Updates to King Arthur: Knight's Tale have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client (in on-line mode) is restarted.

Patch v2.0.1

• Fixed the 'Forge' armor enhancement not working in missions
  
• A change in traits will take effect immediately, instead of waiting one round
  
• 'Authority' on the Morality chart will reduce waiting time for decrees by one mission
  
• 'The Tale of Sir Yvain' mission will autosave after each encounter as per the mission prompt
  
• When (un)equipping an item, Vitality will be taken into account more intuitively, so no accidental hero-deaths occur
  
• Sir Bors's 'Tradesman' trait generates a new relic item only when the Merchant restocks, not after every mission.
  
• Changes to the Character information tab accessible in missions were made to make them more consistent in what they are showing
  
• Fixed Raven Swarm's 'Smother' mastery
  
• Vulnerabilities won't stack anymore

• Several smaller bugs have been fixed on mission maps
  
• Several potential issues that could potentially crash the game have been fixed
  
• Several localization errors fixed
  
• Several controller errors fixed
  
• Multiple bugs concerning sound have been fixed
  
• AI behavior and skill-based predictions have been improved upon
  
• A store link has been added to the main menu

Hello, everyone!

Everything is in full swing right now in our little team.

Life in the village goes on as usual, everyone doing their own thing – the young maidens are, in turn, splashing around in the pond. Look at how much fun they’re having! Our mighty heroes also couldn’t help but steal a glance on the way!



But not the heroes alone are watching. The cunning lizards are, as always, just around the corner. Once the heroes go on to practise their martial skills, the lizardfolk squad grabs the beautiful maidens, puts them in a cage and takes them away. Only Perun knows why they did it, but to be honest, who wouldn’t want to get their hands on such beauties?


The beautiful maidens are growing weary as the lizards’ prisoners, missing their home village. Suddenly, out of nowhere, our hero flies to the captives’ aid, scattering the enemies. The lovely girls repay him in kind, in awe of his manly might.



And now for something completely different.

Renowned historians often dispute about the purpose of lizardwomen having tits.



The famous researcher of reptiles, Hue Axis, shared a few of the most popular hypotheses with us.

Number One: For the most part, mammary glands in lizards are more of an atavism or a remnant from the evolutionary past.

Number Two: It is an imitation of other species that serves as a defence against predators or helps to attract partners during the breeding season.

Number Three: They are not mammary glands. They are bags of poison.

Number Four: Breasts are needed solely to lure in young human males.



Stay tuned for updates!

Damage Calculation and Card Type Rework
Damage types have been redefined as melee, ranged, elemental, summoning, explosive, and special.
Special damage ignores monster damage reduction.
Monsters no longer have armor and are instead subjected to percentage-based damage reduction.
The piercing attribute has been changed to a reduction in percentage-based damage reduction for monsters.
Melee damage is reduced by 10%, piercing damage by 5%, and other types by 5%.
Alice and Ling'er's skills have been greatly enhanced.
New damage cards have been introduced: Thorn Armor and Christmas Tree Spear.
New attribute-boosting cards have been added.
The UI layout has been slightly adjusted.
Fixed a bug where the "vampirism" attribute was ineffective.
Fixed a bug where the "damage reduction" attribute was ineffective.
Fixed a bug where damage reduction could be lowered to -100% in certain cases.
Various other bugs have been fixed.
Game prices are about to be increased.

Hey Folks,

Mark your calendars and join us at Nacon Connect 2024!




Peace,
The crea-ture team!

Greetings survivors,
We've just pushed a small patch addressing some of the feedback you've sent us in the past two days.
Thank you for bringing those issues to us. If you meet other bugs, please do report them!

• Fixed crashes caused by Zombots using a Boomerang.
  
• Fixed cases of NPCs sometimes being invisible in online multiplayer games.
  
• Fixed camera shake sensitivity option in menus.
  
• Fixed input configuration resetting on its own.

The game is launching in 3 hours and a half, we can't wait to see you all in ParadiZe!

---

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A strange girl raised by a machine cult with a clear disgust for all organic life. She built her own prosthetic arm and runs campaigns of techno-terrorism to further her cult's goal.




Visit our Website: https://www.mangofactory.win/kumitantei

Watch us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MangoFactoryEN/featured

Join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/mangofactory

Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MangoFactoryEN

Follow on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mangofactory.win

What can I say? With all the help from my friends telling me I could do it. With all the time spent testing and tweaking. With all the time spent getting stuck in rocks or trees...you know who you are. The day is finally upon us!

