This month Knights Province celebrates its 13th birthday. What started in 2013 as a techy proof-of-concept has grown over the years into a full-scale RTS complete with AI opponents, campaigns, modding, online leaderboard and skeletons! Not to mention all the essentials such as the built-in Map Editor, Replays, Scripting and Multiplayer. To this day there have been a total of 13 milestones labeled as Alpha.
Looking at the version strings recently, one thing became quite clear: a project cannot reasonably remain an “Alpha” for 13 years. The game has long outgrown what this label implies. The core gameplay loop is quite solid, the custom engine runs reliably, and the foundational game mechanics are locked in. What lies ahead is expanding content, balancing, and preparing for the eventual commercial release. To reflect this maturity and in anticipation of the long-term goal (including the future 1.0 release) the time has come to drop the “Alpha” and “wip” tags from the title.
The new 0.x format
Starting with the upcoming 14th milestone cycle, the game is adopting a new structured numeric versioning scheme. Its goal is to better communicate the game’s state to players and modders. The new format will look like this: “Knights Province 0.14.0 r19120”.
Here’s what every part means:
- The first “0.” is the Epoch prefix: it indicates that the game is in the pre-release stage. Once the game is sufficiently feature-complete and polished it will gain the “1.” Epoch prefix.
- The Major and Minor numbers (“14.0”): These are quite familiar to every Knights Province player by now. Major denotes a major feature milestone. Minor is for smaller follow-up fixes.
- The revision number (“r19120”) remains the definitive tracker for identifying the exact engine build for game updates, bugreports and crashreports.
Why not SemVer?
Pedantry corner, you may have heard about Semantic Versioning – it has been quite popular in software development. The game’s new system is largely inspired by it. At first glance it looks very similar – three numbers separated by dots (with a suffix). In SemVer, however, the “14” in “0.14.0” would technically be the Minor version. In Knights Province’s case though, I would not dare to call any of the 13 previous milestones Minor. They are very much Major! Hence the adaptation.
Identifying experimental builds (so-called “wip”)
The development pace is not changing; I still expect 100+ builds per year as new features roll out and get tweaked and tuned. To clearly distinguish stable milestone releases from experimental builds the game will be using the Minor digit (rightmost “.0” in our example “0.14.0”). While the features are dialed in and bugs are fixed, the game version will stay 0.14.0. As soon as everything introduced in 14 is well taken care of, the Minor number will bump to .1 and a release announcement will be made. If further fixes are needed after the release, a .2 will follow. Development of 0.15.0 will be next in line. TL;DR: “.0” represents active development and “.1+” represents a stable milestone release.
There is still room for changes
Even now as I write this, I still have plenty of ideas I’d like to experiment with. There’s definitely going to be room for siege, maybe some more experiments with fighting mechanics. Some of the other ideas I haven’t talked about yet could be considered more radical, but still nothing as crazy as changing the game genre or foundations.
New 0.14.0 is in the works
Development of 0.14.0 is well underway and its first builds will soon be public. You may already have seen some topics it touches on in previous articles. Main features include Cows and Horses in pastures; a single-player Marketplace; autotextured wooden building elements; moddable terrain decals; improved terrain flattening stability; and of course, much more.
Thirteen years and counting
Whether you have been following this devblog since the early terrain prototypes or just joined recently for multiplayer playtesting, thank you for your continued support. As always, feel free to share your feedback and ideas on Discord and keep an eye on the #new-versions channel there for the first new build under this scheme!
