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Conceptual MultiPlayer idea


Nico A.

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On 8/28/2009 at 5:41 AM, Crispy said:

Yes, I was about to post defending multiplayer maps - there is quite a bit of design that goes into them (the good ones, anyway). :) It's hard to compare the effort involved between single/multiplayer maps

On 1/15/2010 at 3:03 PM, New Horizon said:

I think the best bet for network support would be if another group decides to start up a separate branch of the mod to create a multiplayer patch. There does seem to be some interest amongst some in the community to do that.

On 4/2/2010 at 5:06 PM, Midnight said:

I've only just come across this project called Thievious thanks to a post by clearing at TTLG. Although I was doubtful at first (inspired by TDS??) I was suitably impressed at the in-game videos and the potential that this could have, although the title of the mod sounds a little silly so I've suggested 'Thieves' would make a better name for a co-op Thief game.

Now, I know that the TDM team aren't considering any multiplayer development, and most TDM fans (myself included) are primarily interested in a single player experience, but co-op would be a worthwhile addition to TDM gameplay since thieves would often (in the real world and in this universe) collaborate and are not always the lone wolf characters that most of us associate with Thief.

I would hate to see this co-op project fail to progress because it's just a one man tech demo at the moment with no real support, and at the same time, it would be disappointing if it were to be completed, only to have one or two playable maps.

On 4/2/2010 at 6:34 PM, Midnight said:

If that's possible (that different branches can be kept in sync) then that would certainly make it easier to have missions that could be played in both. The T2 multiplayer patch has shown how many single player missions can translate to co-op quite easily (surprisingly), but there have also been many that would need some tweaking, or might not be suitable at all

On 4/3/2010 at 11:41 PM, New Horizon said:

I think it's highly unlikely our team would take on such a project. As we've stated many times, it's enough work maintaining the single player codebase. If a dedicated team of coders came along and wanted to create a separate branch of the Mod with multiplayer, that would be great. If it were kept in perfect sync with the main branch, maybe it could even be merged back into TDM.

Simple answer is that we can't, but perhaps someone else can.

On 10/3/2010 at 11:22 PM, stumpy said:

the only problem with multiplayer is that everyone will want to play the thief.

On 10/3/2010 at 11:39 PM, pusianka said:

Multiplayer games are the future of gaming, it's much nicer to share adrenaline and thrilling moments with a friend. In that case the animations of the thief has to be done.

On 10/4/2010 at 12:30 AM, taaaki said:

Multiplayer is a biiiig can of worms in a thief-like genre.

Co-op: do you split loot/pickups or have a shared loot/pickups? saving and loading (do you allow it and if you do, how do you synchronise saves with minimal disruption to play)? It will get a bit frustrating if the other player is a dunce and keeps alerting the guards while you are trying to carefully sneak by a guard post undetected. It also affects the way mappers design their maps.

Thief vs. guard: to me, TDM is a slow-paced game, so I would imagine this could get rather boring for either of the parties.

On 10/4/2010 at 1:05 AM, pusianka said:

When I say multi I mean coop mode and rather only for two people maybe three. When you play coop you usually contact with your mate and try to plan moves together. It would deffinetly affect the way mappers would create their maps but I guess there is no prob with putting an option saying "mission for 1 player only". I suggest you look at SCCT coop mode. It would be my favourite game if they allowed FM making.

On 10/4/2010 at 1:33 AM, nbohr1more said:

There is a co-op 3rd person Thief style mod being worked on by another author:

Thievious

There was talk of sync-ing his project with TDM but he did not appear to respond to that idea AFAIK...

On 10/4/2010 at 2:56 AM, New Horizon said:

Regarding your requests/suggestions for multiplayer and third person.

1. There will be no 'official' support for third person.

2. There will be no 'official' support for multi-player.

Some other group may decide to make their own '3rd person or multiplayer mod' for TDM, but it will be their responsibility to make sure the existing maps work, or break compatibility and take off in their own direction.

