You'll find the official download links on the site:

 

The old launcher gave a lot of players compatibility trouble; this one clears most of that up. It does everything the old one did and then some: website news now appears inside the launcher on its own, and the newest images and videos from KicksTube show up there too, so you don't have to go hunting for them. It also welcomes you with the latest registered account, which servers are online, the total number of accounts created on Kicks Online, and a few more details, right on the home screen.

 

On the server side we've been busy as well. The lobby messages now carry a bit more info when players join, leave or move around, including small touches like where a player is connecting from. But the part we're most excited about is a pair of new commands (still in BETA) that our team is using to make matches feel smoother:

 

#ping nick — type it with another player's name and it gives you a rough idea of how much lag you'd have with that person in a match. Simple as that: "if we played together, how smooth would it be?"

 

#besthost (BETA) — it looks at everyone around you and points out who would make the best host, meaning the player whose connection would give the whole group the least lag.

 

Here's the technical side, kept short. In a Kicks match, players don't send their moves straight to each other. Each client's packets travel to the KicksServer first, and the server forwards them back out to everyone else in the room: that's the route the protocol uses for the entire match. Because of that, the number you see is built from two hops, your round trip to the server plus the other player's, and it's an estimate of that network path rather than a stopwatch-perfect reading.

 

One thing worth being clear about: this is a ping meter, and only a ping meter. It measures the network path, not the hardware of the player who's hosting. Someone can have an excellent connection and still be running the game on a struggling PC, and that shows up in ways a ping number will never catch: those little teleports and snaps you sometimes see when a character jumps from one spot to another mid-match usually come from the host's machine being under load, not from the ping itself. That side of performance is on our radar too, and it's part of the bigger picture we're building toward.

And that's the key word. This is a testing stage for something bigger we're putting together. For now we're using these commands to compare results between players, gather real numbers and build solid statistics, all of it feeding into the optimization work we want to do to make matches run smoother. So jump in, try them out, check your own numbers: every test you run is a real datapoint for us.

 

See you in game.