Today will be the beginning of many milestones with The Collar. Today is Release Day. It has been on the horizon for so long I was not sure it would come and as it approached, I was not sure I was ready for it. But here we are going in with full confidence in a fun little game, that is different and provides hours of entertainment.

I am proud and honored to release the game to the world for your enjoyment and excited to see some of the crazy fun about to come from it. Enjoy the game and have fun!

~The Collar has you now.

Welcome everyone, Captain Marek reporting for the 42nd edition of the Captain's Diary! I have lots of exciting information for you today, so let’s get started.

Many of you are eagerly awaiting the release date for Update 2, so let’s cut straight to the chase. It’s April 5th, 2024! We were initially aiming for an earlier date, but we wanted to make sure that the game is in a solid state for the release.

We plan to run a closed testing version of the game around a week before the release so if you want to be part of it, keep checking our Discord. And if you’d like to be notified about the release, subscribe to our mailing list!

The work on Update 2 took us longer than anticipated and one of the reasons was that we spent a lot of time working on this other game. And as you can imagine, developing another game takes a lot of time!

The other game is called Captain Cartographer, and you play as a… Just kidding, it’s the map editor for COI. You can lower your pitchforks for now; there are no other projects that we are working on except COI. I just wanted to emphasize that the map editor is comparable to a smaller game in terms of complexity.


Captain Cartographer, our new experience is coming out on the 5th of April!

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the editor is a large project, and there are a few reasons for it. First, we developed a new and future-proof map representation that is extensible and moddable. This ensures maps created by our community will remain functional for a long time, and future game updates won’t break them.

Second, COI maps are more complex than those in other games, as the terrain materials underground matter. Simple sculpting tools and texture brushes won’t work in our case; we had to develop new tools and techniques to provide an easy way of creating terrain features that are above and below ground.

Third, we wanted to make the map creation experience easy and intuitive, even for beginners and non-artists. Creating a nice-looking mountain range should not take hours, but rather just a few minutes.


Map editor showing a work-in-progress map with editable features and their configuration.

Maps in simulation games typically fall into two categories: Procedurally generated or manually created. Each approach has its own pros and cons. In general, procedurally generated maps can be configurable and large, offering greater replayability, with minimal manual effort.

On the other hand, procedural generation can struggle with creating something concrete or unique, which is where manually created maps shine. They offer more creative freedom, allowing for the creation of specific features that would be difficult to make procedurally.

Captain of Industry adopts a hybrid approach, which is quite unique. Our maps are manually assembled from procedurally created elements. How does this work? Here is an example: Imagine you’d like to create an island with a mountain range on one side and a forest on the other. Instead of sculpting the terrain and manually placing trees, you generate three procedural nodes: island, mountain, and forest. Then, you can configure each node to your liking and you are done!


A simple map created using three features: Plateau, mountain, and forest.

There are several more advantages to this hybrid approach. First, all operations are non-destructive and reversible. You can always move or modify a procedural node without losing previous work. Is the mountain too close to the forest? Move it! Too small? Make it bigger! Want another one? Copy-paste it! Plus, we implemented a familiar undo-redo feature for all operations!


The previous island, but with another duplicated mountain, which was also resized.

The second advantage is that creating visually impressive features, such as mountains or plateaus, is just a few clicks away. We provide numerous presets with the procedural parts already configured; all that’s left is to place them on the map to your liking. These procedural features can be further customized, which is considered more advanced.


An example of presets for some terrain features.

Another benefit is the efficiency of map data storage. The map is just a compact list of procedural nodes and their configurations, requiring significantly less data than the final generated map. To be more concrete, a final generated map can range from 20 MB to 500 MB in size, but the hybrid format typically remains under 1 MB. This allows us to embed the entire map in each save file without inflating its size. As a result, both we and map creators can update and refine existing maps without breaking saves that utilize them.

However, there are some disadvantages. Performing small manual edits, like raising or lowering terrain with a brush, is relatively tricky. This requires defining small features and adjusting their parameters to achieve what you need, which can be a bit tedious. This should improve over time as we learn what operations are missing and implement them (or mods!).

