Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Black Line]

I think it would be cool if df had a 2 player mode. Use LAN only because of the bandwidth needed and no caravans the players are on one map with cliffs on both sides a river down the middle and there is only one pocket of [Hidden Fun Stuffs] on the whole map. The main point is to take the other players fort but you can trade and stuff too. Eventually you will want to go to war. Megabeasts would come around 2X more frequently.

[Anti-Paragon]

Yes, multiplayer is rather sought after in any form. Unfortunately, it's just not a practical pursuit at this point - at least for Toady. Some really crafty modder might be able to pull it off, though it would pretty much take a rewrite in entirety for the base code.

But either way, yes, many of us wish we could play simultaneously, but until that amazing day comes, we'll have to make due with succession games.  

[Drunken]

you could totally do a memory hack multiplayer without any need for changing the code. This type of thing was done for GTA-Vice City and although it didn't really work very well, the intimate knowledge the DF modders seem to have of it's memory locations and the very modular architecture of the game suggest that it is quite a feasible idea.

Who will take up the challenge?

(For those that don't understand what I'm getting at: you would have a program that opens a DF program instance. You and another player would both copy the same world file into your saves. You would each start a game in the same square of that map and the meta-program would send your party makeup, location, wagon etc. to the other persons client where it would be inserted into their clients ram footprint in much the same way as the various wizard tools we have at the moment like granite.exe and the magma/water one and the reveal one. Any jobs your dwarves did like mining out a square or building something would be sent to the other persons client and hacked in in the same way on an ongoing basis.)
The biggest problems facing the modder would be how to synchronise the framerates of the two games, otherwise one player would have an advantage. Trading would be doable but fighting each other might prove to be difficult to implement.

Oh and your dwarves would always try and go over to your opponents fort and use their workshops, and steal their weapons and armour... and traps wouldnt work.
In fact I think this could only ever work as a co-operative mode where you both build the same fortress together.

[qwertyuiopas]

No, with the same memory editing technology you can launch a siege againt the forts for either a survive the attack or a survive the longest game.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I can't imagine that the network code for Dwarf Fortress would require very much bandwith, actually. It could probably be done without too much trouble over the Internet, the same as any other real time strategy game. Although there's a lot going on in the game, very little of it involves fresh player input; by synchronizing the random number generators, the only thing that would need to be sent back and forth during play is the instructions given by one player or another that will affect the game. By delaying scheduling the effects of player actions for some later frame (which is standard practice in RTS network games), they could be kept in sync at all times with very little traffic between them, and basically supporting as many players as the processors can handle without slowing down too much. First person shooter games have a much higher bandwidth cost, by comparison. The biggest hurdle here is probably just the time and maintenance, and the trouble on each computer of having twice as many dwarves running around at any given time.

[Sowelu]

I wrote about four paragraphs here before giving up and bashing the keyboard with my head.  I think that quite accurately sums up my entire opinion on the subject.

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>I wrote about four paragraphs here before giving up and bashing the keyboard with my head.  I think that quite accurately sums up my entire opinion on the subject.</STRONG>

y  h mhh yyhyhymjhjhvjfjfhhmmckucyckuckchkycck  kkhkyvhkyvk hhvkykykhyhcyjhgch.

Yeah.  Me too.

[Cthulhu]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>I wrote about four paragraphs here before giving up and bashing the keyboard with my head.  I think that quite accurately sums up my entire opinion on the subject.</STRONG>

That's how I PvPed on my warlock when I played WoW.  Such a dark time in my life...  It could probably be done, they were also working on it on STALKER, but I don't know what happened.  But like Drunken said, it'd treat them as the same player.  I think we should just be content to play single-player until Toady feels inclined to grant us a proper multiplayer mode.