Devlog KAG Build 2622 - Quarry, Stalemates, Eating, More - First Bounties In!

Hey Folks!

First, welcome new players from the steam sale! Hope to see you on the battlefield.

This build contains all changes from our first round of bounties, and a lot more besides!

Two big changes this build for CTF:

• There is a new building, the Quarry. This community-voted bounty was proposed and implemented by Mazey.
  
  
  
  It costs 150 stone and 50 gold, on top of the 150 wood required for the building frame. It consumes wood to generate stone over time. We're going to be keeping a close eye on how this affects balance, but we're optimistic.
  
• There is a new capture-stalemate resolution system. This community-voted bounty was proposed by DoctorSnakes and implemented by Pirate-Rob.
  
  The stalemate system detects when all flags on both sides have been captured, and starts a timer. Once this timer expires, all flags are returned without capture. This prevents the condition of both teams being unable to capture a flag, and the game being unable to end.

Other changes:

• There is a new button dedicated to eating food from your inventory or hands. This community-voted bounty was proposed by benjamingorman and implemented by Ferrezinhre.
  
  
  
  By default, the button to eat food is V. Space will no longer eat food, and is used solely for rotating blocks or lighting bombs.
  
  NOTE: As a result of this change, your controls will be reset on first launch - watch out for this. As the key "clashed" with an existing key, and we didn't want to remove it completely, we decided that was the safest way to handle things.
  
• Builders can quick-swap between their last 2 selected blocks with the Inventory button, F. This change is experimental and could do with some refinement, but potentially saves builders quite a lot of time when building walls and backgrounds. It can also be used to quickly "drop" building frames. Thanks to Potatobird for developing this feature.
  
• The new emotes from earlier in the year have been added to the emote wheel. They have not been touched up further yet, as there wasn't time for it in this build cycle, but that's still on the table. The emote wheel also renders above the minimap to help keep everything easy to see and interact with. We're looking at solutions (including a grid and a multi-tiered ring) that would allow even more emotes.
  
• New Players don't drop hearts. Specifically, players who registered within the last 2 weeks will not drop hearts upon dying, which will prevent them "feeding" more experienced players and help level the playing field a little. We're considering if anyone should really drop hearts on death, and potential other HP-related changes, and will be polling the community through discord about it in the coming weeks.
  
• Gold now stacks to 100 (as 2 lumps of 50) instead of 250. This reduces the overall amount of gold you can carry, but makes taking the right amount of gold for a building out of the storage much simpler. It also makes gold lumps much more visible as they use the large stack sprites for much smaller values, so they are harder to "lose" in the chaos.
  

There's also a fair sized bucketload of fixes and modding improvements - see the full changelog for details.

Longer Loading Times:

This build is the first to feature a "proper" flush of all modded files, scripts and configs on switching servers. This fixes an enormous amount of bugs and exploits, but does somewhat increase loading times. We'll be working on optimising this process ASAP to get the best of both worlds.

Github and Community Dev:

We've been very pleased with the amount of engagement on github so far this month. 15 pull requests and 4 issues have been closed. 10 people have been involved in over 45 commits, with over a thousand individual changes, and many people have proposed features or fixes for the bounty system. Discussion happens both on github and in the #development channel on discord. If you haven't already, give it a look. It's very easy to get involved!

It's quite interesting to see big changes like these proposed, voted for and actioned by the community. We're keen to work with you in a new era of KAG development.

That's it for this build - we'll be back with more info about the July Bounties in a short while and will be keeping an eye on stability as this release makes it out.

Have Fun!
Max

Code:

Full Changelog:

CTF:

[added] Quarry shop in CTF (thanks Mazey, v6steeda)
[added] stalemate (cannot-capture situation) support to CTF (thanks Pirate-Rob)
[modified] Gold stacks to 100 - as 2 separate lumps of 50 (thanks PotatoBird)

Misc:

[added] dedicated button for healing with food (V by default) (thanks Ferre)
[added] Tapping inventory key as builder swaps to last block (thanks Potatobird)
[added] new emotes to emote menu
[modified] players registered earlier than 2 weeks don't drop hearts, for handicap
[fixed] archer grapple beyond top of map (thanks Asu)
[fixed] TTH win condition issues
[fixed] arrow spawn location for mounted bows (thanks FuzzCat927)
[modified] emote menu in front of the rest of the gui
[fixed?] camera flying around after some maps glitch - please report any changes here
[fixed] client_AddToChat "eats" non-ascii characters (thanks Diprog for the report)
[fixed] "Back" entries in menus not translated
[modified] unlocked framerate for cursors in menus (thanks Asu)
[fixed] infinite join loop when using kag:// links
[fixed] steam not used when using kag:// links
[added] async loading messages draw at 30FPS instead of realtime (loads faster with vsync)
[fixed] autoupdater: ESC/cancel not working during downloading files
[fixed] autoupdater: alignment of file download texts rendering
[added] `debug_mode` seclev to allow `g_debug` on a per-seclev basis
[fixed] sanitize getLandHeightAtX with invalid x coord (thanks Asu, TFlippy for the report)

Translation:

[modified] Russian Translation Updated/Completed? (thanks Diprog, Mirsario)
[modified] Polish Translation Updated (thanks Vans, BraveDragonRL)
[added] translatable vote reasons

Modding/Mapping:

[added] new key_eat button
[added] CPlayer.getRegistrationTime() - returns time of players account registration
[added] Time_DaysSince(unixtime) - returns days since unix date
[added] support for custom no-build-zone in maps (thanks Mazey)
[added] support for distance-checking from buy offset to shops; allows shops to have buy buttons well removed from their location
[modified] file limit from 2048 to 8192 (relevant for heavy modders)
[modified] more explicit position tile/worldspaces for CMap in manual
[fixed] mods breaking singleplayer (mods and game objects are now flushed after disconnect)
[modified] alignment of mod download window elements
[added] RemoveScript for scripted render functions

 

Thank you! Now my chrome extension works as it should.

 

Any functionality that relied on the taunt button before will still work, but will use the new taunt button key (as we don't have taunts in vanilla, taunts were moved rather than making a completely new button in vanilla). Basically, try B not V and see if that works in mods that used to use V.

Awesome, let us know how this goes. We're very open to changes here and are thinking that dropping both the rate of conversion and the efficiency of conversion would likely prevent quarries from being a "primary" stone source. We doubt it'll stop some builders from spamming them but having no wood available can be a weakness in itself.

 

Isn't that like any game? To use most things you need an account. Yeah, the buttons are barely noticeable but you shouldn't be relying on the community for player retention. The game itself should be enjoyable enough for the player to continue playing.

In AUS it was definitely way too OP. Maps turned into a bowl where knights fought in a stone pit in the centre while builders slowly built their bases closer to mid. Look at the image posted above... not a wood block in sight!
I also don't know why you would complain about new content. It's good to see something new after a long period of mostly nothing new gameplay-wise.
I think the quarries just need it's values nerfed. No need for anything complex like @Potatobird's suggestion.