Month: August 2009

Wilson Tang has created a port of Knights for Maemo, a mostly opensource mobile platform for tablets (wifi touchscreen devices without phone capability).

The packages are available here: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/pool/fremantle/free/k/knights/

Source code: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/pool/fremantle/free/source/k/knights/

And the creator’s site, with screen shots: http://sites.google.com/site/wil7ang/projects/maemo/knights

The screen layouts have been changed a little bit to fit the Maemo platform, but otherwise it is basically the same as my version.

Thanks Wilson!

This is a quick progress report on what I’ve been doing for the next version of Knights (011).

The following changes have now been completed:

• “Observer” functionality now fully works. If two people are playing on the server you can now log in and watch them play. (I wasn’t originally planning to do this yet, but it’s such a cool feature that I couldn’t resist… Hopefully there will be enough people on the server in future to be able to make use of it!)
• When waiting in the lobby, the Knights window now pops to the front (and un-minimizes itself if necessary) when someone else connects to the server. (This only works on Windows at the moment as I couldn’t manage to  get it working on Linux. I will have another look at the Linux version some other time.)
• ESC no longer quits the game immediately. Instead it brings up the quest information (this is the screen that you get by pressing TAB currently) and you can then press Q to quit, or ESC again to return to the game. TAB now does something else – see next item.
• Chat messages can no longer be typed directly. Instead, you have to first press TAB (or click on the chat box) to activate “chat mode”, and then type the message.
  • The reasoning behind this is to avoid control conflicts. In the current version of Knights, if you define a letter/number/punctuation key as a knight control, then there is a conflict and that key becomes unusable for typing chat messages. In the new version, the conflict is fixed (the key either controls the knight or types into the chat box, depending on whether chat mode is on or off).
• The chat window is no longer cleared after the game ends (this stops messages being “lost” when you click through the Winner/Loser screen).
• The player name (used when connecting to the server) is saved to disk and remembered the next time you start Knights.

The work still to be done is:

• Look at reducing CPU usage while sitting in the lobby.
• A couple of bug fixes (e.g. currently there is a bug in the dungeon generator which might make the quest impossible, because all keys and lock picks are placed behind locked doors).

I’ll try to get these done next weekend.

I made a graph of Knights downloads over time and I thought people might be interested to see the results.

This shows the cumulative number of downloads of Knights version 010 since its release on 5 July. Both the Linux and Windows versions are included.

The spike at the beginning of August is when the game found its way onto the Linux Game Tome.

The second spike (8 August) is when the game was announced on reddit. This caused a massive increase in hits for about a 24 hour period, which then seemed to die down again quite suddenly (I guess it dropped off the front page or something).

As you can see the game is gaining in popularity – downloads have reached 500 and are still increasing. Hopefully this trend will continue 🙂