Rebuilt from the netcode up: Karoball 0.1.4
The first release of the rebuilt Karoball. Your player moves the moment you press a key, a new play menu finds you a match, and the town has new art. A new launcher keeps the game up to date.
Karoball 0.1.4 went live on the evening of 21 September 2026 and it's the first release of the rebuilt game. The networking was started again and almost everything you see between matches is new.
No more input delay
Before, every key press went to the server and back before your player moved. That cost about 85 ms even on a perfect connection, and about 145 ms at 60 ms ping. Now your player moves on your own screen the moment you press, and the game checks it against the server as you play. The server still decides what really happened, and the ball is predicted on your screen too.
The play menu and Quick Play
- Logging in now takes you to the play menu instead of straight into town.
- With Quick Play you queue for any mix of 1v1 to 5v5 at once and join the first game that fills.
- Ranked or casual queues. In ranked your Elo goes up or down with the result, and in casual there's no Elo on the line.
- Each Quick Play match is played on a pitch of its own, away from the town.
- A results screen at full time with the result, your Elo before and after, and the gold and kit you earned.
- Regions: the game pings every region and picks the fastest. For now there's only one, Europe.
- Leaving counts as a loss once a match is under way.
Note: Since 0.1.27 a crash or a dropped connection no longer counts as leaving: your place is kept for two and a half minutes so you can get back in. See Replays, and getting back into your match.
A new town
The whole town was redrawn from a fresh set of art: benches, lamps, planters, bunting and signposts arranged round each of the nine pitches.
Under the hood
- A new launcher that downloads only the parts of the game that changed.
- Every file is checked against the release's published checksums before the game starts, so a broken or tampered download is never run.
- Crash reports. If the game ever crashes it now shows a crash screen and writes a report to its save folder.
Note: Since 0.1.11 the launcher updates itself as well as the game. See Trading, kit presets and match-night cards.
The same evening: 0.1.5 to 0.1.8
Four small releases followed within a few hours:
- 0.1.5: new bushes and pebbles round the town.
- 0.1.6: new trees, an autumn tree among them, and new shrubs.
- 0.1.7 and 0.1.8: fixes to how the ball is shown on your screen when you or another player touch it.
