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!

Good news – work continues!

Over the weekend I have successfully corrected the problem with two or more agents going for the same target and getting stuck, because no one had a clear priority over others. I have tried two different ideas and choose the best.
Also greatly improved pushing out of idle agents.
Changes and improvements were also made to other parts, such as pathfinding and selection of the next waypoint en route.
Many additions were also made to the debug rendering, for easier isolation of problems and debugging.

Now there are two relatively easy problems:
– In the narrow corridor agents often interfere with their neighbors, if they did not touch the waypoint while walking past it. Here the solution is already known – needs just implementing and debug.
– Idle agents are much too “scared” sometimes. If some other agents approaches them and stops one tile short, they run back around 1/5 of tile. I still need to re think how to solve that, because this behavior is a part of the interaction and collision avoidance algorithms.

All-in-all everything is going pretty well so far 🙂