Things are coming along nicely. Lethosar gave me some great advice on IRC which helped me fix the biggest problems I had. Now the gameplay so far seems very stable, but I would suggest saving frequently regardless. Almost everything works perfectly, but there are a handful of menus which are completely broken. Some goblins showed up in playtesting, so fixing the squad menu is the next task. The ability to hook up levers to things is also broken, and that would be quite helpful right now too.
seems like a perfect opportunity for social interaction with all the corona shutdowns going on.
I hope so.
It wouldn’t have to be at fortress speed, the skipping forwards in time just wouldn’t be controlled by the player(s) but a clock running at adventurer speed. Remember, adventurer mode is not only ”turn-based”, but has more ticks/day than fortress mode.
The issue is the controls, to not have the players being massacred while they are inputting detailed attacks, and syncing it up well so e.g. walking doesn’t have the wonkiness of weird delays.
Furthermore, from a technical standpoint, I'm fundamentally not sure how to even trick the game into having different players control different characters. So there are indeed a lot of issues. Making adventurer mode work well would require both a breakthrough in the the technical part (which seems plausible) and some creative thinking on how to adapt the turn-based gameplay for multiplayer while being restrained to what is a viable option technically. It's not unrealistic -- however, the reason I'm working on DF mode is because I figured out an easy way to make it work from a technical standpoint.
What happens if, for example, one player deconstructs a workshop while the other is in the Profile menu of that workshop? Is there a risk of game crashing or corrupting?
I suspect all sorts of similar scenarios need testing with unpaused menus.
What will happen instead here is that the player in the profile menu will suddenly get booted out. (Actually, it's possible they might end up in the profile menu of a different nearby workshop -- that's bad, and I should fix it, but at least it's not a gamestopping bug.) With what I'm doing, this type of scenario isn't possible to cause a crash. (Maybe I will soon regret these words.) That's not to say that there aren't scenarios which could cause a crash. So far, the only thing that has caused a crash was when the outpost liason came to visit and the game wasn't sure how to display the meeting screen to all three players -- that's been fixed now, although unlike any other screen, the meeting screen requires the players to coordinate. Hopefully I can come up with a better solution in the future for that particular screen.
A long term suggestion:
It would be neat if there could be restrictions on what each player can do. Like maybe each player is limited to a certain part of the embark, or to certain dwarves/squads. With some DFHackery and burrows, I bet we could have players running two hostile factions.
Yes, these ideas are good for after the basic implementation is working more solidly. The code so far is not too complicated, so it should hopefully be quite adaptable by anyone who wants to build a mod ontop of it. Regarding PvP specifically, I'm sceptical because I suspect there is a lot to untangle -- is it possible to get a squad from one side to target a squad from the other? Can we prevent dwarves from becoming friends with each other across the gap? In comparison, co-op seems like a natural extension, at least from the technical side of things.
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Topic: Co-op Dwarfmode (online simultaneous multiplayer) (Read 130925 times)