- Knights Province launches Alpha 13 with long-awaited Multiplayer - 24 December 2025
December 2025 - Just in time for the Christmas season, Knights Province reaches a major development milestone with the release of Alpha 13, the major update after two years since previous Alpha 12. Following the previous Alpha 12 release, this new version delivers substantial technical, visual, and gameplay advancements - most notably, the long-anticipated arrival of multiplayer.Alpha 13 marks the first step into multiplayer gameplay, allowing you to experience Knights Province cooperatively or competitively. Alongside this, the update deepens mission scripting and storytelling tools, improves performance, and enhances audio and visuals - all pushing the game closer to a fully realized Real-Time Strategy experience.Key Features in Alpha 13MultiplayerPlayers can now join online servers to play together, engage in PvP or cooperative matches, or spectate ongoing games. Maps and save files…
- New food mechanics - 7 November 2023
In the old system, units would eat everything they can in the order it is available in the Tavern till they get to 90% satiety. This had several drawbacks: It would look odd to see units consume both Ale and Cider, or Fish and Sausage. Sometimes units would overeat and waste the food (e.g. unit ate to 80% and then another 60% sausage, resulting in 40% going to waste) Attempts at food management micro distracted from the game Starting from r13944 new rules are in effect: each visiting unit will want to eat three dishes – meat, bread, drink. Meat can be sausages or fish, bread is always bread, drinks can be cider or ale. Exact choice is made randomly upon availability. New satiety values are: Meat – 35% Bread – 25% Drink – 15% For each 2 dishes combo unit gets an additional 10% satiety. Result is that in the full Tavern a newly arrived hungry unit (satiety
- Knights Province Alpha 12 release (and 10 year anniversary!) - 20 October 2023
October is a special month in Knights Province history - the game was conceived almost exactly 10 years ago back in October of 2013. It has been three years since the last big release of Alpha 11. There was a lot of work done to make the game look and play better than ever. Here are the major improvements and features: 4-way buildings placement - buildings can be placed facing each of 4 main directions. This makes town planning more interesting and strategic. New water rendering engine with waterfalls and water levels for better looks. PBR and Screen-space reflections, normal maps and parallax maps - these are new rendering techniques that allow for a nicer picture, especially for metallic surfaces (like armored units warfare and water bodies), buildings roofs and roads. Lots of new house models, textures and improved unit animations Brand new in-house work animations - covered in detai…
- In-house animations for every home! - 1 October 2023
Animations are super important in Knights Province. The game is meant to be playable in different styles, but one of the bigger focuses are - chill, laid-back experience where players can enjoy building their towns and interact with others towns (including AI). Animations help to reach and support that goal in several aspects: Setting the Scene - Animations help create the right vibe in the game. They make the town and its people seem alive and active, adding a lively feel to the game world. Reinforcing the idea that Building Stuff Feels Good - The game is all about taking your time to build a town, and animations make that process enjoyable to watch. Seeing buildings go up, trees and grain grow, and resources being moved around and processed keeps the game engaging and satisfactory. Feedback that Works - Animations give feedback to players about execution of their orders. When you tell…
- Working on graphics pipeline - 13 May 2023
While revamping graphics pipeline to implement PBR, also been adding underwater caustics effect:
- Adding bridges to Knights Province - 5 February 2023
Following periodic requests, I’ve checked and revised the decals used to place bridges in Knights Province. Usually they have been faked with “Pier” decal, but it has one unfortunate property – it’s unwalkable. Not to mention gaps between boards don’t look that good. Taking “Pier” as a base I have made 2 new decals for bridge body and bridge side. Here’s how they turned out
- How does one fix AI starvation? - 16 December 2021
Knights Province AI opponents in Skirmish have a known occasional issue of not producing enough food for their servants, resulting in citizen starvation and early collapse of their town economy due to that. Let’s look into what it takes to fix that issue! What is it so bad about unit starvation in the game anyway? Well, a number of things: First and foremost (all others stem from it) is that units dying of hunger is a planned penalty from the game for poor town management. Hence all the points below are more or less intended to be working together to implement that penalty. Units die of starvation and need to be replaced by hiring new ones, which is free for serf/builders, but costs gold for skilled professions. In both cases, re-hiring takes additional time. Units waste time by going to Tavern frequently and back instead of working Hungry serfs may die while carrying wares, which not o…
- Starting Alpha 12 wip cycle - 5 August 2021
