KaM Remake -> Multiplayer Demo out!

[Siegfried]

Siegfred has finished Lazarus compilation guide - give it a try!

No!! I am far away from finishing it. I just uploaded the first edition of the text I wrote it someone needs the pure information very urgently (and for you to see that I am still on it), but it is no really in a form I would like to present it.

At the moment I'm struggling to get some nice images for the layout. And then there's the javascript I want to put into a nice working shape.

[Lewin]

however, i quickly noticed something: the enemy will not build anything.
I gave them a place to eat on the 2nd edit so they wouldn't die right away. but it does nothing but stock that (so thats in place)

I'm guessing a structure for the builders is missing?

Code to make the AI find places for every building and structure a useable village is very complicated to write, I haven't even attempted it yet. It will take a lot of planning, thinking and discussion to make it work well, and I plan to make it better than the original KaM.

I am very busy with school for the next few weeks, but in my spare time I have been working on AI defence. The AI now positions and formats troops according to the script commands. I'm still trying to work some stuff out such as whether each position should be filled in order or whether groups should have new soldiers added to the randomly. (whether I should do what KaM does or work out a better way for it to function)

Also almost all script commands are now loaded and saved again if you edit a mission using the map editor. Not all of them are used by the engine yet (such as AI attacks) but they are loaded from and saved to the script. We've done a little bit on the map editor too.
Lewin.

[H.A.H.]

however, i quickly noticed something: the enemy will not build anything.
I gave them a place to eat on the 2nd edit so they wouldn't die right away. but it does nothing but stock that (so thats in place)

I'm guessing a structure for the builders is missing?

Code to make the AI find places for every building and structure a useable village is very complicated to write, I haven't even attempted it yet. It will take a lot of planning, thinking and discussion to make it work well, and I plan to make it better than the original KaM.

I am very busy with school for the next few weeks, but in my spare time I have been working on AI defence. The AI now positions and formats troops according to the script commands. I'm still trying to work some stuff out such as whether each position should be filled in order or whether groups should have new soldiers added to the randomly. (whether I should do what KaM does or work out a better way for it to function)

Also almost all script commands are now loaded and saved again if you edit a mission using the map editor. Not all of them are used by the engine yet (such as AI attacks) but they are loaded from and saved to the script. We've done a little bit on the map editor too.
Lewin.

im guessing for the building ai it needs some if not all of the following:

a building priority script
a building check script (if building is build, priority goes "down" and another is build now)
a script to find suitable locations
a script to make ai build roads to and from buildings and do so efficiently (and have warehouses and such haver larger roads to allow more traffic)

does seem like a lot of work indeed (and im no good at coding, so just noobie observation here)

maybe, instead it is possible to make a script in the map editors to outline buildings, and set "priorities" to them. so, for example you can put the outlines of a stonemason, woodcutter and sawmill down. add priority 1 to stonemason, 2 to woodcutter and sawmill gets 3. (not sure if the ai is able to build roads to buildings by itself as it is now? havnt tested that yet.)
builders should now start with stonemason, then woodcutter etc.

however, adding timed values would allow to make it say, not start building the building until X amount of gametime has passed.


just throwing ideas out there, like i said before no idea how hard it would be to implement.

[Magnitudemus]

oops, forgot to add my name to previous post. maybe i should signup. lol.

anyway, as im sure you have guessed fromt the above, this would make the human playing around with the editor able to "think out" the enemies base, and in a mission it would seem to build "by itself" while its a prescripted behaviour (imho, as a temporarely or maybe even permanent solution in addition to smart ai?)

[Xmasjos]

It would be very nice if the AI could be set on different difficulty settings. The one in the original game would be Medium, because it can be lured out by one bowman.

[Siegfried]

just throwing ideas out there, like i said before no idea how hard it would be to implement.

Or maybe an event handler which reacts to finished buildings, buildings that run out of resources, destroyed buildings, enemy spotted ...

[Krom]

This sounds like too many things to script to set up a simplest village.. I'm thinking about something more automated.. Don't have the idea yet.

Mission difficulty could be set via soldiers strength, but wouldn't this look unfair to player? I.e. on easy setting 10 vs 10 militia fight player wins, on medium - stakes are equal, on hard - AI wins.

