Multiplayer?

[i2amroy]

There used to be something similar to multiplayer going, where multiple people existed in the same world but never directly interacted. How exactly did that work?

This exists, you just gotta have someone set up a server (here’s some basic linux-based instructions for the process: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=150212.msg6255891#msg6255891). Once it’s up anyone can ssh in and play characters, though as previously mentioned you can’t directly interact with each other (and things can get really weird if two people are trying to occupy the same chunks at the same time, so try not to even be in the same building as other people, or have them log out while you help them out and then log back in once you’re gone).

[Fourty_two]

The main problem with multiplayer is the turn based system, for example if one person wants to craft something that for example takes 1 hour to make, it’s won’t be fair to the other player to instantly skip time and have them lose an hour of time, nor is fair for the person crafting the item to wait 600 in game turns. There is already a sort of multiplayer system where people share the same world save but have different character saves, but the problem is that two characters can’t be playing at the same time.

[Jarl_Redskull]

They could make it so the other play can do stuff while the other player is crafting, for example if they walk It’ll subtract 10 seconds of the time of crafting. So the other play doesn’t skip an hour. I don’t know how to word what I am saying but hopefully I’m making sense.

[X-PLODE]

Make the player crafting’s reality bubble a priority so everyone inside his range experiences the timeskip.

It should also suspend all calculations except time advancing in leaps and weather/daycycle.

Maybe it could allow for other players to assist in crafting or just to allow them to interact with basic movement/using until they leave the dominant reality bubble or the crafter finishes, that way things should seem rather seamless.

[Profugo_Barbatus]

[quote=“X-PLODE, post:18, topic:1266”]Make the player crafting’s reality bubble a priority so everyone inside his range experiences the timeskip.

It should also suspend all calculations except time advancing in leaps and weather/daycycle.

Maybe it could allow for other players to assist in crafting or just to allow them to interact with basic movement/using until they leave the dominant reality bubble or the crafter finishes, that way things should seem rather seamless.[/quote]

So if someone across the street starts crafting an item during a gunfight, the fight will just be suspended for eight minutes? Zombies beating at the walls, but everyone has to stop because dude over here batch crafted eight lard and now its night. That gets weird, really fast. Either time skips and just costs other people large chunks of their days by running on the fastest clock, or everyone waits for dave to size up the map for twelve real minutes if it runs at the slowest clock.

The time system for this game is basically completely incompatible with any sort of Synchronous multiplayer. Anything that exists would have to, at its forefront, completely forbid player interaction to the point where you cannot see someone. Then what do you do when a guy leads a horde to your base. Its not like you can kill him. What if he just starts lighting the place on fire, or driving vehicles through the building? Or drives off with your vehicle? All things you couldn’t stop unless you forbid players from interacting with things in the world.

At that point you’ve just got a bunch of people starting with the same world file then diverging off.

A mail session hand-off system “Might” be feasible, assuming you force an end-period to the game day, then hand it off to the next person, “roll back” the clock while committing their changes. IE, if I spend my day turning rags into thread, then finish my day, and let the next guy start the same day with his character, the rags will be replaced by the thread (assuming it was dropped by the other guy). Otherwise you end up with sync issues if you try to remember when an Item was taken. IE guy 1 takes the rivtech shotgun at 4pm. Guy 2 takes the rivtech shotgun at 3:55pm. The rivtech was “available” at both times, but now two of them exist and shit gets weird. You’d still be completely incapable of direct interaction with the players, but your changes would persist enough to permit cooperative play styles.

[stk2008]

If some smart person came up with a MP version of CDDA then TBH me and my bro already said…we would NEVER play any thing else.
It would be amazeing.
I have mentioned it a few times but no one as of yet has came up with an idea of how to do it and looks very hard/impossible :(.

It would totaly rule though imagine it…WOW

[jcd]

I cannot see a way to make it synchronous.
So it 'll have to be asynchronous if at all.
I mean, let each player be in his own timeframe, unless interacting with another player (being in the same bubble).
On that occasion, both players have to follow the slowest clock.
The problem with this approach is that the passage of time in the game is universal. This includes seasons, day/night cycle, plants growth, monster evolution, food rot etc.

For these kinds of stuff, there could be a ‘universal clock’ independent of player activities.

Case in point: Assume two players, A and B.
A enters the game at 8:00 universal clock time (server time) and batch crafts. For him time passes fast so long as he is alone in his reality bubble, but the universal clock time is not advancing much, only the game loop runs for as many turns as it should, without affecting day/night, rot etc.

B enters the game at 16:00 and he goes to raid a lab. Again, universal clock time passes independently of what he’s doing, but what he is doing influences how many turns he takes to do something.

