I’m really excited to have Knights Province Steam page registered!
It took a while, but finally it’s there. So far only a page. There’s no known release date and no “Early Access” there yet (you know where it is ;-)). The game is listed as “coming soon” and it means ~2024-ish or so, given solo development tempo xD.
So .. add the Knights Province to your wishlist and keep on following the project in here, on Discord, Patreon and now on Steam!
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. No more “enable this house repair to get A and train a scout to get B”.
Let’s explore the details. This is how the typical script for the interactive messages going to look like:
procedure OnMissionStart;
begin
Actions.PlayerMessageWithButtons(-1, 'MessageWithButtons prompting player to choose an option', ['Option 1', 'Option 2'], [1,2], True);
end;
procedure OnScriptButtonClick(aPlayer: Integer; aTag: Integer);
begin
Actions.PlayerMessageOpen(-1, 'Player ' + IntToStr(aPlayer) + ' has chosen button #' + IntToStr(aTag) + ' how cool is that!');
end;
The script above has 2 main parts: message instantiation and click event handler. Instantiated message looks like so, with up to 8 buttons for now:
When a button gets clicked, the message closes itself and sends an event to the script.
In our example we just show another message with the event arguments, but mapmaker can write any other script (give wares, destroy houses, spam enemies, reveal fog of war, proclaim victory or defeat and much more):
And now to some technical details for mapmakers – click event has to be separate from the message instantiation (aka asynchronous) because of several reasons:
Finally, this is just a prototype. If all goes well, choice and interactivity can become much more sophisticated. Dialogs, other kinds of controls (text inputs, checkboxes, etc.), controls in the overlay area, etc.
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 additional benefit is that building a dozen of fisherman’s houses would not increase overall catch amount, but only affect speed at which fish gets caught.
Having this mechanics for a while, made me realize that I’m not entirely happy with it, but can not put a finger on what exactly feels wrong. From game mechanics point of view, it works as it should – providing good starting nutrition source that is slowly depleting, but never too much to cause Fishermans houses demolition to be a good move. Mechanic itself is a bit less clear, fish count increments are a bit vague, but still on par with old approach. UI display – that’s what requires the most attention and work!
Current display (numbers on terrain) was totally unnatural for the games visual style and has to be reworked. But how? The idea is to mix a heatmap with a fluid. Let it be a bit vague and flow-like.
These are work-in-progress shots. First attempts at visualizing fish-count with a very blurred texture sharply cut at certain value and filled uniformly red. Done in special preview-tool dedicated to water effects:
Checking that all the tiles align well between texture and the terrain:
Two separate layers, to indicate higher fish density:
First in-game shot:
Tweaking transparency and density:
Fish can not be caught anywhere nut the shoreline, so it makes sense to show the effect only there. Also trying out different scale – looks interesting, but too noisy. The water should be calm:
Applying Fog of War effect
Trying out fish-count effect without blur – looks good for a Minecraft clone:
Again more tweaking:
Forgot to disable texture tiling:
This is how the final effect looks:
You can check this and other new features in the wip versions of Knights Province available at https://discord.gg/cEwJFSY
Been working on hotkeys for the last week:
The system is hierarchical – there are top-level “Global” hotkeys that work everywhere (e.g. opening dev menu with F11), lower level hotkeys that work in the game/maped and lowest-level ones that work only in gameplay/replay.
Army hotkeys were rigged, but I havent mapped default values to them.
There are also 2 new MapEd hotkeys to bring decals and map objects palettes now:
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 times (or periods), which are “nearest unit”, “nearest house”, “go to location”. Then AI checks if it has enough troops and launches the attack. To this time, I have planned for neutral hand to own both inert and hostile animals and houses. Which means that in order for AI to attack “any” enemy, it needs to check all enemy hands assets and also to check all neutral hand’s assets individually (to pick only hostile ones). Which is sub-optimal both from programming and from code-design point of view (especially the “individual” alliance setting).
Hence I’m looking into splitting neutral hand into two separate hands: inert and hostile, so that alliance settings between hands become simple again (either “ally” or “enemy”). Rules go like in order of priority:
New problems arise though. Currently in Game and in MapEd all hands are tightly packed and each hand can be of any type atm. It’s a good time to fix this too. E.g. you can have 1 human hand and 7 separate neutral hands. Which is a waste of space really. Now there needs to be up to 2 different neutral hands – Ni and Nh (if hand has no assets it gets skipped). Still tightly packed on save and always on the right side of the hands palette in MapEd. Reordering hands is a bit complicated since hands hold a lot of cross-references (e.g. Goals/Objectives/Alliances/etc). Processing example goes like so: load a map into MapEd with 1/2/3/Nh hands. Append 8 more hands. Make the last hand Ni. Swap hands around for Ni and Nh to occupy the 11th and 12th slot. Do the map editing. Remove hands without assets before saving.
Another complication: previously I stored hand type in 2 fields in mission data: allowHuman and allowAI. 4 combinations of which described 4 hand types that were – Human, AI, Skirmish and Neutral. Now 5th type is needed, to split Neutral. For that I’m planning to add allowNeutralType flag/command.
There are other minor issues of course (and some bigger ones I haven’t stumbled upon yet), but overall I’m feeling confident and happy about this refactoring – it will make things a bit more complicated in one small area (Ni and Nh management),but much more simple in other broader areas (since larger parts of the game work with alliances).
On to the refactoring! )
Alpha 10.1 is out. It features following bugfixes:
Download links:
Knights Province Alpha 10.1 (installer)
Knights Province Alpha 10.1 (7z package)
What’s new in Alpha 10:
Download links:
Knights Province Alpha 10 (installer)
Knights Province Alpha 10 (7z package)
In loosely chronological order:
Mini-competition is over and I’m happy to announce the results!
We have 5 maps in the competition:
Hodor
Score 22.
Comments from judges:
Longfingers Legacy
Score 22.5.
Comments from judges:
Winter Stand
Score 24.
Comments from judges:
Xmas Tree Combat
Score 21.
Comments from judges:
Man Versus Man Versus Beast
Score 21,67.
Comments from judges:
Winners and prizes are:
Due to lack of time and small number of maps sent in, competition is prolonged till next week – 30 Dec!
Winter is coming along with Alpha 10 of the Knights Province! Let’s celebrate this with a competition! Task is simple – create an addon map for the game using built-in map editor (and optionally, dynamic scripts). Submit the map until December 23rd 30th. Await for results and get your prize soon after.
Participation rules:
Each map will be judged by the jury (DarkianMaker, Krom, Lewin, Maps, Thibmo). Map with the most points – wins. Points will be awarded in the following categories:
Prizes are:
FAQ
Feel free to ask for clarifications, they will be answered here.
