I’ve already seen people write about this, but I was wondering if it was ever going to happen. Will DDA ever have a multiplayer mode?
I know it’s turn-based and the best way to do it was to send the world file between players. But I was thinking about making it so that, for example, when three players are playing, they must wait to get their own turn. So basically, I would play my turn, then I would have to wait for the second player to take his/her turn and it would continue going until all the players take their turns, and i get my own turn again. To make things look a bit more exciting for the waiting players, we could have the text display show what the other players did or we could look at the world from the other players perspective.
I know this might be hard, or maybe a stupid idea, but having Cataclysm in multiplayer mode would be crazy fun, so even if i had to wait for all the players to take their turns, i would feel awesome.
I’m curious what you people think about this idea, would it be worth making, would it be fun to try?
Also, developers, what do you think about this? Is it too hard to implement? Do you think it would be worth it at the end?
Yeah, it would require a massive overhaul of everything. Consider what happens when somebody crafts, or sleeps.
That said, if you wanted to make a branch or a fork and start trying to hack something together, nobody would stop you. Hell, I would’ve said “multiplayer Morrowind will never happen” but TES3MP is a thing now, and it’s getting merged into OpenMW base in the next year or so.
Personally, I think multiplayer features are cancerous for most games that aren’t specifically built to be multiplayer (fighting and racing games come to mind) and that they tend to bring out the worst in people who play games, but I’m just a stupid asshole who doesn’t play well with others, so don’t let me discourage you.
I’m not interested in any form of multiplayer support for dda. As has been pointed out though, looming darkness is a multiplayer reimplementation of dda in python. I believe there is also a multiplayer reimplementation in C# that AFAIK is unnamed.
Thank you everyone for replying. I was thinking a bit, and I realized it would make a giant mess, not only in code, but also inside of the game to have a ton of players around. After all, what kind of “survival game” has more survivors than zombies and monsters
The beauty of Cataclysm is the fact that you’re alone, and there’s nobody around to help. From now on, I will be focusing on finding more in-game errors or implementing a mod.
I also hope this project will always stay up, because it’s just amazing!
I honestly fail to see how you can POSSIBLY implement MP in a turn-based game of this type.
Just from a technical perspective.
Let’s say Bob is walking down a road, while Alice is busy fighting a bunch of Z’s. Alice takes, let’s say, 10 seconds on average to assess the situation and decide on her actions every turn.
What happens to Bob? It now takes him a minute to walk 6 tiles down the road?
You could implement multiplayer eventually, but the evident problem that you and others have said is to make it properly functional and fun in all cases.
If Bob is sleeping and Alice is in her fight, Bob would, presumably, have to wait a many boring amount of turns.
Any of the ingame systems that happen over longer periods of time would be an issue; crafting, sleeping (as said), butchering, installing bionics, heck, even eating would be a mess!
TL;DR Yes, it can be done, but not in a meaningful way.
And for a good reason.
Trying to add MP to C:DDA is about as sensible as trying to make a train fly. That is, the optimal way to do it is to build a new game from scratch with MP at it’s core and then transfer things from C: DDA into it.
You can reimpliment a somewhat similar game in the same setting, but you need to drastically adjust how interaction with the game works.
All tactical (time-critical) actions need to be streamlined to allow actions to be specified very quickly, in less than a second. This has major implications for how inventory management works, and can even result in changing major parts of game direction like how heavily populated areas are with items.
All long-term actions need to be either eliminated or adjusted to provide a way to invoke them in a safe way.
Logout needs a consistent way to be handled, but most likely will have to compromise on how time management is handled.
