It is the most worked-on version of the Knights Province yet (except for Alpha 1, of course). Last release was 7255 and this one is 9043. Almost 1750 bits of changes and improvements went into it.
Main features of the new version are:
Manned towers. Now each tower can be manned with 1-3 warriors who will pick up bows inside and shoot from atop at the enemy. Warriors will request food to be brought in by Serf when hungry, otherwise they will stop “working” and walk out, just like citizens do. It is yet unclear how warriors specialization will affect his performance in the tower, or if warriors inside could take a fraction of damage from enemy archers. At the moment, all warriors shoot with the same strength, distance and frequency and stay 100% protected inside.
Buildable fences. Now you can build and destroy your own fences (and enemy fences too, of course). Fences cost wood to build and block passage for citizens. Warriors can break fences on their way with several blows. So far it is quite a weak obstacle, but with more playtesting that can change. In the future fences are also planned to be used for cattle.
Real Fog of War. From now you can see only what you have surveyed. This is how fog behaves in the majority of the games. Implementation was quite tricky, but the end result is well worth it.
Early stages of multiplayer accounts. Registration and mission highscores allow you to compete with other single-player players. More on that is covered in the previous article.
New and updated campaign missions. Campaign scripting and persistent script storage between missions, customizable icons and maps. Now allows for more varied custom campaigns. Check updated tutorial, Intro and Hostages missions.
Added Russian localization as a test of a text translation engine. More localizations can be made later on.
Configurable shortcuts/hotkeys are finally here as well. Almost everything is configurable and Ctrl+Alt+Shift are supported as well.
Restyled fish count calculation and display in water bodies. Now it is smooth and informative.
Smaller features are:
Return of the fraction of building materials on house destruction. Nice bonus or last chance at building a Stonecutter’s – you decide.
Revised and improved several house models and textures.
Finally added some leather background to in-game forms. It’s still a work in progress though.
Added cinematics and speech bubbles support in missions.
Allowed to make terrain highlights (invoked from script).
Decal and Objects palettes for the MapEd. As well a couple of new objects.
Added support for Buttons in dynamic script messages. Your choice can now directly affect mission flow.
Changed how coalmaker’s house works, now the coalpiles need to be set outside.
Made AI to attack animal dens.
A lot of effort went into refactoring alliances. Neutral hands. Players instantiation and mission setup.
Reiterated and improved AI in Skirmish (GDP +17%, Starvation -30%).
A whole lot of bugfixes and improvements.
New music by Juan (Dark Banners, Harvest, Over the Hills).
Campaign Builder tool is included with the game now.
Thanks to monthly support from my patrons on Patreon I was able to purchase Substance Designer!
SD is a tool for procedural texture generation. Those nice shingles, wooden beams, plaster and whitewashed walls, grass and lava. Guess what, instead of painting by hand, all those textures can be generated from noise and simple functions!
So I was looking for shingles textures online again. Shingled roofs are so common in the game and they make the most screen area after terrain. Finding suitable textures (free or not) to use in the game is not easy. Every time it’s either a different scale, too low-res, watermarked, has unclear copyright, etc. So when I found another bunch of neat textures I noticed they were not hand-painted, but procedurally generated. That made me think, if those nice textures are a product of an algorithm, surely I can tweak and repeat that algorithm to get the exact result I’m looking for.
Procedural texture generation is not uncommon to me. In my 3D editing app (Lightwave 3D) there’s a procedural texture generation subsystem. It is rather clunky though, for its main goal is to produce 3D volume materials and affect the render pipeline rather than create flat surfaces. Still it’s the same idea in its core – take small pieces and interconnect them into a more complex system (just like you take houses and build towns in Knights Province).
Procedural texture generation captured my mind a long time ago, but until recently I have not met a good working example. Earlier this year I tried another texture generator – Material Maker. It’s free and open-source, it has a great variety of elements and nodes, but trying to create anything more complex than a simple brick wall texture with mortar has put its performance to its knees. It took seconds to refresh even 256×256 nodes ..
So here comes the SD. I first tried it on trial and made myself a deal – if I can create 2 decent textures in it with reasonable effort – I’m buying it, cos that’s gonna be break even with ordering the same textures from freelancers or painting them myself. After two days of tests I was convinced – albeit textures creation is a tricky and complicated job, SD as a tool offers a very good interface and instruments of doing it. I was able to get acquaintanced with SD UI and toolset in a day and after exploring some examples (included with SD and available online) to craft a decent shingles texture for the Fisherman’s house. Soon followed by wood planks texture. The purchase was made.
Having such control over textures allows me to bring my vision into the game much better.
