Yet another Alpha 1 update

Alpha 1 receives yet another update. The biggest change (apart from many bugfixes) is temp display of unit types icons:

2307

Once again larger portion of changes is dedicated to bugfixes. Here’s the list:
+ Units are not visible along right/bottom map edges
+ In the map editor u can’t rename the map, u can write new letters but you can’t delete letters
+ MapEdit: Player Settings -> Reveal Fog -> Reveal All option does not store state or does not read the state
+ MapEdit: Village planning -> AI Defence options -> AI defence position crashed the game
+ MapEdit: Player Settings -> Reveal Fog -> Reveal a portion of the map causes game crash (ERangeError)
+ Empty list of savegames in game
+ Unit selection breaks up after linking one group to another
– MapEdit: Extra -> View Pass-ability slider crashes game (could not reproduce)

Download: Knights Province Alpha 1.06

Posted in Downloads, Live progress, News | 23 Comments

Temp solution for missing unit models

While there are no proper unit models, temp solution is to overlay the unit icons and assest they carry (or armed with):

2015-08-05 temp unit icons 2 2015-08-05 temp unit icons

Posted in Ideas | 3 Comments

Alpha 1 update

Thank you everyone for sending in crashreports and contacting me on Skype/Facebook/other media. Knights Province is coming along nicely. There are many bugfixes, but so far none of them are blockers AND hard to fix at the same time 🙂

r2281

Current bugfixes for the Alpha 1.05 are:
+ Game freezes after AI builds a School
+ Crash when units eat last food in the Tavern
+ Crashreports would not include savegames
+ Severely updated XML handling to fix the dense fog bug
+ Crash on exit due to Resolutions = nil
+ House UI wont show up after house is built
+ Leather icon was missing
+ Game would not report sufficiently low OpenGL version on start
+ few more minor ones

And the most important update. Now the game includes the music track written specially for it by Andre Sklenar!

Download: Knights Province Alpha 1.06

Posted in Downloads, News | 8 Comments

Alpha 1 is out

Alpha 1 is finally here.

After several hours of unexpected bugs popping up and emergency bugfixing the game has stabilized at Alpha version 1.04. Please try the updated package:

Download link: Knights Province Alpha 1

Posted in Downloads, News | 16 Comments

Live Progress #40 – Playtesting the Alpha

For a change I was playtesting the Knights Province Alpha tonight. Here are some actual screens from the game:

1

View on the town center

2

Woodcutters district

3

Food production

4

Training more people for new houses

5

Birds-eye view

6

Still lake

Posted in Live progress | 5 Comments

Live progress #39 – Smoothing

Uploading new video with progress report over the past 2 weeks:

 

Posted in Live progress, Video | 3 Comments

2001 Commits

Small anniversary for the Knights Province repository – 2001 commits!r2001

Took me less than 2 years to make, which is quite fast.

2001 commit is nothing spectacular though:

  • Updated test map goals (bring 5 cider and 5 fish to the Tavern), so that it could be used to clock unit navigation and pathfinding
  • Updated Alpha map with better stone decals
  • Fixed a bug in Game logging

The test map mentioned above:

r2001map

 

 

Posted in Live progress, Sidenotes, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Another video showing off stone deposits placement and mining

Sunday is a great day – here’s another video showing off stone deposits placement and mining:

As always – comments and critics are welcome!

Posted in How things work, Video | 9 Comments

Trying out video recording

This is the first Knights Province video and it is about one neat Map Editor feature called Map Resize.

Posted in How things work, Video | 2 Comments

How many languages there will be when Knights Province is finished?

This has been asked several times now and the answer is a bit too lengthy for the FAQ page (though I can link from it). So let’s unroll that question!

Firstly, “finished” is a vague term when it comes to our development process. It can take several years of Alphas and Betas, progressively improving and polishing the game, steadily bringing it to the playable state before it meets our internal standard for being “finished”. Also, unlike big studios, we don’t have a pool of game developers that can be distributed among the projects, speeding up or slowing them down, to meet the deadlines – hence we don’t have them by design. And unlike any size studios we don’t have a solid 40h/week development timetable for anyone, so the development can be really slow at times. Since Knights Province development is a hobby project, that means that any kind of real-life issues can delay it (and sadly they do).

So we’ve established, that “finished” is rather vague term. Now let’s see about the rest of the question! Game localization itself is complex process, consisting of many interconnected parts:

  • finding and maintaining contact with translators,
  • communication about translation process quirks and features,
  • freezing the games’ state for the translation phase,
  • updating the game in case translated strings do not fit into designed space,
  • testing the translations
  • polishing and wrapping everything up for the release

From my previous experience, preparing a localized version usually takes around 2-3 weeks of full concentration if everything goes smooth (which it rarely does), and more than a few months in unlucky cases (if for example translator goes missing). Some locales are still incomplete as far as I remember. On the other hand, Knights Province is still in pre-Alpha stage, which means everything changes a lot, many text strings are being added and removed during a week. Translating those will be a waste of resources and significant slowdown the games development (if we to spend weeks/months just to keep the translations up to date with changes).

So for now many texts are simply hardcoded into the game in English, which is easiest and simplest for the development. Localization sub-engine is in place and supports Unicode and left-to-right writing, which means that majority of worlds languages can be implemented rather easily. When they will be implemented? – probably we will add them gradually after the game goes through several Alpha versions and takes a more solid shape.

TL;DR: Can’t say for sure.

Posted in Sidenotes | 7 Comments