[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:13507”]Scenario: you have two people in a shared base, one is continuously crafting or sleeping, the other is doing extensive inventory management.
The crafter/sleeper is stuck in real time (i.e. sloooow) mode for thousands of turns (an hour or many hours, depending on your tick speed), that’s unacceptable.
There are a large number of scenarios that would trigger this kind of thing.
The only way I can think of to make multiplayer work would be to write a total conversion mod that eliminates sleep and moves all crafting to being furniture based.
Even after doing that, you’d need to write the net code for the game, this would be a massive undertaking since usually multiplayer games are written with this kind of thing in mind, Cataclysm definitely wasn’t.
Do all this with very little input from me (I can’t speak for any of the other devs, but I don’t recall seeing any enthusiasm for multiplayer from other core devs), because I’m simply not interested in a multiplayer version of dda. I’d be happy to merge things that allowed such a total conversion to happen, and we could make a separate build of the program that handles the net code, but I wouldn’t help write it.[/quote]
Thinking about this sort of problems that make MP near impossible to do, i’ve thought of an idea that is not multiplayer, but still might be a fun addition to the game, and less nightmarish to implement i think.
Basically, give players an ability to play DDA as a Jagged Alliance style team based single player game, with direct control over multiple characters at the same time. Technically we already can do that minus the “at the same time” part.
The balance, PvP, disconnection and netcode issues are nonexistent to begin with, the “bored player doing long craft\read\sleep” problem is solved by the fact that the player will just simply leave the “busy” characters busy and do stuff with the others, and large part of the features needed, like detailed human NPCs and handling multiple player characters on the same maps are already there.
The only issues i can think of is running multiple, possibly overlapping “reality bubbles” for all the characters with related increase in hardware resource use which may or may not be a major problem depending on the number of characters and harware, and adding UI features to make multiple character switching and moving not be a pain in the ass.
The extra player characters could either be added through the usual character generation (say, an option of “is friend of option”) or “assume direct control” option for recruited NPCs.
Such a system would also squeeze a lot of extra use from all the already present features like building, crafting (characters to spare work hours on that), vehicles (multiple seats, turrets) and NPCs (recruited ones really worth the effort due to not relying on AI all the time) .
Nevermind the massive amount of new possibilities in combat tactics due to having multiple characters able to act in a smart way or properly use advanced item fuctions that AI can’t.
If multiple reality bubbles are not feasible at all, the alternative would be to just have an expanded reality bubble, and letting “stray” player characters out of it get handled similarly to allied NPCs that get outside the reality bubble.
Might also create a use for radio items, allowing switching between which character(s) should be “active” and which should be outside of the bubble.
