Knights update

I haven’t done a Knights update for a long time so I thought I would briefly let people know what’s been going on.

Over the last 2-3 months I have been doing the following:

1. Moving the Knights server to a new VPS (instead of the home server we had previously). This has delivered better ping times and faster website performance for Knights players.
2. Updating the Knights codebase so that it works with the latest Visual Studio version. I also investigated using SFML or SDL2 for graphics, but that work is on hold for now (see previous post for details).
3. Behind the scenes, I have been writing some scripts to help auto-generate the HTML pages for the website. (Previously, I had been manually editing HTML files, which is a pain; now I can just edit “template files” and then use my script to generate the HTML and upload, which is much easier.) This should make it much easier for me to change and update the website in the future.

I have also been thinking recently about updating the game’s website. The design of the front page basically hasn’t changed since the game was first released and it is looking a bit “dated” at this point. I would like to try to improve the style/look of the page and also try to “sell” the game a bit more, highlight what’s good about the game, that sort of thing. Hopefully this will persuade more people to download it 🙂

There are also some bug fixes to do (such as the “dagger bug” reported by KnightRider) which I have not forgotten about.

For those who are interested, I have written a “todo list” for Knights, which looks like this:

1. Fix gate squishing bug (#194).
2. Fix dagger throwing.
3. Update the website front page.
4. Make the official game server show up as “knightsgame.org.uk” instead of “vps.solarflare.org.uk” (I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, it will require a new server config option though).
5. Fix the Linux makefile (at the moment it doesn’t quite work right when building the knights server on Linux).
6. I got a code warning from the new Visual Studio (about “incorrect API usage” in one part of my code), I want to investigate what is going on there.
7. There is a bug with LAN broadcasts which I want to fix.
8. I’m planning to write a patch for SFML and send it back to the developers (this relates to something I found while investigating SFML for Knights graphics).
9. I also want to add a “–pidfile” option to the Knights server (this will make it slightly easier to install the server on Linux machines, it is something that came up while setting up the new server).

As you can see there are quite a few small fiddly tasks (which you always get in game development) mixed in with more interesting things like bug fixes and website updates.

As most people know by now I don’t get a great deal of time to work on Knights, but hopefully I should be able to get the first two items on the list (the bug fixes) done in roughly the next two weeks. At that point I’ll do a new release of the game (so players can have the benefit of the bug fixes) and then continue working my way down the list…

I’ll try to do blog updates more frequently as well 🙂

About Knights

Knights is a multiplayer game in which players must run around randomly generated dungeons and solve various quests. For more information please visit http://www.knightsgame.org.uk/