Now that you understand maps are composed of manually placed procedural nodes, it's important to note just how extremely configurable each node is. I don’t use the term “extremely” lightly. There are three levels of configurability.

First level of configurability: This involves changing the shape, position, and basic parameters of map features. Many features, such as mountains, are defined by a polygon and its position, shape, and number of vertices can be easily changed via intuitive UI. For example, creating a mountain shaped like the letter 'U' is as simple as manipulating the polygon. You can also modify basic properties such as the terrain material for mountains and the type of trees for forests. Most of the parameters are documented in tooltips.


An example of forest node configuration. You can also see our new tree models!

Second level of configurability: At this stage, you delve into the parameters of the procedural model itself. This advanced technique allows you to modify properties like the slope of a mountain, scale of generated details, surface material, etc. This is meant for more experienced users who want precise control over the procedurally generated pieces. However, mastering this level requires spending some time to understand how the procedural model works and what each parameter does.


An example of advanced parameters that control the function defining a mountain shape. The white surface is a real-time preview of the mountain feature.

Third level of configurability: Now we reach the pinnacle of customization - the extreme part. Some nodes, like the ones that generate mountains, have a fully configurable procedural model. This means that the procedural functions and the way how they are connected to each other can be configured via our simplified pipeline language. It’s even possible to add new functions and transformations via mods! This is intended for expert users who are familiar with 2D noise functions and their composition.


A previously shown mountain with an added warp function that twists it into an interesting shape.

A map includes not only a list of features, such as plateaus, mountains, and forests, but also elements known as post-processors. A post-processor transforms the generated map features in various ways. Good examples of post-processors include one that generates grass on rock surfaces that aren’t too steep, another that mixes two types of grass for better visuals, and a post-processor that automatically generates rocks and flowers on grass. These post-processors are as configurable as the map features themselves. For instance, the flower-seeding post-processor uses a configurable noise function to determine the appearance and distribution of flower patches – it’s all fully configurable!

Additionally, we have post-processors for localized terrain shaping operations, such as smoothing, ramp creation, and flattening. These operate within a configurable polygon area and perform exactly as their names suggest.


A ramp tool allows you to create a smooth ramp between different heights.

Another post-processor worth highlighting is the Erosion simulator. This is an entirely new post-processing step that simulates hydraulic erosion by modelling millions of virtual rain particles falling on the terrain, eroding it in a realistic way. I could write (and maybe I should, at some point) an entire blog post about this process, but for now, the short story is that it makes any map and, especially mountains and cliffs, look so much more natural and realistic. Check out the before/after animated gif below to see the difference. Notably, this entire process is also fully configurable for those willing to delve into the 20+ parameters. We also put a lot of effort into making this process parallelizable, utilizing all available CPU cores; otherwise, just the erosion simulation alone would take 30+ seconds to finish.


A comparison of a mountain before and after simulated hydraulic erosion.

In the map editor, you can select a map size from a recommended list or enter a completely custom size! The only limitation is that the maximum map area cannot exceed 17M tiles, and no single map dimension can be larger than 16k tiles. This allows for unique map shapes, such as 512x16k. It's worth noting that, up to now, the largest map size was around 4M tiles.


A “ribbon” map that is 512 tiles wide and 16k tiles long. As you can see, you can’t see from one side to the other :)

There are several other neat features in the map editor:

• The ability to add one or more starting locations.
  
• An x-ray tool that reveals material layers beneath the terrain surface.
  
• The option to plant individual trees and place other props.
  
• Configuration option for virtual resources, such as crude oil deposits.
  
• Map generation that is fully parallelized, using all the cores your CPU can spare!

A screenshot from a tracing tool showing parallel map generation on a 6-core CPU (Intel i7-8750H).

As you can see, the map editor is a beast. To showcase all its capabilities, we’re planning a live-stream demonstration covering everything described in this article and more! This event will scheduled closer to the release, and we’ll make a separate announcement.

To enable our community to share and download all the maps they create, we are launching the CoI Hub website in March this year. We originally announced it in Captain’s Diary #39.



And that’s everything for today, mark your calendars for the 5th of April and see you soon! Captain Marek out.

Unleash the power of the elements, control your enemies, or summon ancient spirits to fight alongside you. Dive into the diverse world of magic in Dark Envoy with these three distinct Adept specializations!

