Alpha Release - 2008/06/13

[immortius]

A new release is available from Nightblade's Testing Page. The changelog lists what has changed, but give a brief summary:

- Added an option to remove the AI and revert to a lives based system for guards. These defaults to on, so if you want to mess about in single player you may wish to turn it off first (sorry, forgot to change it before release)
- Added a Post Process effect to make shadows darker the further away they are.
- When shouting, player's names are displayed in their team 's colour (red for thieves, blue for guards).
- Implemented team balance.
- Fixed the issue with para bolts being recovered as ordinary bolts.
- Fixed the issue with the Frob command not dropping held items.
- Fixed an issue where sometimes a player could not join a team after a map transition.

[-KewlAzMe-]

How will team balance be handled in NB? Same as TUT? or will there be additional checks?

[immortius]

Present tense, KAM, not future tense.

I believe it is much the same. After the countdown, players are shuffled about to achieve even teams, taking into account max player limits for each team. After that players are only allowed to join a team if the difference in player numbers between the teams is < 1.

It also tracks which players have been shuffled about so that it can shuffle other players next round.

[-KewlAzMe-]

yea i like to think of it as future until I DL it.

Does it take into consideration odd player games where the same guy gets stuck on one team twice and better his odds for the 3rd game?

[-=V12US=-]

Isn't protecting the AI sort of one of the things that made playing guard so much fun? It was kind of an RTS, you put your units in the right place and they would be deadly. You'd leave them wandering around, and they were blackjack fodder.

[-=V12US=-]

Present tense, KAM, not future tense.

I believe it is much the same. After the countdown, players are shuffled about to achieve even teams, taking into account max player limits for each team. After that players are only allowed to join a team if the difference in player numbers between the teams is < 1.

It also tracks which players have been shuffled about so that it can shuffle other players next round.

Make sure that when you click a team, it says team preference. I remember a lot of new people complaining about the team thing and that it must've been bugged, because they clicked thief and then became guards. Got kinda tedious when you had to explain it to new people all the time.

[-KewlAzMe-]

^^ Good point