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 🙂
Would be nice to hear, what you are planing for the next release.
At the moment I think the main thing for the next release is going to be a new control scheme. A lot of players have complained about the controls so I want to make some improvements in this area. I made a post about this on the forum today.
Apart from that, I am going to concentrate on adding Lua scripting and better modding features to the game. This will allow users to add new content and improvments, and ultimately will result in a better game, since a community of modders would be able to achieve a lot more than just me working by myself. Unfortunately to enable this I need to actually put more modding features into the game… This is quite a bit of work so it won’t appear in the next release, although hopefully I can make some progress on it over the next few months.