First some good news: after a break of about 2 or 3 months, I have started working on Knights again, as of today 🙂
The first thing I wanted to do was have a look through the backlog of bug reports. Unfortunately there are a couple of bugs I can’t reproduce at my end, such as #74. This is a bit of a problem since you can’t really debug something if you can’t reproduce it. So what I’ve decided to do is start logging all Knights games played on the server: this means saving all the network packets received, with timestamps, as well as the random number seed used for the game. Then, if I set up a test server on my machine (with the same random number seed) and replay all the packets to it, the game should (in theory) play out exactly as it did on the real server — and bingo, we have a reproducible test case.
So the first thing I will do is set up some logging; hopefully this should be done by next weekend.
After that, I want to have a look at controls – lots of people on moddb complained about the “strange” control system, so we need to do something about that. Also, I want to continue the work to add Lua scripting to the game (which is quite a big task). So there is lots to keep me busy for the moment 🙂