with builders being able to "try" to build on those tiles, but nothing would change and they'd lose resources. Theres 2 overloads ("flavours") on the scripting side of thing and one more in the engine.

We'll see how big discord gets. If everyone is very keen on it then we might look at integration but it's never nice pulling in new dependencies to this code base unless they're very small :)

 

Code:

[added] c_write_console_to_disk and c_write_chat_to_disk for disabling logging

Thanks for adding this, could we also get a option to not have the 'Sending files' thing printed to the console, since this still causes issues with big mods, having the console spammed with 1k lines in less then a second.