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[Quizmar]

I know, I know, its probably been said before, but this is a new era of Dwarf Fortress. I'm aware Putnam has commented on this before, but that was the past.
Here's my idea:
Coop fort mode, X number of players are able to make commands for dwarves, see one another's camera center tile, a textbox is added, and when one player pauses both players are paused.
Yes overhaul, but why wouldn't this work? I get lonely playing
I know little about the intricacies of coding, dwarven or otherwise. 

[Telgin]

The short response is that it's technically possible but it's a lot of work and probably considered outside of the scope of what the developers want the game to be.

In more detail, this isn't as hard as making something like a multiplayer real time shooter or something like that, but even just adding networking capability to the game is a lot of work.  Not to mention the added complexity of things like overhauling the input handling system, adding a multiplayer lobby or some other way to present info on who's connected, and so on.  That's all stuff they'd have to maintain, fix, and support forever.

Having said all of that, there have been utilities in the past that did allow something like this.  DFTerm I think was the name of one that would let people remotely connect to another DF game, but I don't know if it works with the current version, and it was pretty janky because it was an external utility.  DFHack may have something like this too now, for all I know.

[eerr]

There was at least one or two utilities that used DF Hack to run a sort of multiplayer thing.
Dwarf term, and all of it's compatriots caused innumerable crashes. It really wasn't worth it.

The game expects only one person to play and attempting to have two or more people playing the game at one time, destabilizes the internal workings of the game.

It isn't a matter of 'oh it's only more work, and toady one does work'
It's a matter of scrapping the entire game as-is and building it from the ground up.
Hiring (more) people just to test,
Actually testing the game with multiple people at the same time, with enough frequency to catch most of the bugs,
Chasing bugs that only happen when multiple people are playing.
Making features now designed to work for multiple people using Dwarf Fortress at the same time.
As well as complicating the addition of every other feature.
Not to mention all the features and secrets that Toady One would have to modify or outright remove (There's gold in those hills!!!).

With the heralding of the steam version, such a thing would force the new, paid, audience of Dwarf Fortress to sit far longer than Toady One is comfortable with.

It is an utter impossibility given the constraints.

The bottom line is that online/lan multiplayer will never be added or supported.


You can however, share saves with other players for play by post/play by email.
Saves were cross compatible in previous versions, so once the mac and linux releases are out, those should also be cross-compatible with pc.

Sometimes, a person starts a fortress. He plays a little bit and post it for the next person to work on. Then that person builds some and passes it on to the next person. So on and so forth.
As well, sometimes a single person spends months of their own time building a fortress, and then when it falls, or they tire, pass it on to another person to explore in adventure mode.
We have a whole section of the forum specifically for this:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=14.0

[Eric Blank]

Of the aforementioned utilities, the one I tried didn't technically allow multi-player, but screen and user input sharing to a remote device for a whitelisted party. It was fun to play as a group, but there was nothing preventing two people from trying to control the screen simultaneously. Which resulted in amusing fights over control. The program was DF-only somehow it wouldn't display or allow access to anything besides the running dwarf fortress instance, but presumably one could access the server hosts computer directly, so the host was running it on an old laptop, not their usual work computer.

If someone would reimplement a similar program, that would be cool as hell.