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Developments of the Last Week

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Geti, Apr 15, 2012.

  1. Shadlington

    Shadlington THD Team THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

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    1,562
    63 as it happens...
     
    arcadebomber likes this.
  2. GloriousToast

    GloriousToast Haxor Donator

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    1,463
    6 more and wow, hopefully in the future ill be able to mod it to show the kill feed with out it crashing on me, any help there?
     
  3. BlueLuigi

    BlueLuigi :^) Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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    3,620
    Killfeed worked back in.... 170?
    Hasn't worked since.
     
  4. PrisonMax

    PrisonMax King Arthur's Cake Donator

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    12
    What does this mean ? Classic and Full will be separated into two clients ?
     
  5. Tyngn

    Tyngn Ballista Bolt Thrower

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    167
    I sort of wished for lua but i guess Angel Script is okay too...
     
  6. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

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    3,730
    Lua isn't as nice to bind, doesn't allow proper object orientation and involves a syntax shift for us going from engine code to game code. I've done a fair bit of Lua work so it wouldn't bother me that much but its a matter of practicality more than anything else.

    BL: bugs report please so i can look into it. It's probably just commented out somewhere tbh.

    Forking = multiple clients? : We're not sure yet. Hopefully we can keep it in the one client and have 2 modes of play, classic and full version (with the latter greyed out with many frowny faces around it for f2players, haha). That'd make it simple for people with the full version to swap between playing classic CTF and a full version WAR server (or Bomb Ball or whatever modders cook up)
     
  7. FuzzyBlueBaron

    FuzzyBlueBaron Warm, Caring, Benign, Good and Kind Philanthrope Global Moderator Forum Moderator Donator Tester
    1. The Young Blood Collective - [YB]

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    2,508
    Or, you know, some of have toppers because we actually wear a top hat irl... :B)::rollseyes::p
     
  8. Reactorcore

    Reactorcore Shark Slayer

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    155
    Modding huh.
    Now I'm going to get VERY serious here.

    There are some important things I want to point out for you to consider regarding a modding system. If you don't take this seriously, a bad modding system is worse than no modding system, because its a waste of time if you do it wrong.
    If you want people to see people make worthwile mods that are of good quality and serious in their design (massive addons, total conversions, overhauls), you must ensure several things.


    1. Fully Consistent Vanilla standards for rules and content.
    If you intend KAG to become a serious platform for modding, the foundation has to encourage consistency. This means that the KAG universe has solid rules of how physics work, how character behave, how the world is structured and why so. You will need to establish standards for this stuff. Concrete rules of the KAG universe, in other words.

    This also extends beyond how content behaves ingame. Consistency is equally important in terms of how they are defined in the files when they are created. As in, HOW do you create the content. Things like formats, conventions, standards and other rules to adhere when making content for KAG. And I mean actual good content, not your usual yet-another-generic mod that you will most likely skip or uninstall after 5 minutes of trying it.


    2. No content hardcoded.
    If you want to see Total Conversions or Overhauls, its is critical, I mean CRITICAL to not have any piece of vanilla content hardcoded, or it will interfere with any attempts at making said types of mods.


    3. Documentation AND well-made, guiding Tutorials for content creation.
    Incomplete or no information on base classes, functions and attributes on the coding side can deter many MANY people from ever making a mod that could have been worthwhile. This goes double for tutorials. Brute-forcing your way through trial and error not only takes longer than its supposed to, but it is also frustrating, maddening and blind when making a mod. Or heck, when making pretty much anything creative, not only modding.

    Tutorials can not only be used to get people started, but also guided to make the stuff you would want to see people make. Not only you have to teach an aspiring modder on how the tech works, but you must also teach him how to think for himself for what are the possibilities and potential. This stuff is not self-evident and must be taught. Theres a very good reason why many first mods in Cortex Command were bullethoses or bland reskins of existing things.


    4. Seperate support for Total Conversions mods and Addon Mods.
    Mods are different, but most can be categorized:
    1. Edits, Tweaks, Overhauls
    2. Addons, new mechanics/features
    3. Total conversions (aka new base game)

    Thing is, addons often are compatible with other addons in terms of design because they simply ADD something. And many times, there are multiple addon mods that would be great to have functioning at the same time.

    Total conversion, however, redefine the entire system, the whole game is different. As such, you can mix two total conversions.

