Knights Province devblog

I figure the game needs a short campaign to tie up existing test missions together. Been working on that in past week:

Planning to make the second mission dedicated to resources mining. And here’s a little guarded bonus for explorers:

Whole thing is still largely wip and a lot will change, but for now this mission helps me to polish the wagon interactions.

Other advancements:

• More unit models and animations
• Recolored terrain surfaces
• Lots of things I cant remember now
• Improved height brushes in MapEd
• Allowed to select and save campaign maps from MapEd menus, no need to copy files manually anymore
• Terrain height can be changed globally in MapEd now
• Lots of bugfixes and minor improvements

Bonus info: KP scripting now has Actions.UnitOwnerChange. So that this wagon could be easily transferred with all its contents to the player once he defeats the guards.

Taking a break from Caster, did a playtest and found and fixed a bunch of smaller issues:

• Stone/Iron/Gold decals will be shown on the minimap correctly now
• Stone roads will have more tints and become a bit darker
• Group direction selector now previews all members locations
• House tablets will be placed with a little random rotation
• Forts “train” button will properly update on stock change now
• Iron/Gold house plans will be shown correctly now
• Scripting will now use TKMHouseType/TKMUnitType/TKMWareType instead of IDs (described in previous post)
• several more minor issues

Caster issues continue to occur, but also grows the list of fixed ones. When before Caster was tested 100% in a staged environment, now it is 50/50 between staged and actual game.

Some of the issues are:

• Agent needs to walk through in-between 2 locked agents
• Agent should not hesitate approaching another agent if his target is in front of him
• Group of agents walking through corridor should not clog it while trying all to register at a waypoint
• Agents approaching house entrances from the side often look unnatural

On a different note – while staging in-game tests for Caster, I got frustrated with how unit/house/ware types were hard to use. This got me thinking and testing, what if enums were available? And they seem to be. For a quick example:

procedure OnTick(aTick: Integer);
var
H: Integer;
begin
H := States.HouseAt(6, 7);

if (States.HouseWareInside(H, wt_Grain)) >= 5 then
Actions.PlayerWin([0], True);
end;

Now this syntax should be much easier to use!