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:
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
endThis 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.
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:
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.)
I did a bit more work on the Knights Lua documentation project today. The following functions have been added to the docs:
There is still a lot to do, but this is a good start 🙂
For more information about Knights, please visit http://www.knightsgame.org.uk/.
Hello, I hope everyone had a good Easter.
I am conscious that I haven’t made any Knights updates for about 10 years now (where did that time go!), but I feel that the time has now come for me to start working on the game again!
For me the priorities for now are:
After that, we can start thinking about what we want to do with the game next, in terms of new features or whatever. But the above should be a good starting point.
That’s it for now — I’ll post again fairly soon with an update on how it’s going.
For more information about Knights, please visit http://www.knightsgame.org.uk/.
Just a quick note to say that I updated the Knights server to the latest Debian version this morning.
As far as I know, the update should not have broken anything, but please let me know if you spot anything that has stopped working.
Thank you to everyone who continues to support this game!
The Knights server move described in the previous post is complete, and the server is running at its new home without any (known) problems.
I have also enabled HTTPS support, so you can now access the home page at https://www.knightsgame.org.uk/. (For now, both HTTP and HTTPS are working, but I may turn off the old HTTP site, or redirect it, at some point.)
As always, if you spot any problems please let me know in the comments below, or by email to stephen (at) solarflare.org.uk.
Dear all,
First of all, I’m sorry for not updating this site very often these last few years. Basically I have been busy with my full-time job and “real life” and just haven’t had much time to work on indie game programming projects for a while. I do hope to get back to it sometime, but probably won’t be able to do too much for at least the next year or two, unfortunately.
Also, I hope everyone reading this has been staying safe during the pandemic.
The reason I’m writing today is that I’m going to be moving the Knights server (and my personal website) to a new hosting provider. (My existing provider has said they will be discontinuing VPS hosting at some point in the future, and also I can save a bit of money by moving to a cheaper company, so now seems like a good time to do this.) I notice there is a Knights game planned this Saturday so I’ll try to fit in the work either Saturday evening after the game has finished, or Sunday morning. That should give plenty of time to fix things if everything starts going wrong 🙂 (especially since Monday is a holiday here in the UK as well).
Of course I hope (and expect) that it will all go smoothly, but there might still be a little downtime, so basically what I want to say is, don’t panic if the site is inaccessible for a time, I will be working to get it back again as soon as possible!
Any concerns, drop a note below or email me at stephen (at) solarflare.org.uk.
Thanks to all Knights players for your support over the years!
Stephen
We have quite a few issues on the Knights bug tracker now, so I’ve decided to tidy things up a bit by sorting them into categories. I’ve used the “Milestone” field to represent the categories, and have created new Milestones as follows:
(The numbers are just to make them sort in the order we want.)
The best way to see the results is to look at the Active Tickets by Milestone page.
I plan to start clearing some of the bugs over the next few days/weeks, then maybe we can move on to some of the more interesting stuff after that.