OK so Knights development has been a bit quiet recently, but today I went through Trac and planned out what I would like to do in the next few releases. The plan ended up looking something like this:
- Version 20 (the next release):
- Get rid of the separate “Team Duel to the Death” quest type, and instead make all games team games (as proposed in the forum a while back).
- Add a “Quest Requirements” box on the right hand side of the screen, this will show you a “checklist” of what you have to do (e.g. “Find 4 gems” and “Return to entry point”) plus a little tick or cross next to each item. The idea being to make it a bit clearer exactly what you are supposed to be doing in each quest. (You can already get the quest requirements by pressing ESC, but it is a bit non-obvious, especially to new players.)
- Version 21: improve “modding” support (see this thread)
- Make mods easier to install, by simply creating a new directory in “knights_data” (instead of having to edit the existing “knights_data” files as you do at the moment).
- Change the Knights client so that it downloads all graphics data from the server, instead of looking in the local “knights_data” directory. This means that mods could be installed on the server side only, and players would automatically see the changes without needing to update their Knights installation at all.
- Tidy up ImpassIve_Rus’s mod for multiple wand types and support it as the first official Knights mod.
- Version 22
- I would like to improve the Tutorial. I think a game like Knights needs a strong tutorial, since there is a lot of stuff you can do in the game, and it can be a bit confusing for newbies. The current tutorial is OK but there is definitely room for improvement.
- Some other minor improvements, e.g. fix some bugs when players get eliminated (which Moo has pointed out recently).
There is also the small matter of the Knights Map Editor which is currently in a somewhat neglected state. I was thinking of rewriting this in C#, as that would give me an excuse to learn C# (and therefore increase my employability) however it doesn’t look like I will be able to do that any time soon. I plan to concentrate on Knights itself for the time being.
Still not sure when I am going to get time to work on the above, but at least there is a plan in place now 🙂
The plan sounds excellent! It’s certain these updates will result in continued enthusiasm by the regulars, and probably open the doors to new players as well (especially those that enjoy more team playing antics and hands on creativity with modding).
Thank you Stephen.