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[ahappydude]

Such a great read! Gave the whole developming an dungeon mastering tone hehe

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

Just heading to bed, but thought I'd cross-post this for you guys before I did.  Current tester count is like... 5 pathologically patient people that we've met in real life, but when it grows a bit i'll let you know

http://www.gaslampgames.com/2013/11/23/pre-alpha-testing-has-commenced-whatever-that-is/

Edit: I totally didn't realize i had 2 accounts for this forum.  Sorry for the confusion :S

Edit: just realized that some of them we haven't met in real life... wow, late.  okay, going to bed.

[MoLAoS]

Man you guys are so industrious. I feel so lazy now. I've been procrastinating on my project by trying to play EVE. Which ended up not working out. Too much hassle. I think I've given up on MMOs. I hope your game can handle people who play 7-12 hours a day for weeks at a time. A few thousand hours of Paradox games and I've even burnt out on those. I need something to do.

[ScriptWolf]

So signed up for alpha testing

Thank youuuu

[Puzzlemaker]

Oh I am excited!  Things are coming together!  A game is being born!  Remember:  Deep breaths and Push!

[ScriptWolf]

Hey dan I have been thinking about this for a long time and I know you might not be able to tell me but how will multiplayer work ?

Is it possible for us to fight against the other three players ? And would we each have our own colonies and does this mean the map would be huge for multiplayer ?

[Morrigi]

Signed up for testing.

[Descan]

I was thinking of how you could handle multiplayer, and I was wondering: Are there gonna be naval mechanics? Boarding, cannons, blockading, etc?

It'd be fun to have multiple coasts/islands/landings/whatever for multiplayer, seperated by water, and have the naval-based gameplay there. Trading or attacking.

It'd also be fun to have like a 90% water map and focus on a sea-faring colony. Keep the mainland for housing, and have the water give you all or nearly all your resources.

In fact, it'd be cool if there was a special map or map-type that had special, on-this-map only sea-resources, so you can get EVERYTHING from the ocean. Sunken forests and shipwrecks for wood, some undersea iron-equivalent, oil, cthulhus, sea-cows for beef and sea-sheep for wool, etc. And you start with a small boat and some wood to make a few houses and you have to get everything from the ocean. Things like the sunken forests and shipwrecks might work in the normal game, but maybe sea-cows are a bit much for a normal map. ;P

Pleasedothis. Or at least make resources mod-able enough that I can make a map like this! I suddenly desire this so very much.

Mostly for the sea-sheep.

[Karkov]

I signed up too, seems like it could be a fun venture.

Descan I read your post in this frantic, really eager voice.  Was actually kinda hilarious.  Give them time to finish the basics of the game before we demand features of them, eh?

[Descan]

It's the avatar, isn't it? ;P

Yeeeah, I know. <3

[Citizen Daniel]

We very briefly, some months ago, talked a bit about naval combat.  It's something we could do in the future given enough time, but not to start.  You're right though, naval combat is awesome.  It would be really interesting to pursue how indirect unit control would affect naval battles.  Might just be awful, but it would be a neat challenge.

Multiplayer takes two forms.  First, of course, succession multiplayer.  The game is built for this to be as painless as possible.

For the concurrent multiplayer, everyone gets their own starting settlements.  Whether you attack the other players or work together is largely up to you, we're setting as few restrictions on it as we can.  We'll adjust this as we get feedback. 

We had some determinism problems crop up that we've been working on so we haven't really had a chance to play with multiplayer much for the last while.  Characters have a concept of player ownership of objects, but will still talk to each other and so forth.  We'll explore other ways to push the multiplayer as people try it out.  There's a LOT of room to experiment there, and we're definitely interested in that.  We're going to try stuff like multiple players controlling one settlement, and various levels of allowable interactions between characters, and see what people like.

The terrain code is actually one of the VERY few things that isn't written in scripts, I'm afraid, because it's really weird and really computationally expensive.  We could move the generator functions over I think, but this won't happen for a while if we do

[Darkmere]

There was a multiplayer DF group around here for a while, where people would take turns controlling parts of a single fort. I guarantee you there would be interest in having multiple people run the same community fort with different folks controlling different aspects of the colony. And it would be awesome.

[Descan]

Are you talking about succession forts, or was there an application that let multiple computers control (to whatever degree) a single DF instance?

[Darkmere]

Are you talking about succession forts, or was there an application that let multiple computers control (to whatever degree) a single DF instance?

There was at one point a project called DFTerm (I think, it's been a while) that would run DF in a terminal with a chat and accept command input from anyone logged in the same terminal (local or remote). We used it to have multiple people playing the same fort at the same time in that terminal, but it was clunky and didn't last very long.

The control system was basically allowing everyone viewing the game to input commands at any time, so we had to take turns or delineate particular jobs/miniforts to certain people with a set cycle of playtime to keep the chaos managed. Since it wasn't run locally, you couldn't use DwarfTherapist or DFHack or anything like that, but it was workable in a very rudimentary fashion.

Building a similar system from the ground up would provide much more usability and player role options, like having a military commandant, chief of agriculture, Lord High Inquisitor Of Industrial Progress, or whatever. Or just let players hash it out as they so choose.

[The_Fool76]

How did I miss the existence of this thread?
(Don't attempt to answer that.  Down that path lies ... well I was going to say madness but you all run towards madness as if it was made from chocolate and puppies.  Just forget I said anything.)

On the topic of newspapers and other such things printed on mostly-dead wood pulp, I think postmortem reports after the colony's eventual demise might have the best potential.  It lets you dive into more detail without being concerned that you are providing too much information. (Kind of like the legends interface in DF)