It’s been a long time since Alpha 11, but at last, Alpha 12 is entering its public Wip cycle! Starting from today, you can find a link to fresh Alpha 12 wip build on Discord Long story short - lots of coding, game design, artists interactions and debugging went into Alpha 12 over the past year. There are several new big changes and improvements in the game: Sheep farms, Sheep, Pastures, Wool, Gambesons! Reworking object picking (aka hitboxes) UI/UX Reworking HUD UI/UX Waterfalls and multiple water levels New text localizations - French, German, Spanish, Polish and Turkish And as always - a lot of smaller features and improvements Now let’s look into these features more closely. As always, a word of caution - anything described below is not final and can change during or after Alpha 12 release. Sheep, sheep farms, pastures, wool and gambesons One of the things that bugged me from the ear…
- Substance Designer purchase - 20 June 2020
Thanks to monthly support from my patrons on Patreon I was able to buy Substance Designer! SD is a tool for procedural texture generation. Those nice shingles, wooden beams, plaster and whitewashed walls, grass and lava. Guess what, instead of painting by hand, all those textures can be generated from noise and simple functions! So I was looking for shingles textures online again. Shingled roofs are so common in the game and they make the most screen area after terrain. Finding suitable textures (free or not) to use in the game is not easy. Every time it’s either a different scale, too low-res, watermarked, has unclear copyright, etc. So when I found another bunch of neat textures I noticed they were not hand-painted, but procedurally generated. That made me think, if those nice textures are a product of an algorithm, surely I can tweak and repeat that algorithm to get the exact result…
- Alpha 11 news - 7 May 2020
It is the most worked-on version of the Knights Province yet (except for Alpha 1, of course). Last release was 7255 and this one is going to be at least 8930. Means that a whole 1600+ bits of changes and improvements went into it. Main features of the new version are: Manned towers. Now each tower can be manned with 1-3 warriors who will pick up bows inside and shoot from atop at the enemy. Warriors will request food to be brought in by Serf when hungry, otherwise they will stop "working" and walk out, just like citizens do. It is yet unclear how warriors specialization will affect his performance in the tower, or if warriors inside could take a fraction of damage from enemy archers. At the moment, all warriors shoot with the same strength, distance and frequency and stay 100% protected inside. Buildable fences. Now you can build and destroy your own fences (and enemy fences too, of cou…
- Knights Tavern news - 8 April 2020
Knights Tavern (KT for short) is a codename for the accounts server we have been developing since 2019. Accounts were one of the more often requested features in KaM Remake, but we never had expertise or bravery to actually implement it (well, for numerous reasons). Attempts were made for the KP, but they did not succeed until recently, when a lucky chance has arrived (in form of an article ( https://habr.com/ru/post/491272/ ) and a code repository ( https://github.com/Cooler2/ApusEngineExamples )). Now, knowing that the backend server can be developed in the same language as the game, KT is finally taking its chance to come true. Neat thing about KT, is that it can be used for both KaM Remake and Knights Province. Both games are very much alike in terms of accounts info they provide and can benefit from. So we can safely build KT in such a way that it allows for a single account for bo…
- Adding fences - 19 January 2020
Fences have been long on the game’s todo list. Being a really neat feature described by a single word, it comes with a lot of problems to solve. How does one approaches a feature like that? First the “wants” had to be outlined. Fences might have a number of variants and uses in the game: Short crossable fences can be used to designate grain fields and orchards. Purely aesthetic Medium breakable fences. Can be a weak fortification, slowing down enemy advance. Maybe they can also be used to keep the cattle Tall tough fences can be a better fortification. More expensive and harder to break If we think about it, fences around house building sites are somewhat related too Next comes the problems and features exploration phase. Here’s a short FAQ I did on fences before starting the work. Each line poses a problem and has a solution below. The FAQ is not final and solutions can be changed to a…
- Campaign improvements - 8 January 2020
Campaign menu is one of the menus that received the least attention during Alpha development so far. Why is that? Well, it’s not as important as the main game or map editor - it’s rarely used and serves a small role of allowing to click “Start mission” or choose to replay the previously beaten mission. It lagged so much behind now that it’s subpar even by Alpha standards. By requests from mapmakers it’s finally getting some dev time. Along with that campaigns are also getting some new features (campaign scripting, yay!) What campaign menu should look like? The big idea is to have it in 3D as a sort of map laid on the table, with heights and 3D banners. However this is far from priority, since it’s better to have a more developed game, rather than campaign menu, right? So for now, campaigns are getting most of their planned mechanics, but still retain its simpler (and easier to develop)…