For both A and B, some things will depend on UCT, but others only on the turns it takes to do somehting, while the turns should not be affecting the UCT.

This approach solves it, but the catch is that it would need tons of balancing, because the time balance would get out of whack, resulting in batch crafting in a spiffy and likewise behaviour (rot taking UCT weeks, etc.)

PS. I much prefer Cata in its current form, tbh. Many of the best stuff in cata would have to be simplified/changed for the worse for MP to work semi-acceptably.

[stk2008]

LOL I think I may have figured a way this could work.

Who here has played Kerbal Space Program with the DMP mod?.

If you have you will understand about syncing reality bubbles.

So it works like this

Player one decides to craft some thing which will take 3hrs.

Player Two is off out side reality bubble doing other things.

Player one asks for help after he has crafted what ever he was crafting.

Player two says roger that on way. Now obviusly both players are in different time zones but here is the clever part.

Player two as soon as he enters reality bubble of player one gets a pop up saying SYNC TIME TO PLAYER ONE.

If he says yes time is synced and they can both iteract.

If he says no then they stay in there own little world/bubble.

If both players are all ready in reality bubble and one decides to craft etc then they both have to agree on this and take the time hit together.

[Profugo_Barbatus]

[quote=“stk2008, post:22, topic:1266”]LOL I think I may have figured a way this could work.

Who here has played Kerbal Space Program with the DMP mod?.

If you have you will understand about syncing reality bubbles.

So it works like this

Player one decides to craft some thing which will take 3hrs.

Player Two is off out side reality bubble doing other things.

Player one asks for help after he has crafted what ever he was crafting.

Player two says roger that on way. Now obviusly both players are in different time zones but here is the clever part.

Player two as soon as he enters reality bubble of player one gets a pop up saying SYNC TIME TO PLAYER ONE.

If he says yes time is synced and they can both iteract.

If he says no then they stay in there own little world/bubble.

If both players are all ready in reality bubble and one decides to craft etc then they both have to agree on this and take the time hit together.[/quote]

That still doesn’t solve the issue of item sync. If two players interact in the same area, but neither of them sync up for a while, then the items in the world wouldn’t sync either. I could pick up a rare item, then he could pick up the rare item, then we’d sync worlds. Instant duplication glitch. The KSP mod relies on the fact that players spawn in their items from nothingness. CDDA is pretty much based on crafting, looting and combat, which cannot operate on asynchronous bubbles without introducing an exploit into every single thing. Trying to sync up enemies would be even worse.

The only ways to manage it are either hard sync, every player must make an action before any actions are executed, which means someone doing a long craft will just sit there for a loooong time in real life waiting. Or handoff games like I described in my previouis post,

[stk2008]

Could we not have the server update items in real time so items dont dupe?.

[Profugo_Barbatus]

Could we not have the server update items in real time so items don’t dupe?.

But how do you define real time, without disadvantaging people? If I pick up an item at 6pm in the game, its easy enough to have it disappear from everybody’s game when 6pm hits. But what happens if its 6pm in my window, and 3pm in another players. I pick the item up. Does it immediately disappear from the past in the first persons game? how does the server handle this? what if I’m looking over a tile, deciding what to loot. Someone six hours in the future see’s the items on the ground, because I’ve not picked anything up yet, and picks them up. Despite the fact that I’m in the past, the items just got stolen away into the future. And if items are managed outside of time, that means that someone a week into the future could drop stuff and someone from the past would suddenly see them.

However you look at it, you end up with incredibly wonky logic of things poofing in and out of existence. For all this to work, you need some way to ensure that items cannot be interacted without outside a managed stream of time. Pass-off gameplay handles that by only permitting one player to interact with the entire world at a time. Everyone matching time units handles this by forcing everyone to have their realities synced up.

Permitting player interaction, indirectly through items across reality bubbles that might not match up is a clusterfuck.

[i2amroy]

Currently what we’ve got is asynchronous. And, as mentioned, things can get pretty weird if two players access the same submaps at the same time. Basically you just create a race condition that is resolved by whoever saves first winning IIRC; so both players would be able to pick things up and move them around independently, but when they both left it would end up looking like whatever it did for the player who managed to save that particular submap first IIRC.

