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[darkrider2]

I like the current succession forts.

But true multiplayer... I could see it two ways.

A) players each have their own fortress, and attack each other or trade, would create interesting political landscapes.

B) players are all in the same fort, one is the overlord, and multiple dwarves are assigned to each player below him. Overlord says what he wants done and the lower players get their dwarves to do it. Would create very efficient forts as players find it boring when 'their' dwarves aren't doing anything and would constantly assign them jobs when a single player would usually just let them idle.


Or you could have a truly epic combination of the two, I'm a dreamer.

edit: and what I mean by 'interesting political landscapes' is that some players would attack each other for the absolute stupidest things imaginable, only making it more hilarious.

[denisol]

i have the perfect solution , have two forts and have half of the dwarfs assigned to one side and half to the other , that way they wont cross into other fort
. although i do not know how mining would work in this case :/

[doomdome]

Anything involving both players on the same embark area would absotively NEED to be LAN-only, or the server lag would completely screw everything up between the players... Also the whole "pause when you open a menu" thing would need to go, which would make the game pretty dang stressful.
If they were on the same map but non-overlapping embarks, it could work, kinda, although either they'd all exist in their own time-bubbles or the server would need to save every possible moment a fortress existed in order to keep the relative times the same (which would probably require a few thousand dollars worth of server memory, and slow the game to a crawl). I don't really see how players would interact with other fortresses without overlapping embarks, though.

[Brian]

Multiplayer will never work. Never with me anyway. The first thing I'd do is collapse all forts not controlled by me 1 Z level.

[Vehudur]

It would have to be LAN only, but I think you could make it work with some creativity and RAM editing.  Oh, and you'd have to disable the pause on menu.

[Eagle_eye]

ah, If only I could code....

[Vehudur]

ah, If only I could code....

I'll see what I can do, but it will be a few weeks at the shortest, if I can pull it off at all.  I'm not sure I'm up to it - it'll be a test of my coding skills for sure.

[squeakyReaper]

LINK HERE
Just a plug, but we do have someone trying to get everyone to work together.  Basically, we tell the OP what we want our dwarves to do for a season.  He think carries out those orders, stops next season, repeat.  Not the same as you guys are saying, but check it out.

[gaga23]

Going back to the multiple fortresses on a map, I can see this working in the far far future, but it seems too complex as a first step, though I think the 2+ people control 1 fort just wouldn't work, so my idea?well....

as a first step, have one player control the fortress like normal and the other can control invasions.
of course invasions would have to be made a little harder but what I mean is that for each dwarfbuck value the fort has and per season, the invasion player gets points to spend on troops and equipment, and then when he thinks he has got enough, he can attack,

the catch is of course, the longer you wait, the more troops, but the better defended the fortress is, so for example, spend a few points each season on small raids and keep the rest for one big yearly siege or something like this. This could be expanded by the invasion player also being able to add creatures to the map, which he can control, e.g. instead of an expensive raid, send a wolfpack or instead of storming at the way too good frontgate, send some forgotten beast or olmman through the cavern

[Dreggon]

I was really thinking of something like each player either controls a fortress each on a map (like I control the left side, you control the right side) with some no-man's-land in the centre, and dwarves wouldn't auto-path into the other fortress unless both players allowed it. There would be options "Allow other dwarves into your fortress" and "Allow your dwarves into other fortresses". It would be fun to just watch the other fort.

NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED

also you could send flaming dwarves into their booze supply

or into a room full of bituminous coal veins

actually just the booze

[Devast]

Dont know how this would technically work but to me it sounds like a good idea.
Have the game allow up to 4 people.
The Host picks the map and items to bring. Players join at the preparing screen, each player is given control of X amount of dwarves and can see what other players are giving their dwarves so the fort is full of soap makers.
The game starts like normal and players can either try and grief or build stuff together (kinda like minecraft).
If a player leaves the dwarves under their command are split up and assigned to other people
New players to come in as migrants and could add a mutany element to the game

Orc mod included to add that extra "OH SHIT OH SHIT GET THAT WALL UP"

[Shoku]

Wouldn't unstable FPS cause an almost desynchronized gameplay? Unless the cap is the slowest computer it wouldn't work out.

Simple misconception. Do you think everyone playing WoW is doing the calculations for how hard some group is getting hit in Molten Core? Even just the people in the group? Hell no. There is exactly one server that actually judges what happens and then it sends that out to everyone else. For multiplayer games there can be some wiggle room to that (imagine a sniper not being able to line up the crosshairs on someone and hit them because they were always getting visuals that were late and because the bullet didn't go until even later,) but with DF that wouldn't matter very much. You say "pull this lever" and then you've got to wait for a dwarf to decide to go and do it anyway.

With something like DFterm you even have a potential small advantage- if you have access to a fast desktop computer and a slow laptop you can have the desktop run the game while you "play it" through the laptop.

[Wastedlabor]

A siege event mode. One player, one dwarf. They have to fence an assortment of enemies for a preset amount of time with whatever is available in the fortress.

[Erotic Bootlace]

The most logical, and IMHO best, way has already been suggested; every player controls their own fortress, each fortress exists on the same world map, interaction occurs strictly through trading and war. I would perhaps even limit the ability to players to watch how their trading / raiding parties fare; they could perhaps recieve a report on the encounter from their returning wagon / troops but I don't think Dwarf Fortress is built in such a way that commanding an invasion through it's interface is feasibile. It's a management sim, not a war game (that said, warfare is in ToadyOne's plans so maybe it'll be feasible).

Player interactions should probably occur on saved versions of fortresses rather than in real time; working out a decent way of doing this would be the greatest challenge, as you'll need to balance out player's desires to actually be present when fighting off attacks vs. the aggressors desire to watch their troops. I think the best way to do it would be to make it so that players are able to assign strategic orders for say a week; then during the week, these orders occur, so essentially the world syncs once per week, which might represent a year (or perhaps even as little as a season) in game mode.

An example;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Player A loads up his game, and he decides to give strategic orders. He decides to invade player B, who the previous turn stole his caravan and it's valuable cargo of ☼Kitten Tallow Roast☼. A therefore assigns a couple of squads to a war party, and sends them off with orders to sack the fort, then gets on with managing the rest of his fortress as normal.

B logs on a few days later and recieves a notification that player A has sent a war party. This force will arrive some time during his game, although he can't be sure exactly when. He doesn't issue the strategic orders, and several minutes into playing his game the raiding party shows up as a seige and he fights them off like any invader.

If one of the players dissapears or decides to not play his turn, any strategic decisions should probably be generated automatically and applied to the save. Then, at the end of the turn the fortresses are saved and the world map is updated.

One of the many problems with this system, of course, is that you'd either need to limit the amount of time a player can spend on his fort (seems ridiculous to me, but it's the only 'fair' way so no one has an advantage in time played) or to accept the fact that players who play longer will be able to do more than players who play for less time. There are also issues with when events occur - what if a player sends out his army but his opponent has already had his turn? And so on. Ultimately, I think it's clear why multiplayer isn't planned for DF

[Kearn]

it would be cool if DF got implemented as a multiplayer game where we all have our own fort

but wouldn't there be issues since most good forts take days/weeks to get to their peak?