Month: May 2024

A new version of Knights has been released!

This makes some changes to potions and staffs, which were requested on the forums, and which make the gameplay closer to the original Amiga version of the game.

I have also updated the Lua and ENet versions used and made a couple of other minor changes.

The game can be downloaded from the download page as usual.

Enjoy!

For more information about Knights, please visit https://www.knightsgame.org.uk/.

Summary: In the next release of Knights I will be upgrading the versions of ENet (a networking library) and Lua that are used by Knights. I will also be removing some custom patches to Lua that were being used previously. This will have the following effects:

• Users will have to upgrade their game client (because the new ENet version is incompatible with the old one).
• The Lua code for mods might need to be updated.

Lua Change

I have updated the version of Lua used to the latest version, 5.4.6 (previously it was 5.1.4).

The previous versions of Knights also included a custom Lua patch (written by me) which added a new “&” operator to the language. This was used for merging tables, for example one could write code like the following:

i_wand_of_destruction = kts.ItemType(
  basic_wand & {
    melee_damage = 1000,
    melee_stun_time = rng_time_range(2, 3),
    melee_tile_damage = 1000
  }
)

This would make an ItemType that had all of the properties from the “basic_wand” table, together with the new properties shown.

Adding the “&” operator to Lua seemed like a good idea at the time — but it does cause problems, because it means I can’t easily upgrade to newer versions of Lua (as I would have to port my patch across to the new codebase every time).

So, from now on I am removing this patch, and the “&” table-merge operator will no longer be available.

Instead I have written a Lua function that does the same thing:

function table_merge(a, b)
    local result = {}
    for k, v in pairs(a) do
        result[k] = v
    end
    for k, v in pairs(b) do
        result[k] = v
    end
    return result
end

This function is available as “kts.table_merge”. Therefore the above “wand of destruction” code must now be written like this instead:

i_wand_of_destruction = kts.ItemType(
  kts.table_merge(
    basic_wand,
    {
      melee_damage = 1000,
      melee_stun_time = rng_time_range(2, 3),
      melee_tile_damage = 1000
    }
  }
)

This does make the code a little bit uglier I suppose, but it is not a big problem and I think this is a small price to pay, in exchange for making it much easier to do Lua upgrades in the future.

Of course, any mods that were using “&”, must now be modified (no pun intended) to use “kts.table_merge” instead, but this shouldn’t be too difficult.

ENet change

I have also taken the opportunity to upgrade ENet from version 1.2.5 to the latest available version (on Windows this will be 1.3.17, as this is the latest VCPKG package available; on Linux it will be whatever is installed on your local system, which will hopefully be reasonably up to date).

The main issue here is that ENet 1.3.x is incompatible with 1.2.x, so users running the older versions of Knights will not be able to connect to the new Knights server. They won’t even get any message telling them they need to upgrade; the connection will just fail completely.

To mitigate this, I’ve arranged for the “Connect to Server” screen to show a message like the following when players try to connect:

Hopefully this will be enough to let players know what they have to do, and it won’t be a huge issue.

A new version of Knights has been released!

This is basically just a maintenance release. I have fixed various issues with the codebase and brought the code up to date (e.g. upgrade to latest Visual Studio version, upgraded various libraries to new versions). There are no actual gameplay changes.

The release can be downloaded from: https://www.knightsgame.org.uk/download

I plan to do another release after this one with the following changes:

• Fix the bugs that Knight_Rider has posted about recently (potion changes and staff damage when using super/strength).
• Fix a bug I noticed with chat (pressing the keypad enter doesn’t seem to send a chat message, although pressing return on the main keyboard does).
• More changes to upgrade the codebase (e.g. remove deprecated C++ features, upgrade to latest Lua version).

So stay tuned for that within the next few weeks 🙂

For more information about Knights, please visit http://www.knightsgame.org.uk/.

I’m pleased to announce that I have finally moved away from SVN and moved the Knights source code into Git.

The Knights source repository is now available at: https://github.com/sdthompson1/knights

I’m also, slowly, bringing the code more up to date — e.g. updating to the latest Visual Studio version for the Windows build, moving from SDL 1 to SDL 2, removing some outdated C++ constructs.

This process will continue over the next few weeks, but hopefully fairly soon, I will be able to make a new release of the game! (The first in many years.)