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TDM Coop using Last Man Standing Coop Mod for Doom3?


Darrin

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I know it's been debated, but no thief in the real world actually works alone .... My wife and I start missions simultaneously so we can kinda feel like we're going through it together, as we sit side by side in our game room .... We played ALL thievery missions together, but that's getting dated fast ..... we also played Doom 3 together using the Last Man Standing D3 Coop mod .... works like a charm for all four of us (two girls play along with us too) It makes family game night a wee bit different in our house ......

 

I always wondered that since the Last Man Standing Coop mod for Doom 3 worked so well, why couldn't it be an option for TDM? I thought of actually contacting the LMS developers and hiring them to do a custom coop mod for us ... desperate I know , but after Thievery, we realize how fun sneaking around together actually is! All the elements are there, it seems like one would just have to take advantage of it if they knew how ... I mean those guys did it for Doom 3 right?

 

Wife and I envision someday a massive multiplayer online city map server where citazens roamed about thier business, and thieves could work together, share hints, buy and sell items to each other, etc .... We sure wish we could hook up with some of you great folfs for some thieving together!

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This topic comes up a lot, and we've got a pretty standard answer to it by now.

 

Multiplayer isn't a given with vanilla Dark Mod. It'd require re-doing a lot of systems that assume one player character. Other people understand these things better than I, but from my little look into it, I know things like the frobbing system acts just for one player, the goal system ... Everywhere you see $player1 put in code somewhere by hand (I think), which is *everywhere*. And it's not like you can just change the variable name. The entire logic has to be reworked from the ground-up to deal with multiple players in the same map. It's a marathon task.

 

The team has come out saying it won't be working on it so they can focus on their already full plate of supporting and advancing the singleplayer gameplay as it is now. They just don't have the resources to work on it too, and their focus has always been on the single player experience.

 

That said, it'd be awesome, and if some fan wants to work on a branch project getting multiplayer operational (like Tos did with Thief2MP, working quietly behind the scenes for over a year, then popping out a fork version or patch), it'd be very cool. It really needs a Tos like person that has the knowledge & commitment to see it through, though.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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it would be really cool. But I'd like to see a coop 'thief only' mode rather than a thievery type mode.

 

Where you could play maybe 2-4 thieves in a team.

 

The problem with Thievery is that the guards know you are coming. Which imo makes it very hard to be sneaky if they are running around looking for you the entire time. AI are 'dumb' by default, they don't have any idea you are there until you mess up. Other players can't forget you are there.

Spy in TF2 is somewhat the same, if the other team doesn't know your team has a spy you can sneak in and do a lot of damage (only because your team can have any combination of 9 classes and because you can go invis or disguise as one of them). But once you do it can become very difficult if the other team stays on the ball.

 

In fact I think it would be required to have thieves go invis in shadows if the guards were players.

 

But thieves only, would be good to have a cvar mappers could set. A map like outpost could have a limit of two thieves since it's small. Larger maps could have a limit of 3-4.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Thievery dealt with the guards knowing you're coming in the design of the maps. The thieves can come from a number of multiple ways, with lots of darkness cover, and the guards can't cover all of them at the same time. So they have to be very efficient in their patrols. What's fun about coop is that it works for singleplayer FMs, so your pool of FMs you can play will be much bigger.

 

If someone goes to all the trouble of getting MP working, I think they should work on a coop mode and a Guards vs. Thieves mode so you can have the best of both, then it's up to the mappers to make the maps.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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You'll never get the source from that project. I've tried several times over the last 2 years or so and I've been friends with him for over 5 years now. You'd be better off trying to get another coop project's source if someone was to attempt to tackle it. Just an FYI.

 

Why is he so strict?

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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Speculating, possibly because he sees a chance of making profit, or just being able to say ME. E-Peen.

 

Either way, sharing it with a larger community, more options, would seem to make a 'bigger' achievement and bring more respect/recognition which could possibly lead to better job ops, etc...

 

Again, speculation, I know nothing about it or him, so who knows.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Ermm... people?

 

New version released (build 218): Download here.

 

- Added an objectives menu overlay.

- Fixed a crash when joining a server after having previously been in a game the host had left.

- Restarting the mission from the main menu now allows new players to join the server.

- The server now prevents clients from joining with a different motiondb.bin or mission file.

- Added ability to kick players from the players menu (accessed by pressing tab).

- Added an option to increase game difficulty. Enabling it will make AI more responsive and alert, and prevents the lean forward + blackjack combination.

- Fixed body carrying for the host. Clients still cannot pick up bodies.

 

I've also decided to release the source code which you can download here. I only ask that you release the code for any improvements that you may make, as this has been released under the GPL license. I've disabled the global server functionality in the public source to keep only official builds listed on the GS.

 

Fair warning: the code is a bit of a mess and not very well commented. You will need either VS 2003 or 2008 to build it. I added the 2008 project a few days ago and haven't tested .dlls built with it very thoroughly so it may be buggier than usual. All of the public releases have been compiled with VS 2003. I've included the IDA Pro 5.5 database containing the disassembly of thief2.exe that I work from in thief2_ida.7z in the root directory.