The Elementalist in Dark Envoy is a traditional mage harnessing the combined power of the elements, to decimate enemy formations. With abilities like Meteor, allowing for massive AoE damage, the Elementalist is a force to be reckoned with. The Immolate skill, on the other hand, scales with the enemy's total HP, making it a perfect tool for dealing with bulky high-priority enemies and bosses.



The Combat Medic is a sorcerer who wields the powers of both life and death. Their very presence serves as an inspiration, granting vitality to allies and enabling them to surpass their own limitations. Not only does this specialization possess abilities capable of dealing Chaos damage, making it unique among adept specializations, but it's also one of few classes capable of seizing control of an enemy's mind, turning them into an ally thanks to the skill "Mind Virus" .



The Summoner is a druidic adept who utilizes their bond with spirits to summon them onto the battlefield. Beyond their summoning abilities, they possess the unique capability of transforming themselves into a powerful entity called the Colossus, serving as the last line of defense. Depending on your choice, your transformation can be more defensive, buffing allies around you, or offensive, with skills that allow you to pull enemies towards you.



The Elementalist, Combat Medic, and Summoner are just three of 12 specializations available in Dark Envoy. Each offers a unique playstyle and range of abilities for you to master.

What specialization do you think is the best? Is there any particular combo you use during the game? Let us know in the comments!The Dark Envoy team 🛡️✨

https://store.steampowered.com/app/945770/

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Version 1.11 is now the default Steam version! This version contains only few user-visible changes, with the bulk of the work focused on optimizing the game sim to extract as much performance as possible from 4+ core CPUs. There's also pax pathfind improvements and new features, like board and disembark -only line stops.



In 1.11 the game simulation and the game UI can now run fully independent from each other. This boosts the game simulation speed by potentially a large margin, depending on how large your save is (and for users with less powerful GPUs, on how complex your on-screen buildup is). Since the game simulation was already massively parallel, this increases the CPU usage of the game. Faster sim = more CPU usage. If you prefer the game making less use of your CPU, in 1.11 it is also possible to limit this capability down to just 2 sim threads, with the corresponding sim performance hit.



Board only and disembark only line stops are now possible. Although not super realistic, it is useful to keep local pax from boarding long distance lines making multiple stops in a large city, for example. Or to make sure large capacity lines only empty their trains in some selected, less busy stations. Factorio or a human transit simulation? You decide!



Pax pathfinding can now consider a pax staying inside a train for more than 2 train runs. This limit has been in the game since 1.5 and it is now finally removed. The pax pathfinder can now plan a path leg which keeps the pax inside the train until the train starts a technical line or an already visited station appears (not just the boarding station), whichever comes first, over any amount of train runs, including an entire week worth of them.

"Figure 8" or "pretzel" shape lines are now better supported. These lines, in conjunction with single line stations, have had limited support in the pax pathfinder. In 1.11 the game is able to detect more cases of a transfer station, including cases of a line crossing over itself on the same station, or a common looking line having a single direction loop in one end (in this case, the station(s) just before the loop are marked as transfer). This means there are now some cases where pax can disembark in a station and pick a train of the same line, to avoid the loop part of a "figure 8" line for example.

Finally, it is now possible to restrict pax from boarding a train if they plan to ride it for a too short time. For example, if you have a long distance line making a couple of stops in a big city, and want to forbid local pax from using it like a subway between the two stations, you can set a minimum stay time in these stops. Pax will stop considering them as valid legs in their trips if the ride time is under your setting.


I've written this a bunch of times over the years already, but the new version contains major multiplayer fixes and optimizations. This time I'm confident enough that I've enabled up to 100x shared sim speed and made it the default setting, and feedback from the beta period has been positive. Give it a try if you are a multiplayer fan.



A new option in the company panel now allows to change into a new time zone mode: Approximate. This mode uses a real world time zone map, instead of the previous simplified rule of having one time zone every 15 degrees of longitude. It's still called "approximate" because in order to keep performance from diving, it is a rasterized map with a resolution of around 5km, so locations within a 5km border of a time zone might display the wrong one. Still it's a huge improvement over the previous system.



It is now possible to change what time of day the game accounting considers as the start of day, relative to UTC 0. So for example, if your save is mostly built up in the USA east coast, you might want to consider changing accounting start time to -5h, so it tracks the USA Eastern time zone.

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For a more detailed and technical look into what's in 1.11, check the devblogs:

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-november-2023/

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-december-2023/

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-january-2024/