Category Archives: How things work

How does one fix AI starvation?

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Krom

Knights Province AI opponents in Skirmish have a known occasional issue of not producing enough food for their servants, resulting in citizen starvation and early collapse of their town economy due to that. Let’s look into what it takes to … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress, Tools | 4 Comments

Substance Designer purchase

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Krom

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Artwork, How things work, Screenshots, Tools | 4 Comments

More player choice comes to missions in Alpha 11

Posted on October 13, 2019 by Krom

A long ago requested feature from mapmakers and player is to have a choice in missions. It is coming to Knights Province Alpha 11. With this new feature missions can ask player in a convenient way to make some choice. … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress, News | 8 Comments

Fish count display

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Krom

Some time ago I was reworking fishing mechanics. Biggest flaw that had to be fixed – unnatural fish depletion. Now fish slowly regenerates. To make it work, waterbodies had to be made to keep track of their fish reserves. One … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress, Screenshots | 5 Comments

Refactoring Neutral hand and alliances

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Krom

Making AI to attack neutral aggressive animals (and their dens) proved to be more complicated than I thought. Why is that? Existing AI attacks work quite simple – AI has a list of attacks it needs to run at certain … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | 5 Comments

Food values

Posted on December 12, 2018 by Krom

All Knights Province units need food to eat (well, except machines and animals). Otherwise they die of hunger. So dedicating a large portion of town to a food production is a good thing. But how much food is needed anyway? … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work | 8 Comments

Working on render quality – Part 1 (SSAO)

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Krom

Goals Ever since the beginning of Knights Province project I wanted it to be visually pleasing. Slightly cartoonish style with bright colors, semi-realistic soft lighting and shading. Ambient Occlusion (AO) is one of those shading effects that add depth and … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress | 7 Comments

Working on Caster unit navigation

Posted on April 12, 2018 by Krom

Been working on unit navigation for Alpha 10. It is still very hard and complicated, but progress makes me happy. Made some terrain collision outlines generation code tonight:

Posted in How things work, Screenshots | Leave a comment

Fixing Delphi project compilation time

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Krom

TL;DR: When compilation time goes out of hand – prune “uses” sections. Over the time the game`s EXE compilation time grew longer and longer. Today it clocked at 70sec! Of course codebase has also increased (~350kLoc now), but still it was weird, … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | 1 Comment

A dozen of ways to loose a unit

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Krom

I’ve been categorizing and refactoring unit deaths in the game. Made this comment block in the code. Might be interesting for you to see it too: // Killing of a unit is done in 4 big steps // 1. KillUnit … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | Leave a comment