Changelog/bugfixes since last report:

+ Occasional crash when loading due to listener not being initialised
+ Mouse wheel for scrollbars now works much better and in more places
+ Added repositioning of units and houses in the map editor by right clicking with them selected
+ Right clicking on the train button in the school now fills the queue with the unit (I always wished I had this for recruits)
+ Allow to use replacement sprites for cursors [Krom]
+ Main menu would reset on resize
+ Default team colors are not like in KaM [Lewin]
+ Added V-Sync option
+ Some houses would not show all fire animations [Lewin]
+ Added French translation by Sylvain Domange
+ Savegames names would not initialize properly sometimes
+ Crash when loading mission scripts with a space on end (TSK19)

We are working on AI defense positions and archers. This involved an upgrade in our path-finding function, cos archers don't need to go to exact location, but stay keep a certain distance. Also since they need to check a massive amount of points for enemy presence - we upgraded our unit-tracking function as well. Now it's much faster

[H.A.H.]

Very, very nice remake... though one problem is exceptionally annoying. When I merge newly trained military units into bigger troops, I sometimes get "Range check error" messages. And sometimes I get five of them in a row. It's really annoying.

BTW, is it possible to appoint the nearest to the building serf to a delivery task? Right now it seems that the first on the list of free serves is appointed.

[Lewin]

Very, very nice remake... though one problem is exceptionally annoying. When I merge newly trained military units into bigger troops, I sometimes get "Range check error" messages. And sometimes I get five of them in a row. It's really annoying.

I think this has been fixed since the last demo, I can't make it happen any more and we did a lot of work on warriors since then.

BTW, is it possible to appoint the nearest to the building serf to a delivery task? Right now it seems that the first on the list of free serves is appointed.

We'll look into this eventually. I think the way it works now is that the first free serf takes the closest delivery to him. The better thing to do would be that the first free delivery takes the closest serf to it, but this doesn't fit well with our unit/task system. For now it's low priority.

Today I fixed a flaw in memory/pointer management that has fixed quite a few bugs. There are still a lot of crashes happening so we are fixing them and working towards a new demo some time soon.
Thanks for supporting us guys.
Lewin.

[The Dark Lord]

Mission difficulty could be set via soldiers strength, but wouldn't this look unfair to player? I.e. on easy setting 10 vs 10 militia fight player wins, on medium - stakes are equal, on hard - AI wins.

Personally I don't like this idea. I'd rather see a smarter AI on hard difficulty. But since that is probably hard to program, I guess that's not gonna happen. In that case I would prefer raising the difficulty myself by changing the script instead of making hostile soldiers stronger.

[Danjb]

So, what are you working on these days?

[Krom]

We are working on bugfixes
I hope we can release new demo till 2011

Even TheKnight says Remake is much more stable now and is better than TPR

Besides there's new menu background, archers, faster scan of missions, improved performance ..

[H.A.H.]

nice work keep it up i allways miss kam and please dont add speedup utility like on kam tpr because this ruin the game

[Humbelum]

Nice to see you added the longrange units and tower attacks. Well done! One Question: Did you added the circle range? Longer range at higher positions?

I created a mission with the ingame editor and tried to test something and there is a bug with my serfs. They disappear sometimes. I have 10 serfs in statistic window but on the field there are just 2 :/

Another thing I mentioned before is about the serf AI. They take the foods always from the warehouse instead of the producer like here:

Currently: Baker-> Warehouse-> Inn
Sould be: Baker-> Inn


I also enjoyed this feature in old KaM: I stopped to take the wine barrels into the warehouse(red corner). The vineyard had after some times 5 wine barrels. If I got now 5 hungry fight-units and press the feed button the serfs only takes the 5 wine barrels from the vineyard instead from other sources. If I had 3 vineyards I could feed 15 Units just with wine.
It makes sense because serfs(etc) prefer loaves and sausage and you produce the cheap wine barrels for your fight-units.
It improves also the feeding speed. If you stop to store in wine barrels no serf has to move to the vineyard. So you can build the vineyards outside of your main village and move with your units in front of your wineyards.

I used the vineyards always like a gas station for units. Would be nice if this works again

[Juba]

Do you have plans to change the way soldiers are fed? Should they prefer "real food" like serfs so their conditon bar wouldn't fill to 100% (from something like <10%) if they are fed only with one wine barrel?

By the way, is fish better food for serfs than loaves of bread?