Knights Windows, Linux game

I hear what you're saying about controls and would definitely like to improve this.

Note that you already have some (limited) ability to remap the controls, on the Options screen.

Some things we could do in future are:
- have a separate key for opening the menu (instead of holding down ctrl).
- have a separate key for throwing daggers / firing the crossbow.
- separate key (Tab?) for activating the chat box, then the letter/number keys would be available for use as additional controls.
- possibly map different actions (pickup, drop etc) to their own keys instead of using the menu.

I'd like to hear feedback from players though... what would your ideal control scheme be?

W, A, S, D; movement.
Enter/T; chat.
Left Arrow; attack/set bear trap/use wand/activate held item/etc.
Down Arrow; open door/activate object/pick up item.
Right Arrow; access menu/manage drop-ables (gems and the like).
Up Arrow; throw dagger/etc (select activated secondary weapon via Right Arrow menu).
I; inventory, for more advanced stuff later on such as armor management.

I would personally like to see an indepth explanation of the functions for items and such as well as a great deal more functions added for various things. If you were to add the above control features, as well as making modding more accessible, we, the players, could begin to help turn it into an expansive action/hack'n'slash or adventure/action-RPG or any number of other similar styles with the right tweaks. Additionally, more extensive enemy lists (or better yet, more extensive/better explained modding possibilities so we can make our own enemies, especially given the resolution of the art being so accessible). And finally, options for persistance. EG, coop campaigns with towns and levels/skill systems and such? All in all, you just have to put the features in the game, really. I would be more then happy to provide the content, like many others I'm sure.

Oh. And a personal request. Make it so that only the host can change settings?

Thanks for the control ideas. I'll try and add those (or something similar) to the game soon.

There is already an indepth explanation of items etc. in the game's manual. I strongly recommend reading the manual if you want to enjoy this game fully -- it is one of those games which is not much fun at first, but gets a lot better once you know what everything does. The manual is installed along with the game (check your start menu) or can be read online on the Knights website.

As for modding, I have recently started to add Lua scripting to the game. This is going to take a while to complete as there is a lot of stuff to convert over, but I hope to get it done gradually over the next few months. There is also a half-completed map editor which I should be able to polish up once the scripting system is a bit closer to completion. This should allow plenty of modding possibilities.

Finally, making it so that only the host can change settings: actually someone else requested that as well, so I suppose I will have to do it :)

I actually already went through the manual for the ingame items. And, in fact, I dug a great deal through the game's data files. I feel I could start modding as is with a few caveats.. I can't work around the problem of only two slots for monsters. I could quite easily change the two monsters, but I can't extend the enemy list beyond that without changing the game itself.. The documentation I was talking about was more for the code of the given items, and in the future, the Lua you're implementing (which is an awesome addition, by the by). For instance, I see that the Wand Of Undeath has scripting to turn targets into zombies, and to instantly kill zombies. However, the part where the zombies fear it is actually not scripted into the wand itself, but into the zombies with an ai.fear command regarding that particular item. And in this sense, it would be quite easy to, say, make an ice demon, and a torch. And script said ice (or shadow, even) demons to fear fire (or light, etc). Mostly, it's just a matter of making the game a little more open-ended (like the two monster limit).. Once the fullstops are removed, this game could expand exponentially. And, like I said, I'd be more than happy to help out with that content generation. Whether you'd be interested in cooperating on it directly, or whether I'd be simply generating content as a player. Up to you, really. :P

I'd certainly be interested if you (or anyone else) wanted to help out with content generation. In fact one of my aims of posting here on ModDB is to try to get people like yourself involved :)

Basically, I came to the conclusion recently that I am probably going to need some help to make this game reach its full potential. For example, people keep sending me ideas, but I don't have time to implement them all myself; but neither is there any way for people to add things on their own (except by editing the data files, which, as you have noticed, are not really flexible enough to do the job). My solution to this problem is to open up the data files a lot more, so that the community can start adding their own content to the game. This is why I wanted to add Lua support. Also, as you point out, a lot of the restrictions etc will have to be removed, but hopefully that should not be too hard.

So, in summary, yes, I agree with everything you say :) Just give me a bit of time to start making these changes, then, we can see how it goes from there...