[Arek_PL]

i have some ideas how multiplayer can look, of course making this a mmo is impossible and it cost a lot of work for barely working feature but for lan co-op with friend it should be good (because everyone is in one player faction with this same quests and npc relations)

of course it sounds simple only on paper, coding something like this will be something hard

speed is something like action points now

crafting, stun, sleeping and other things what take time drop speed to 0

turns look like this:

[ol][li]turn start[/li]
[li]check if any of the players have more than 0 speed[/li]
[li]if speed of every players is <=0 npcs and monsters what still have speed (monsters use speed too, right?) move and start new turn
else
players input commands[/li]
[li]after all player who have speed input commands characters, npcs and monsters (monsters use speed too, right?) move[/li]
[li]goto 1[/li][/ol]

of course we have some wariant of that like players moving in order (like in most turn based games) or players do thier turns in this same time and ai do thiers after all players stop moving like in hybrid turn mode of civilization but i think that my first idea is not bad at all

only host save game, when he saves everybody sync data with host, realy bad solution if host have slow connection but it should work (frequent saves will decrease desync)

best solution will be setting up a server and doing everything severside

when both players move on this same title or pickup this same item faster player (with more speed, if equal who first issued command) do it and another player do not lose speed

what happens when someone have few car controls and more than one player start to drive? prevent other players from taking over controls?
how to view other players?

known bugs:
when one player gets halucinations, everybody get them
when player feed LSD to npc all players gets halucinations

[stk2008]

The problem with me making suggestions is my total lack of code skills lol as u nowmrealise.

Any ways it would be a bloody thing of beauty if mp was some hoe ever implemented

[Profugo_Barbatus]

Again though, a “sync everyone’s movements” system doesn’t work when you consider the scale of some actions. A turn, regardless of the movement points in it, is six seconds in the game.

Grinding flour, to just use an example, is one hour. Some crafts are significantly longer than that. Therefor, once a player has embarked on a craft, they cannot do anything until the other player has performed three hundred and sixty actions, or their equivalent. Its not just a matter of sync. Its a matter of enjoyability. Collaboration sounds great, getting twice the things done, but in reality your looking at having significant downtime for one, or both players at various points. Sometimes when I’m playing Cata, I’ll get through a week or two in a day of play. Sometimes, It takes a hour or two to do a game day. Sitting down with a goal that involves ten hours of crafting is going to be extremely tedious for the player doing it.

So yea, my objections to that aren’t based on mechanical ability, I know enough coding that I could probably hammer out something ugly that permits it. But I genuinely feel that it wouldn’t be a particularly fun experience, as you’d have large swatches of mandatory downtime based on the nature of the game. Even if the other player(s) can go through enough moves quickly enough to get that downtime to a few minutes per action, you tend to have a lot of actions to perform, so that few minutes turns into half an hour of “Push button, select crafting recipie, watch netflix”.

[Nickal]

This has been suggested over and over, once by me. It doesn’t really work well. Maybe if a day comes that it is decided that there are no more mountains to conquer in this game, maybe then multiplayer could be seriously considered.

[Flare]

There will be so much to change in this game to accommodate real time multiplayer that it might just be easier to redo everything and lift some chunks from this game every once in a while. It is a gargantuan task.

[Dragometh]

I once saw a multiplayer mod for Kerbal Space Program. The mod worked in a way so that players had their own time and could sync with other players time. Maybe that could work on cata, but it would need to make the game not be turn-based-ish; instead of waiting or pressing 5 to skip a turn the game would have a clock running down. Movement would then be a problem too, though. Or maybe scaling down the time on all actions to an extent that it would be multiplayer-acceptable. There are ways to make it work, but they’re pretty damn hard to pull off. It is a thing I’d like to see in the future, though.

[TacticalPteridactyl]

Take game concept X and apply multiplayer. This is a terrible idea. (sorry!)
Why?
Because to create a successful multiplayer implementation, player interaction needs to be incorporated into the design process from the get-go. I’ve played a few games that caved to user pressure to add multiplayer functions and they’re always really clunky.

[Arek_PL]

actualy this game is turn based, making players synced will be not that hard task just throw away idea of real time multiplayer (and MMO idea too) we must focus on small co-op

hardest part is managing multiple reality bubbles and making players see other players

for world syncing only host should manage saving, host what is currently playing on computer what is host will probaly notice some preformance loss (because computer have to process all reality bubbles) so we need server edition of game where host can only create and host worlds (loading world create server but host do not have any character in control) maybe some administration tools will be usefull too (ban, kick, force saving)

for time sync when someone craft, skiping time is terrible idea imagine that you are surounded by zombies too and then someone decides to batch craft 2 katanas if my memory is good it is 16 hours so you are dead
better solution will be having him skiping turns when he do things what need a lot of time to do, of course it will turn this time in maybe even half hour of RL time so if you need to craft something what thakes a lot of time try cooperating with other players to start crafting together so turns will pass faster because making crafting skiping turns will only help with people boiling water or dehydrating meat