Korax’ Heritage Blogs

Although I do not position myself as an usual mapper inside Korax Team, sometimes I become inspired to design a piece or two (an inspiration should be strong enouph for me to overcome my eternal lazyness, hehe). This time I was impressed by latest RambOrc’s Big City version and decided to make something so nice and pretty-looking. Thus came the idea of a town-on-the-hill.

Seem as Firebrand has started to use the blog once more and informed you all of the progress on Korax RPG, I feel that perhaps I should too, but with something far more imminent, KMod3.

The public beta was released around 4 years ago, and most fans around back then have probably moved on or passed away for all I know. Due to several real life issues I’ve never actually managed to finish the blasted thing off, but I’m back once more to give it a shot. With the intent of releasing a new beta soon, and a final release shortly after. And that should be it for KMod, I’ll move on to help the others with KA and KRPG so we can get them released sometime before the end of the world.

For now I’ll just tease you a little with some of the new features added since the last beta.

Firstly a few minor things, mainly graphical, pretty things. That while nice aren’t going to change the way you play, the HUD has been updated to show more information in a nicer cleaner format, as well as the addition of contextual help screens, that show information relevant to your current class.

I’ve spent some time adding to the character creation menus, especially the setting of your initial stats. You now have full control over how your character starts, this should hopefully allow you to set your character up for your playing style, and also add greater replay value to the mod (Fancy playing as a Fighter with all attributes set to 1 for an added chalenge).

The Spell system has been greatly modified, rather than having each spell binded to an individual button, you have one active spell at a time which is cast via the aptly named “spell button”. I’ve found it makes casting spells much easier and more useful while mid battle.

I shall bring you more updates next week and perhaps even a date for that beta release.

I’ve been working during my vacations on KRPG experience system, the basic system is now done, when you kill monsters you now get experience, you can upgrade your character via de upgrading screen, you also receive spells as you level up being a cleric or mage, the remaining part is to make an actual spell casting system, Crimson Wizard started by creating spell instances, so the map can be told when spells are casted and updates itself if necessary, he also created actor conditions, so we can now affect actors when they are poisoned, confused, etc. by spells, the next step is to create items that are spells to the game, this way, it’ll be easier to make them be recognized as spells by the status bar and the spell book, which will be started once I finish with the spell system, hopefully it won’t be THAT complicated, I already have some ideas regarding this :), so I’m preparing the way for all of it.

Stay tuned, I might post some actual screens of spells once I get everything working as expected, it should take a couple of weeks for me to test it all properly. If you are more interested in how something might work, I would suggest you to post on the forums, since it’s the best place we might take some attention, heh!

The first internal build is nearly done; too pity I cannot show it to common users (a developers’ secret, heh), but at least I am not prohibited to speak a little about what I have already achieved.
As I already mentioned earlier , monster AI is of high importance for our new game. At current point I will state following:

The 14 august 2007 was the historical day for Korax Heritage project. Latest Vavoom progs were uploaded to our SVN repository on sourceforge.net, thus updating long-time-ago created KoraxRPG project. From now on KoraxRPG (Vavoom powered) will be coded and designed until final 1.0 release, and, hopefully, futher.

Well, right now the team is discussing what to do with the site, since it’s a bit old and outdated with certain things, we would like to know what you, the fans, would like to see in a new version of our website.

What do you think we could add? we would like to hear your voice, since the site is oriented on giving you information about our projects, we know what information we want to give about them, but we need to ask you how you would like to receive it? do you think these dev blogs are good? you think we should remove something you don’t like? or just revamp the site’s design, keeping the amount of information like it is now?

We are giving you the chance to voice your opinions on this, so it’s your chance to adapt the site to what you would like seeing, that’s it for now, take care everyone!

Strange title for this entry, huh?

Well, that’s what we are looking for Korax Arena, since the last beta release, Crimson Wizard and me had been discussing about the bots and their much needed AI enhancements, I’ve been researching for ways to improve certain aspects of the bots AI and it seems this whole things can be extended greatly for other projects, like the RPG project, so you can expect new enemy AI for our projects besides new AI for bots in the next release, I’ve got some ideas, and Crimson Wizard is also working on this, so by combining these efforts we’ll be able to extend something to enemies and make some tests on our findings, we are focusing for now, in making bots to look for paths to reach things and enemies in a more realistic way, once this is done, we’ll be able to apply all this for other bot reactions, like strafing missiles, jumping for reaching something, etc.

Imagine if we could make enemies that jump to reach for the player in our RPG, or enemies who instead of attacking alone, get a group of other enemies and attack the player, or enemies who won’t attack if another one is in front of them, things like this can increase the challenge of the game for the player in a great way :). That’s it for now, see ya all again soon!

I feel I must confess that over the last year and a half or so, I’ve been pretty inactive on this project. Due to a mix of social and personal reasons that I’d assume your not too fussed about.

Good news however is that I’m back, and KMod3 is being brought back into development, which not only means that all the annoying bugs in the last beta will be fixed, but also new functionality will be added. I’ll not say anything now, but watch this space as I’ll bring the occasional update on our progress.

Oh and don’t worry, Korax Arena will not be slowed by this.

Okay, people, trying to think of what can I write in these Development Blogs, I decided to state following. We are approaching Korax Arena public beta release. Hurray. Period.

I invented a new weapon for RPG Trilogy, most probably suitable for some boss creature. Weapon is a spell that summons number of spikes in front of caster and raises them. Each spike’s position and delay before spike raise are choosen randomly from a predefined range, and this makes weapon more effective and spectacular. But what is more important – is the fact that a spike, as you may remember from time playing original Hexen, does ultimate damage killing any creature instantly. Now imagine overall power of this weapon…