Hey all, long time lurker but this thread has turned me into a first time poster.
I honestly can't decide what I'm more excited about now, the update or this mod; as this is exciting as hell to me.
I always have online friends always asking me to teach them and being able to play, real-time, with them all, without the
intimidation ASCII element. This will allow me to do that so easily, I absolutely cannot wait.
Insane work mifki, very well done.
The idea is simple: if we want to have any real-ish multiplayer we need ability to draw any place (not only what player is looking at). When we have that, we can at first implement e.g. play as one dwarf in a fort: player connects, is shown a radius around one dwarf, can influence his dwarfs choices somewhat. All this while "main player" (also server) is playing normal df fort mode.
Other ideas: each client can control one aspect of df (mining, military,etc...), each client can control one civ (needs binary hack for df to think of multiple civs as one), and so on...
The album has start of first idea. Offscreen module allows asking df to draw stuff, and my lua scripts perform server/client stuff.
With each player controlling a single dwarf this is going to be truly massively multiplayer game
I wonder what happens if we manually instantiate some df viewscreen and don't add it to screen hierarchy, but rather manually feed it with events and call its render(), swapping screen buffer/renderer before and after this call.
Okay, excuse my ignorance when it comes to all the technical aspect but what you guys are saying is that, in theory, I could run an Object Testing Arena game where I have friends controlling units they've made whilst I, in a gamemaster like role, throws whatever dangers I can at them? If so incredible! Or is that all just a far off, pipe dream?