Here's your chance to show off your Kong skills, the CSCup LAN party hosted in Namur, Belgium will include a Kong deathmatch tournament. There are some prizes to be won and a chance to meet our art director kiwi :). So if you live in the area it's well worth checking it out. It will take place on the 28, 29 and 30th of March, good luck!

I'm pleased to announce that Roland Shaw has joined the development team and is going to be our sound guy. He has already replaced almost all of the existing sounds in the game and created some new ones. You can listen to some of his previous work on his website: http://www.rolandshaw.com/. You will be able to listen to his creations in the next version of Kong. Speaking of which, it will be released as version 1.1 rather than 1.0.3 because there will be a considerable number of new features in this version, the main ones are:

• Re-coded the lightmapping algorithm to increase performance
• Added a new Jungle theme
  
• Re-designed the GUI, now using libRocket instead of CEGUI
• Added new coco-flash weapon which can be used to blind enemies
• Exploding monkeys (gibbed) when killed from an explosion

There are also a whole load of smaller changes that I won't list here but they'll be in the change log. I realise it has been a while since the last release but I hope the wait will be worth it. In the future I will try not to make so many changes at once so that smaller releases can be made more frequently.

Version 1.0.3 is coming along nicely, on the programming side I have been spending a lot of time optiming the game so hopefully if you've been getting bad frame rates this should be improved. The shadow generation code has been re-written and is now a lot faster.

On the art side of things, kiwi has been working on a new jungle theme which I think looks very nice. A new theme system has been implemented to support this, it is done in such a way that themes can be switched without needing to rebuild the map. The screenshots section has been updated to showing off parts of the new theme.

Here is a direct link to the first screenshot:

First of all, Happy new year to everybody! I have some good news, a while a go we put our friend Nikolas in charge of finding us a dedicated server to run Kong 24/7. As always, he hasn't failed to deliver, Yves Decleyre has kindly agreed to lend us one of his servers for the month of January. These servers are usually available for rental (http://www.ghalan.be/).

The only issue is that it is running under linux and I have not yet been able to compile Kong for the linux operating system. I have spent the last few days setting up the build system and making modifications to the code to compile with gcc. Hopefully I will be able to get the Kong server up and running soon.

Update: Unfortunately I am unable to get Kong to operate correctly on Linux due to a bug in the current release of the PhysX library. I've been told the bug has been fixed and that it will be in the next release (v2.8.0), so until then I'm afraid the dedicated server will have to wait.

It has taken a little longer than expected but here it is, Kong version 1.0.2! For a list of changes please look at the version history. There arn't any radical changes to the gameplay, this release was mainly aimed at fixing bugs and optimising the game. One thing worth mentioning is that I have implemented NAT punchthrough. In theory this should allow you to create and join games from behind a NAT without having to resort to port forwarding, although I haven't been able to test it thoroughly so I hope this works as expected.

To update please run "Update Kong" from Start->Programs->Kong. If you have any trouble with this you can always download the full installer from the downloads sections but please let me know of any problems.