Okay, shadows!

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Krom

Okay, shadows! Those funny dark patches behind objects that sun seems to create 🙂

shadow-blur

One of those “spot 10 differences” pictures

Unlike real world, where sun adds lit areas on surfaces (yep, shadows are places where sun did not create illumination), in virtual world it is the other way round – shadows are added on to surfaces. And done so dynamically!

Being real-time strategy, it implies that Knights Province needs real-time shadows, right? Well, there are basically two approaches to dynamic shadows in games:

  • Stencil shadows
  • Shadow map

Continue reading →

Posted in How things work | 11 Comments

AI improvements

Posted on January 24, 2016 by Krom

Been restoring AI functionality and improving it.

Here’s results of 2 AIs skirmish:

2016-01-24-ai-got-more-dang

Posted in Live progress | 4 Comments

Alpha 5.2

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Krom

Thanks everyone for crashreports!

Two big bugs fixed and now Alpha 5.2 is out: Knights Province Alpha 5.2

P.S. Still trying to isolate and fix “Exception in script: ‘Integer overflow’ in procedure ‘CHECKVICTORY'” exception happening in mission script..

Posted in Downloads, Live progress | 10 Comments

Alpha 5

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Krom

Alpha 5 is ready!

2016-01-08 guards

Guardians of supplies

New features:

  • Campfires – provide allied troops with food. Any group standing within campfire area of effect does not get hungry. This is helpful for small groups of enemies placed on map to guard passages and ambushes.
  • Wagons improved. Now they change sides on contact, drive into camp/store/barracks, depending on if they have suitable ware in them.
  • New map (Treasures) to test both campfires and wagons.
  • Two new music tracks by Andre Sklenar (Farm, Sheep)
  • Hand color on unit models. Now units have players color on them. Troops also have banners.
  • New unit models – farmer, recruit, fisher, militia, swordsman. Yet without animations.

Smaller features are:

  • List of maps in main menu, for quickplay
  • Separate neutral player for animals and neutral units/houses. Now there’s special neutral player that owns all the animals and unclaimed assets, which might be useful for scripting.
  • Dynamic scripts wiki (https://github.com/Kromster80/knights_province/wiki)
  • There’s a map edge now rendered below the terrain
  • Snow terrain type, which goes nice on to mountains
  • Oak tree model
  • Dozen more icons and cursors
  • Dozen of bugfixes

Hotfix has been applied. Download Alpha 5.1: [Download not found]

Posted in Downloads, News | 13 Comments

Summing up 2015

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Krom

2015 is near its end. This year was quite busy for Knights Province and its creator (me). Gains include:

  • Public Alpha release! (in fact 4 major public alphas!)
  • Thousands of downloads and gameplays
  • New game mechanics (wagons, campfires, objectives)
  • Lots of artwork by 3rd party
  • Professional unit models and animations by 3rd party
  • 3 new music tracks! (to be included in Alpha 5) by Andre Sklenar
  • New fog of war techniques
  • Successfully tried streaming development on Twitch
  • Recorded videos with voice-over (yep, for the first time)
  • Got much deeper understanding of gameplay mechanics
  • Got a lot more experience with 3rd-party contractors
  • And last but not least – lot’s of positive feedback and offers of help from you guys!

On the downside however:

  • Wasted a lot of time on unit navigation (which is not working out so great after all)
  • Contractor work revealed to be really expensive for the game of such scale
  • I realized that I have to learn a lot more about gamedev (which is doubtfully a bad thing)
  • Anything else I forgot to include in pros or cons

All-in-all 2015 was a good year and I’m looking forward to what 2016 brings. Thank you all for support and interest in my humble ambiguous project – share if you like! 😀

2015-12-31-all-units

Knights Province crew walks/floats into 2016

Wish you Happy New Year everyone!!!

Bonus poll: What single feature would you like to see the most in Knights Province next year?

Posted in News | 10 Comments

Streaming again

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Krom

Streaming again at: https://www.twitch.tv/kromstern80

Posted in Video | Leave a comment

Player colors

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Krom

Support for player colors on units has been added:

2015-12-29-player-colors

This and many other changes are to come in Alpha 5, which hopefully gets released in a week or so.

Posted in Live progress, Sidenotes | 2 Comments

Two new things

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Krom

Two new things to show for today’s progress:

2015-12-19 terrains edge

Oak trees and edge-of-the-map. Oak trees I like more (although they are gonna change in the future, with proper texturing and such). Map edge is certainly to get much prettier too.

Posted in Live progress, Sidenotes | 2 Comments

Guardians of treasures

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Krom

When you want to put a treasure on the map, how do you plan to keep the guards fed?

Posted in Feedback, Sidenotes | 6 Comments

Cotton to replace Sheep

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Krom

As some of you noticed in-game and on site plans – Sheep farm was planned to be in the game to produce yarn from which cloth would be made to hire citizens.

Major drawback is consistency, sheep would have to grow without food and could not be slaughtered for food (otherwise cloths would be too hard to make).

An alternative was found – cotton farms.

Process of making cotton is rather simple. It’s planted, it grows, farmer picks it and processes into yarn. No extra complications 🙂

So that is the plan for next or one-after-the-next Alpha – Cotton Farms! 🙂

Posted in Ideas | 5 Comments