So far the plan seems to be: – generate most common and prominent textures (roofs, walls, wooden beams) – roughly UV map them to the existing 3D models – later on, improve the models and do the proper mapping
Knights Province has got one more neat feature provided by the Knights Tavern – Player Scores! Now you can compare your single-player skills with other players.
Scores are calculated by the following formula:
Each mission has a ranking mode (min time, max time, best score)
Each mission also has a scoring multiplier (some missions give out only 50% of the points and some 200%. Percentage is configurable in KT depending on the missions difficulty)
Some missions are excluded from the scoring (e.g. “Alpha 1”, since it is a development mission, not a real one. “Town Tutorial” is also excluded, since it’s very easy to “win”)
For each mission a player has played his place is identified
Points awarding system is then applied. It is made after Formula 1, but with a bias towards first 3 places. Places get the following number of points: 10, 10, 10, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
The system is not final, but for now it produces rather good results.
The system is not final, but for now it produces rather good results. As usual, test version (r9018) can be downloaded and tried out from Discord (https://discord.gg/cEwJFSY). With that change I’m hoping Alpha 11 is ready to be released in a week or so.
Alpha 11 release is coming soon and I’m not adding any big changes to the game to not cause any new bugs. I’m getting less and less crashreports, which is a good sign of version becoming stable.
To keep myself busy and get some distraction from bugfixes, I’m also working on smaller side-features (those that don’t affect the game at large). One of such features is a Players List:
Player list is important to have for many upcoming features of the KnightsTavern. E.g. when the game allows for private messaging or sending MP room invites, and many more.
In the next wip build, settings location will change from games folder to “My Documents\My Games\Knights Province”. According to GDSE, this is the most popular location games save their data to. This way settings wont reset each time you download and play new wip version 🙂
Alpha 11 is nearing its completion and is looking for beta-testers.
It is the most worked-on version of the Knights Province yet (except for Alpha 1, of course). Last release was 7255 and this one is going to be at least 8930. Means that a whole 1600+ bits of changes and improvements went into it.
Main features of the new version are:
Manned towers. Now each tower can be manned with 1-3 warriors who will pick up bows inside and shoot from atop at the enemy. Warriors will request food to be brought in by Serf when hungry, otherwise they will stop “working” and walk out, just like citizens do. It is yet unclear how warriors specialization will affect his performance in the tower, or if warriors inside could take a fraction of damage from enemy archers. At the moment, all warriors shoot with the same strength, distance and frequency and stay 100% protected inside.
Buildable fences. Now you can build and destroy your own fences (and enemy fences too, of course). Fences cost wood to build and block passage for citizens. Warriors can break fences on their way with several blows. So far it is quite a weak obstacle, but with more playtesting that can change. In the future fences are also planned to be used for cattle.
Real Fog of War. From now you can see only what you have surveyed. This is how fog behaves in the majority of the games. Implementation was quite tricky, but the end result is well worth it.
Early stages of multiplayer accounts. Registration and mission highscores allow you to compete with other single-player players. More on that is covered in the previous article.
New and updated campaign missions. Campaign scripting and persistent script storage between missions, customizable icons and maps. Now allows for more varied custom campaigns. Check updated tutorial, Intro and Hostages missions.
Added Russian localization as a test of a text translation engine. More localizations can be made later on.
Configurable shortcuts/hotkeys are finally here as well. Almost everything is configurable and Ctrl+Alt+Shift are supported as well.
Restyled fish count calculation and display in water bodies. Now it is smooth and informative.
Smaller features are:
Return of the fraction of building materials on house destruction. Nice bonus or last chance at building a Stonecutter’s – you decide.
Revised several house models (still temp).
Finally added some leather background to in-game forms. It’s still a work in progress though.
Added cinematics and speech bubbles support in missions.
Allowed to make terrain highlights (invoked from script).
Decal and Objects palettes for the MapEd. As well a couple of new objects.
Added support for Buttons in dynamic script messages. Your choice can now directly affect mission flow.
Changed how coalmaker’s house works, now the coalpiles need to be set outside.
Made AI to attack animal dens
A lot of effort went into refactoring alliances. Neutral hands. Players instantiation and mission setup
Reiterated and improved AI in Skirmish (GDP +17%, Starvation -30%)
A whole lot of bugfixes and improvements
New music by Juan (Dark Banner, Harvest, Over the Hills)
Campaign Builder tool is included with the game now.
Join the Discord server and try it out – https://discord.gg/cEwJFSY Please report bugs and feedback on Discord too!
If all goes well, Alpha 11 will be released this month.
