So I know making a multiplayer rougelike, especially a turn based one, has never panned out, worked, or been a good idea. And this idea is certainly just as bad if not worse. However playing hours upon hours of DDA and then moving over to SS13 made me wonder if some kind of mod/port or even making a new DDA based game on a BYOND sever, or something similar (and anything better) would be possible. Space Station 13 is what I’m speaking of for anyone lucky enough to have not heard of it before. Playing one the new Space Marines server got me thinking if it were possible to set up something similar to DDA on a BYONDlike server, using tilesets to simulate a smaller world with a small amount of players or something like that. So if all you fine people on this wonderful forum could share your opinions on why this is a bad idea, how it would fail, all the problems that would prevent it and how it would take a huge amount of work just to result in nothing and so be happy with the game we’ve been given, I would enjoy it ever so much. Also this is my first post, so if its in the wrong section, please forgive me in advance. Thanks for reading~!
Having no experience with this what so ever, my idea of a best bet would be a way for all players to do an action before a turn passes, if a player is crafting or doing another time consuming event, their turn would be skipped until they finish. This would be very crude but would make it so the source code would not be change so much by just adding support for input from a server.
I always liked the ideal of Multiplayer for similar games, but hell no to MMO! To many people are assholes and like to destroy just to destroy. Now if we are talking a few friends getting together to face the apocalypse together, then HELL YEA! But I’ve never seen it done well even on some larger titles that werent held together with duct tape and blobs.
You could definitely do something “like” DDA in BYOND, but the world size would be limited to 1000x1000 tiles or so… Which honestly might not be very much DDA at all. 
1000x1000? Then make it a compound kind of thing.
You can already run a server that multiple people can log on and play at the same time on (though you can’t interact with each other directly, and things get weird if you try to overlap reality bubbles since you are technically at different times in-game and both trying to write to the same map tiles at the same time). Here’s a short tutorial on how to set one up (though you need Linux).
Hmm yes I do know about the same server multiplayer thing already. I suppose thats the best its gonna get for turn based rougelikes, and its a brilliant idea. I’m always pining for an interactive one. Perhaps not MMO or large scale server based, but simply coop or even just have one other player in the game. Perhaps that would make a turn based coop system more manageable, if there were only two people sharing the world.
Cdda coop would be awesome and a dream of mine for years.
I said on irc about a timer count down i also daid about we go system look at combat mission for what we go is
I would support multiplayer-oriented play for the challenge senarios.
You MUST write the entire game with this kind of thing in mind.
The advancement of the game has to be related to wall time so that players stay in sync. If you miss a tick you don’t take an action, this is of course very bad in combat, and as a result you either need long turns or to have relatively simple combat, you can’t have game mechanics that require you to spend any amount of time looking in your inventory for things or making convoluted decisions. This is one of the reasons roguelikes can have such depth, the simple commitment to being turn-based allows the player time to manage a nearly arbitrary amount of depth in game systems, even in combat.
Another result is that you either need player relationships to be non-rivalrous (you’re not competing for the same resources) or relative turn advancement must be managed and balanced. If you took DDA and made it multiplayer, the first person to get a working vehicle would simply win for all intents because they would suddenly have massively better mobility and resource gathering ability compared to other players, and the first person to get there would almost certainly be someone who took way more turns than anyone else. Rivalrous MMOs tend to parcel out turns as a limited resource in order to stay attractive to people who don’t have hours to spend on the game per day.
All the crafting systems go right out the window, since they burn through hundreds of turns at a time, crafting would either be “start it and walk away from the game” (and hope you don’t get ambushed, since you’re not watching the game) or would have to be gutted and replaced with a system with shortened timespans.
tl;dr, it’s possible, but you’d have to start from scratch, or it’ll suck
Or you could just turn dynamic NPCs on and…as they say, it effectively becomes DayZ: The Roguelike.