HKMP Major Blockers

Admittedly, it has been a while, but not for a lack of updates to HKMP. I've made another batch of small and also some larger updates, which I'll cover in this post.

I want to start off by saying that HKMP 3 is reaching a more polished state. Since the last update, I've had a couple of major blockers on my TODO list that I required to be implemented before I could call HKMP 3 releasable to the general public. Those were (in no particular order):
- Stable networking implementation that uses DTLS
- The ability to play singleplayer with the HKMP mod enabled without it interfering
- The ability to play without using the "entity system" (which I've now renamed to "Full synchronisation") on HKMP servers
- A functional UI, similar to the old settings UI in which players can change teams, skins, and server settings
And I'm happy to announce that all of these points have been addressed in the latest development version to a certain extent. So let's talk about them!

The DTLS implementation has already had a post written about it when I was working on it initially. So I won't talk about it much here, but the main focus point is that there were still some internal networking implementation details that caused issues for some people. Specifically, some people encountered random disconnects, trouble connecting, and a spam of log messages regarding socket errors. All these issues seem to have been caused by some suboptimal logic on the receiving side of the networking client. Without going in too much (probably incomprehensible) detail, I've disconnected the socket specifics from how the DTLS client requires data to be delivered, which greatly improved it. Since I haven't gotten many more complaints, and with some people reporting that they had more success with a newer build I posted in the Discord, I'm now assuming that this fix worked.

Another issue that plagued HKMP 3 for a very long time (and was on the bottom of my TODO list) was making sure that with HKMP 3 installed, players could still play singleplayer without it completely breaking due to HKMP registering hooks and events and then complaining that it couldn't network things because the player was connected to a server. A lot of (much needed) refactoring later and HKMP will now only register hooks and events after connecting to a server, ensuring that the singleplayer experience is untouched.

Similarly to the previous point, all HKMP development builds to date had the full synchronisation of bosses, enemies, save data, and world state basically forced upon the player. This meant that there hasn't been an option to play HKMP without synchronising everything, akin to how the latest normal release of HKMP works. Naturally, I want players to have the option to play either way. Moreover, in the future I'll have to look into making it configurable what facets of the full synchronisation are enabled so players have even more control. For now though, it is satisfactory to toggle whether full synchronisation is enabled.

Last, but definitely not least, I wanted to bring back the UI that HKMP has always had to choose teams, skins, and modify server settings from a graphical interface. This has now been realised through the use of the mod menu. Many mods for Hollow Knight already make use of the mod menu extensively to configure various aspects of their functionality. HKMP however, never made use of it for no good reason really. The mod menu (when implemented properly) is very intuitive as it mimics the options menu that Hollow Knight already uses. The HKMP mod menu now allows players to modify both client settings, such as whether to display the player's ping and whether to enable full synchronisation for hosted servers, and server settings, such as how much damage abilities and spells do and whether teams or skins are enabled.

Apart from the points described above, there are a myriad of other fixes and improvements in this version. And unfortunately, I don't have time to talk about all of it here. So I'll leave those for another post. As always, the development build is included as an attachment to this post, and available in the HKMP Discord Patreon channel. That channel is also the best way to get into contact with me if you have any questions, issues, or other remarks about HKMP. Thank you all for the continued support on the Patreon!