    To have a robust modding support, that not only is limited to just one mods or relying on overwriting the base game, there needs to be support for launching a seperate version of the game, as well as support for additional addon mods to further extend a particular version of the game (either vanilla or TC modded).

    Point is, from a users perspective, when he launches the game and there are total conversion mods installed, he gets a game launcher program that should allow him to choose in which mode will he launch the game. From there on, KAG will load whatever version of the game, INCLUDING the additional addon mods that were made for that particular version of the game.


    Those are the core pillars of a robust modding system and if you fuck up any of that, I will not mod it. You can fucking count me out of it. I'm still bitter from the Cortex Command modding experience and all I just said is originated from the years of experience modding CC and all the things that sucked about it. Things that made me stop. And things, without a doubt have deterred or stalled many aspiring modders as well as experienced modders from getting into the fun of modding or continuing it.

    Besides all that, there is also the issue how KAG is developed. You guys are, from what I've seen, build KAG with agile development in mind. You rapidly test and prototype stuff and while you are indeed fast, the code base is a mess and the results are glitchy gameplay, inconsistency in game content and mechanics, bugs, security holes and loads of many more fun things.

    My point is, you guys are still at it and I doubt you are considering doing things differently (well designed before implemented, for example), so this will not have a good impact on the modding system you are planning. What I'm saying is that perhaps you should not consider having a proper modding system in KAG and instead, focus on the core game itself.

    Building a robust modding framework is a hard challenge and you absolutely dont do it by rushing, so you may want to reconsider your plans for this. One thing I can suggest is evolving KAG like you do now to its final state in terms of vanilla full version gameplay, THEN only consider building the whole thing from ground up with a modding system integrated properly. Building it as you go will cause frustration not only to you but also to modders when there is no stability for the work they do. Think about how fun it was when each new version of CC broke the previous mods.

    That is all.
     
    BlueLuigi, goodyman8, Pizza and 8 others like this.
  9. BlueLuigi

    BlueLuigi :^) Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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    3,620
    Also I'll have to read up on AngelScript but just because it's easier to setup does not make it a good choice, keep in mind a lot of people are going to know LUA and python because they are common, having to learn the standards of a new language can be annoying, having people just starting having very few tutorials out there is also not that good. There are tons of things on LUA and python as well as tons of communities to go for help.
     
    goodyman8 and Rayne like this.
  10. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

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    3,730
    RC you know of my CC background and should expect me to implement modding in a more complete and extensible way.

    I'm sure you know first hand about what happens when you just spam tons and tons of content into a game ;) You should know by now that my development style is focussed on getting something done right, and as I'll be in control of the majority of the gameplay design for the new version that will carry over into content design and execution.

    The whole point of making this system is that "nothing" will be hardcoded - initially the menu etc will be for the purposes of getting KAG finished, however we're looking at how to turn this system into something much larger than just KAG which would include the forking and merging of separate games and content, editing both in and out of game, convenient logic encapsulation and sharing, simple prototyping tools and extendible editors etc etc. Its going to be both incredibly simple and incredibly powerful.

    We've been designing this system for a while before i even bothered talking with you guys about it because we've wanted to get the design side of it sorted before you guys got to pick holes in it.

    It's gonna be good, dont doubt us.

    ---------

    Blue: Anyone who knows a C like language (read: most programmers) will be comfortable with AngelScript syntax and most of the constructs. We wouldn't be implementing it if it was a crappy scripting language. Its much more of a programming than simple scripting system and we think syntax that reflects this is necessary - the lack of object orientation in lua and the potential formatting frustrations of python aren't something we're that keen on. Being able to bind more functions more easily is a very important trait for our uses because it means we can iterate on the game API quickly while we work on it which means more control for the scripting language thus more control for those using it.

    tl;dr we know what we're doing.
     
  11. BlueLuigi

    BlueLuigi :^) Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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    3,620
    Alright sweet, all of that sounds great.
    I'm guessing most of these plans are for up to 1 year from now (the modding perhaps being further?)
    Not trying to twist you into some sort of date or even estimation to keep you into, just curious cause I know you guys also do lots of stuff in the background and I've noticed the changes of them in other builds as part of it. (Balls and physics changing on classes for instance).