 

If you have any trouble getting the source to compile or have any other questions, feel free to ask.

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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Even with his work, I don't know how much easier it'd make the task because you still have to integrate it with all the Dark Mod systems, which might morph it into such a new thing anyway that would have been better off starting from scratch. That's not so say I agree with him though. I'm always of the position that the more information is public the better. Even if someone decides to do things differently, we can learn lessons from it. It's like the first commandment of open source work; information wants to be free. So his attitude is just sort of foreign, if it's not for some commercial motivation. I understanding wanting full credit, but wanting to hide it is going a bit far.

 

@SeriousToni, that's the multiplayer code for Thief2, not what we're talking about. It wouldn't be useful for Doom3 at all, considering the multiplayer base for both games is probably much different.

 

Edit: Of course it's good to point it out to Darrin. If they want to play some FMs coop thief style, they should absolutely play some Thief2 FMs with Tos's patch; and there's 100s to choose from. It's fun as hell.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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It's not about ego(at least directly) or a ME complex(the SDK code was actually written mostly by AO who is now at Splash Damage, some from Nicemice who moved to OpenCoop, and Hobbes who left the scene). Basically he has an extreme bitterness towards the entire Doom 3 community unfortunately. I personally feel his reasons are unjustified but I can only express my opinion to him. It's his reasons that I hope someday he gets over and releases the source to people.

 

Then again, Nicemice also never released his source either for OpenCoop.....

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I think Oneofthe8devils' also has Coop source code available for the community. The problem is that TDM is so customized that it would be just about as much work to integrate it as to write it from scratch. I imagine that's also why Greebo never used Solarspace's mission hub code for Campaign support and instead wrote his own mechanism. TDM is too far out to make use of most SDK work from other mods except for visual effects and physics fixes. The reverse is also probably true. Other Doom 3 mods could've used TDM's frameworks for insights but it's likely they would've needed to rebuild them to gain any use.

 

Now with the Doom 3 source code it's likely we'll see forks that target different rendering paradigms for different hardware classes and performance expectations. TDM will likely stick with a fork that emphasizes dynamic techniques with a DX9 hardware base (since most DX8 hardware is too weak for TDM anyway). When (if) TDM adopts one of these forks then any fixes applied there will be more suitable to be shared with the community. For example, if Tels gets his SEED framework integrated early there's a good chance it'll become the defacto standard on which augmented procedural content systems are built. Of course, it's entirely possible that TDM will remain too unique for it's code to have any shared use other than for other Thief style games or RPG's.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I think Oneofthe8devils' also has Coop source code available for the community. The problem is that TDM is so customized that it would be just about as much work to integrate it as to write it from scratch. I imagine that's also why Greebo never used Solarspace's mission hub code for Campaign support and instead wrote his own mechanism. TDM is too far out to make use of most SDK work from other mods except for visual effects and physics fixes. The reverse is also probably true. Other Doom 3 mods could've used TDM's frameworks for insights but it's likely they would've needed to rebuild them to gain any use.

 

Now with the Doom 3 source code it's likely we'll see forks that target different rendering paradigms for different hardware classes and performance expectations. TDM will likely stick with a fork that emphasizes dynamic techniques with a DX9 hardware base (since most DX8 hardware is too weak for TDM anyway). When (if) TDM adopts one of these forks then any fixes applied there will be more suitable to be shared with the community. For example, if Tels gets his SEED framework integrated early there's a good chance it'll become the defacto standard on which augmented procedural content systems are built. Of course, it's entirely possible that TDM will remain too unique for it's code to have any shared use other than for other Thief style games or RPG's.

 

IIRC, he was working on thievious. Too bad no news for that. He could use darkmod but he didn't. He wanted to invent wheel again. Don't know why.

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I believe he started using the very first release of OpenCoop code. Nicemice released way back the very first implementation of OpenCoop as at the very start OpenCoop was supposed to be, well, open. He closed it shortly after that. I think thievious started with that one and only release of the code....and it was early code at that.

 

There was a guy who mentioned he released working coop code structure. Can be found on D3W, I think I even downloaded the source at one point, might have it laying around. It didn't get any attention but the person said it was functional I believe. I downloaded it just for the reference of coop in hexen at some point since I was unable to obtain the LMS source in all my trying.

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wow, glad to read all the angles on this ... So a lack of source prevents coop .... no big it's still super fun as we sit side by side and "synch" up our moves and loot grabs ..... we're always asking, ok, how much you have now? " ... and Oh, you missed the necklace under the book ... " etc .... Just because we don't actually see eachother, it's still fun to go through the same maps at the same time ...... DAM it's hard to get ALL the loot! - I usually get 80-90 % ..... Jessica gets 95 - 100% ... Thanks again guys for all your hard work! - Darrin

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If you haven't updated since 1.02 you're in for some major treats with the AI...wait until you see how much smarter they've gotten!

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