Karoball is back: open test 0.1.19

Karoball is back, and almost all of it is new. The networking has been rebuilt, so there's no input delay, and there's a lot more besides: a play menu with Quick Play and ranked queues, tournaments with brackets and champion titles, parties and friends, quick chat, a locker with kit presets, player-to-player trading, and a town that goes dark at night under the floodlights.

This is an open test, so expect rough edges and tell us about them on our Discord.

To play, download Karoball for Windows, unzip it and run Karoball.exe. It fetches the game and keeps it up to date by itself. Press Play, register an account, and you're on the play menu.

New in 0.1.18 and 0.1.19

• One queue per region. Everyone in a region is matched together whichever server they're on, and the game moves you to your match without a reconnect screen.
• A region can have several towns. The game sends you to the busiest one with room and you can choose another. Europe's town is called Maple Green.
• Quick chat: press 1 to 4 to pick a group, then 1 to 4 for a line, and it shows in a bubble over your player.
• New default controls. Left click now shoots and right click sprints (it used to be the other way round), and the controls card shows both schemes with a moving picture.
• A friend's profile shows where they are, with a button to join them there.
• Cloth goal nets that ripple and bulge when the ball goes in.
• A region can now run several servers side by side. A full server sends newcomers to the next one, and a party follows its leader to another server or region. (Europe runs on one server for now.)
• Better online play, with fewer phantom bounces and jumps at 300 to 400 ms ping and smoother, more predictable turning, so other players are drawn closer to where they really are.
• Another pass on the town at night: softer lamp light that reaches further, a calmer lawn, and floodlight towers you can no longer walk through.

Everything else since the relaunch

If you last played the 2023 game, here is the rest. All of it arrived in the week before the open test, and each part has its own post.

How it plays

• Your player and the ball answer your input straight away instead of a round trip later, and the server still decides everything. More in Rebuilt from the netcode up.
• The ball is drawn as a real ball, rolling as it travels and spinning when it's struck.

Play menu and Quick Play

• Logging in lands you on the play menu, and Quick Play queues you for any mix of 1v1 to 5v5, ranked or casual.
• The game pings every region and picks the fastest. The chip at the top right lists them, with their ping and how many players are in each.

Tournaments, leaderboard and profiles

• Sign up for tournaments from the play menu. At the start everyone signed up and online is drafted into even teams by Elo and seeded into a knockout bracket, and your matches call you from the play menu and take you straight in. A draw after full time means golden goal. The winners and runners-up share the prize, and both get a trophy for their profile.
• Watch live matches from the stands by clicking them in the bracket.
• Win the latest cup of a type and you hold its title ("3v3 Champion") under your name until someone takes it from you.
• The leaderboard has the top 10 on the play menu and a full top-50 screen.
• Profiles show kit, rank, Elo, record, titles and a trophy cabinet.

More in Tournaments, parties and friends.

Parties and friends

• Parties of up to 5. The leader searches for everyone and the party always plays on the same team, and in a team cup one sign-up enters the whole party.
• You can add anyone as a friend by name or from their profile, see where they are, and invite them to your party or ask to join theirs.

Kit, lockers and trading

• The locker on the play menu shows your whole bag as item cards. Hover to try a piece on, wear or sell it, or change class.
• Kit presets. Save a home, away and third kit and switch in one go, from the locker or at the three lockers in the changing room.
• Stand at the desk in the market hall to trade kit and gold with another player, and both of you see the same table.
• No bag limit, you can keep as many pieces as you like.

More in Trading, kit presets and match-night cards.

The town at night

• Day and night on a 40-minute clock, the same for everyone. At dusk the street lamps come on and night matches are played under the lights.
• A rebuilt town of timber buildings with lantern-lit rooms: the changing room (class cards, kit racks, your lockers), the market hall (trading desk, sell stands) and the shop, with walkways between everything.

More in The town at night.

What we'd like you to test

• How movement, kicks and tackles feel, especially if you're far from the server. Does the ball ever jump, glide, or bounce off nothing?
• Quick Play queues: team balance, and what happens when someone doesn't turn up.
• Tournaments. We'll run test cups and announce them on Discord.
• Parties, friends, trades and quick chat: anything that gets stuck, anything you could exploit.
• Performance with lighting on, and whether the launcher and its updates work well on your PC.

Known issues at the time

• One region (Europe) so far.
• Windows only. The old Android app can't join the new server.
• If the game complains about a missing VCRUNTIME140.dll or MSVCP140.dll, install Microsoft's Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x86). See Troubleshooting.
• Queueing only works from the play menu, not while you are in town.