    I really love the way you're taking this, me, Carver and some others had some talks a while ago on the potential of KAG with some moddability (Futuristic KAG, crazy mods and addons, RTS KAG, MMORPGish thing with the Overworld), these are things we couldn't expect you guys to do, especially not for the low price you're asking and how much you're already doing and I'm sure you've spent enough time on KAG where you want to explore other avenues as well, but we would love to fuck around with for funsies.

    Even if they are impossible it was fun to talk about how this kind of stuff could happen. I must also say that as an example of just how great KAG can be, it's starting to feel good after having not played Minecraft for over a year I tested some of the addons (Tekkit) and it to me changed it into a whole nother game, and with proper quality control and such a quite polished extension, that for free increased the hell out of my actual content-hours from the game and makes me feel that it's awesome that I bought it, so with a game like KAG that I'm already happy I bought and get lots of fun out of, I can only imagine that not only will the Overworld bring a hell of a lot more fun and I could imagine myself spending a good 2-3 months trying to fuck around on a single server before moving on to messing around with stuff, but a single mod could add that much gameplay, adding custom classes just that much more, and playing with friends in such an active and engaging game even more.

    Even though MM's a troll (sometimes -cough-), this all looks very promising and I can't wait to see what you guys come up with
     
  12. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    Hopefully we can get the modding API finalised enough for you guys within 6months tbh. We'll probably discourage you guys from playing with it while we get the API sorted out but we're hoping to make it available fairly early, once we can avoid breaking compatibility (having to port mods kinda sucks).

    In the short term I'm exposing the class variables to you guys as of next build so that you can play with the balancing. There are a few of them missing (because they aren't variables in the code, just magic numbers <_< that I'll have to track down ) but I'm sure I'll hear very quickly which ones are missing.

    Off the top of my head for balancing you'll be able to tweak knockdown times, fall damage, charge times and attack speeds. I'll hook up the damage and arrow speed variables asap (got a lot of other bugs to fix and a bunch of Uni stuff to do as well...).
     
  13. Reactorcore

    Reactorcore Shark Slayer

    Messages:
    155
    I'll hold you to that, but I'm more concerned about MM. Although both of you have worked on this project equally, MM was the one who concieved KAG and the one doing the main code work. Now, I might be wrong since I don't fully know what kind of relationship you two are having with this project (data-access, work-split, profit-split etc.), but I always had the feel MM is the ultimate big boss of KAG development.

    I've followed MM's incredible adventures with soldat, with his blog (MM what I do, Defining Awesome), link-dead and now with KAG. I've seen how he thinks and what he values and the way he works. His methods often leaned on simply getting the job done and done fast, regardless of code quality or indepth fore-thought for design.

    While you, Geti, do indeed have the experience of modding from CC and have seen what was wrong with it, MM doesn't. If he would, I'd imagine his development style would much be different than what he is doing.
    And since he's the main guy doing most of the engine work, he'll have the responsibility to implement the modding system.
    For that reason, I am concerned as to whether MM will do it right, is HE aware of what I wrote in my previous post and does he care for it as much as you and I do.

    I'm not blaming MM or how he works, because without that crazy workstyle of MM, KAG wouldn't be what it is now, especially in such a short time. While he did sacrifice code quality for development speed and has had to deal with so many bugs that resulted from it, it still miraculously works. We, the players, actually do have something to play with. Thats absolutely fantastic.

    But when it comes to a modding system, that development style of his needs to slow down. And I'm not sure MM is up for that, because that requires him to change, maybe not in the way he might find comfortable as it will make him slower than he is today, just for the purpose of writing a more stable framework. He might rather deal with the cumbersome nature of the current engine along with all its bugs, simply because it works right now.

    A lot what I said is speculation based on analysis from my time following MM over the internet, so I reserve the right to be utterly wrong.

    But if I am right, then I know this about MM: He is a man that lives today, not tommorow.

    And to achieve something of a robust, well designed modding framework, it might turn out to be a very tough challenge for him.
     
  14. fishfinger73

    fishfinger73 Haxor

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    185
    I already tried to mod but failed (I'm pretty good at sucking at it though) so a modding API would be just fantastic! :)
     
  15. GloriousToast

    GloriousToast Haxor Donator

    Messages:
    1,463
    the most i've able to mod is swordfight (give bombs, make builder playable, unlimited items) i was slightly able to mod it so i can see the kill feed and it worked for a brief period. now it doesn't really work anymore. its really pretty easy to mod. any1 know how to make the server stop trying to connect to the master server offline?