Alpha 10 features

New features development on Alpha 10 is nearing its completion (more on that in articles end). Here I would like to list and explain features that went into it:

Particle effects
Smoke, dust, fire and mist effects were added to the game. That involved creation of new rendering engine section. Some details could be found in previous article. This includes:

• Allowed and placed smoke for house work
• Allowed and placed smoke for damaged houses (6 of 30)
• Allowed and placed dust effects for plans placement
• Allowed and placed dust effect for house destruction
• Allowed emitters that could be placed on terrain in MapEd (e.g. mist and fog)

SSAO
Covered in detail in previous article. This is a big rendering change and it includes:

• New deferred rendering pipeline
• SSAO itself
• New custom antialiasing (FXAA2 and partially FXAA3)

Revised house-placement
Houses can not be placed around trees from all 4 sides now. This makes much more sense than before, where only lower-right tile below the tree was blocking house-placement. On the same topic, there are two ways of placing houses now, from game, where trees are blocking, and from script (static and dynamic) where trees get auto-magically removed (to keep scripting simpler). To keep town-building manageable, see the next change below

Allowed builders to uproot trees and small stones
Long awaited feature. There’s a new “Uproot” command in build menu. Now you can markup trees and small objects to be removed by builders.

Revised fish-catching
This is first iteration on improving fish-catching. Now every shore tile has certain fish count associated with it, that fisherman can catch (since it’s a shore property, it can not be cheated by building many Fishermans houses, although that would increase initial rate of catch). Fish will replenish slowly over time. Intention is to keep fish a good starting food source, but keep it limited, so you will have to invest into other food types when it’s ran out, but to keep Fishermans useful and whole process realistic – now they will keep catching small amounts of fish forever after.

Revised wind effects to act uniformly on flags, particles and map objects
This is purely visual feature. However it’s nice to have

Expanded undo/redo in MapEd (units, houses, etc.)
Better undo/redo is always a good thing! I’ve restructured undo/redo to handle various MapEd changes and will be able to include yet untrackable things more easily later on.

Unified main menu and gameplay options pages
Now you can change most of the same game setting during gameplay and MapEd as well. Except those, that require render reinit – resolution setting and localization (once it’s enabled)

Separate volume controls for sounds (alerts, effects, menu)
Separation and categories are not final yet, but the idea is there.

Sound for messages opened and closed
Found free sound and added it

Changed campaign UIDs to GUIDs (generated automatically)
This should simplify campaign creation a bit. You might need to update old campaigns if you want to see them in Alpha 10. Stock campaigns are updated by me.

Rigged coalmakers house to place/collect smoking heaps
This is half-baked feature until Coalmakers house model is made. For now – just a groundwork for upcoming feature.

A lot of other smaller features and bugfixes, among which:

• “Replay has ended” should happen on mission end, not on last command given
• House plan outline disappears when builder pick up tablet until he starts digging
• Don’t let AI connect new houses to Towers/Campfires
• MapEd showing error when trying to save SP map as campaign map (or vice versa) due to “slash” in path
• Replay info would get lost on loading a savegame
• Occasional “Integer overflow” error caused by (TKMMain.RequestRender > TKMFPSCounter.FrameEnd > TimeGetUsecSince > TimeGetUsec)
• Game would rarely crash on trying to assign Train task to Blank who is walking out of a house

Non-game changes include:

Setting up Patreon
Finally set up a way of collecting donations for Knights Province development. More details on Patreon page and in one of previous articles.

Setting up itch.io page
One more place for Knights Province presence.

So .. Alpha 10 is mostly feature-complete. It still needs a lot of content placed (e.g. placing fire-damage smoke emitters for 2 dozen houses). Now it will undergo some weeks of Wip builds (uploaded on Discord channel) and then, with good luck, will roll out officially.