The Castle Doctrine Forums

jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2013-04-01

Posts: 1,235

Starting work on Version 6

During the past month, over 3000 people have tested the living daylights out of The Castle Doctrine.  Thank you all for your patience while I worked through various issues and growing pains, and thanks for all of the reports that you have sent me.  I received over 400 emails, and I have now answered each and every one of you personally.

I've fixed a bunch of server-side issues already (those that don't require a client change), and there are a few more of these to deal with.  The biggest one is server-side robbery verification, which will eliminate all problematic types of cheating.  The server will be running a copy of the client and then pass that client robbery logs to verify (this eliminates duplicating game logic in the server code).

From all of the reports, I now have a long list of things to fix that will require client changes, and that means it's time for me to get busy working on version 6.  Obviously, there are a bunch of little bugs that need fixing, but there are also some major overhauls in the works, including:

• Improving family behavior so that it's actually possible to protect them.

• House blueprints for robbers, to push house design away from the guessing-game realm and into the real-puzzle realm (and eliminate the viability of 24-bit combination locks).

• Being able to watch security tapes without fixing up and re-testing your house first.

I've got a lot of work to do.

In the mean time, I'm still interested in hearing about bugs that you discover.  Check the list of known bugs in the forum first, and if you've found a new one, please email me. 

The same goes for incorrect server-side behavior.  If the server is killing you because of an error, I want to know about it by email.

In all cases for bug reporting, please include your most recent recordedGame file and (if you're on Windows) your stdout.txt file.

Hunter X

Member

Registered: 2013-04-15

Posts: 8

Re: Starting work on Version 6

What type of software will the serverside verification require? I've been toying with the server code (exploring the viability of a non-permadeath server) and I might need to switch it to my other host if it goes much beyond just PHP (for example, I suspect I may not be able to execute custom programs uploaded to the server).

jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2013-04-01

Posts: 1,235

Re: Starting work on Version 6

Yeah, the verification will actually be running a headless client---a compiled C++ program.

However, this verification step will be optional (so you can still run your own server if you can't run compiled programs).  You'll be able to turn off verification in the settings.php file.

It's really not practical to duplicate all of the game logic on the PHP side, so I need to solve the problem this way.