On 11/29/2010 at 5:10 AM, Ishtvan said:

That sounds interesting, but you'd have to add multiplayer support to TDM first. We didn't make maintaining D3 multiplayer support a priority, and therefore many TDM things (e.g., frobbing) would be broken if there were more than one client connected.

On 1/23/2011 at 8:27 AM, Fidcal said:

Multi-player is not officially planned for Dark Mod although maybe someone else might get it to work. But machinima isn't limited to multi-player is it?

On 3/7/2011 at 6:06 AM, Ishtvan said:

Just a cautionary note, we didn't go to great lengths to support multiplayer in all the additions we made to D3 (things like frobbing, for example). So having multiple bots at once may be tricky.

On 4/9/2011 at 9:53 AM, Tels said:

Personally, I have had always a feew ideas (like make a multiplayer sneaker game in the browser) that would attract a larger audience, but that would boil down again to the two questions:

* who will join (I am a coder, not an artist)

* and will the audience really care, anyway?

On 4/30/2011 at 4:57 AM, lost_soul said:

Well for starters, the player model is only half-animated. This can be seen in a few FMs with mirrors. I don't know about the underpinnings of the game though and whether network play would work. Another conceivable problem would be the ragdoll physics. Let's say player 2 knocks out a guard. His system has to transmit the exact position of the limbs of the body to the other players and update accordingly. I think a lot of games that have ragdolls only render them on the client, like ut2004. It isn't like Quake 2, where there were strict character death animations. Player 2 could be dragging a guard through a hallway and have it get stuck on a door... etc

Coop play would really be awesome though. I think somebody was working on Coop at one point...

On 5/12/2011 at 7:27 PM, frogdude said:

this may have been said before, i didn't have time to read the entire forum, but i believe that a multiplayer component would greatly increase the mod's popularity, with Thievery being outdated as well. I know that Thief is primarily a single player experience, but i found Thievery's multiplayer very gratifying in it's days, exactly how i would have pictured the multiplayer of Thief 1&2, if they would have ever had one:)

Since Doom 3 had multiplayer support, i'm thinking my suggestion is not extremely unrealistic. But then again, i'm not a programmer.:P

On 5/12/2011 at 7:46 PM, Baddcog said:

Can't say multi will ever happen, probably would take a lot of coding and coders are in short supply these days. However, if anyone ever stepped up and got it done it would be done. So you never know.

it's open source so there are no roadblocks, just not any road crews either.

On 5/12/2011 at 8:04 PM, demagogue said:

I would personally love multiplayer too. Just looking at it a little myself, it'd be a big task! Every system locked in to the local player, like frobbing & objectives, would have to be redone to negotiate multiple players using it in the same game... But anything's possible. Maybe someone will take it on someday

So, here's another round of chronological talk about MP (I selected between and within posts, so this is no exhaustive or even objective representation of the discussion). Some themes that come up multiple times are:

1. Implementing MP is very difficult but not impossible, maybe an independent party could have a crack at it.
2. the theme of "frobbing" comes up several times (but I'm sure it's only one example of a lot of things that'd need tweaking)
3. "Thievious" seems to be (have been?) another Mod project in the style of Thief with MP in mind, although at least the link above seems to be dead. I didn't search further about this yet.

 

Edited by Nico A.
tidying up
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It's player-caused events in the world that are problematic, of which frobbing is the first thing people usually think of, but it'd include S&R, objectives, scripts, locations, triggers, weapon & tool use, GUI, AI reactions (who does the AI run after on sight?), etc., etc. And that's just thinking offhand. I'm sure there's many more.

Basically any time you see $player1 in the code, which is everywhere, it means only player1 can do that event.

I had the idea to actually have a general system that takes any use of $player1 in the code and applies it to all of the appropriate clients in the appropriate way, which might take more work up front, but if it applies across a lot of systems it'd end up saving work. I'm not a real coder though so I have no idea what I'm really talking about.

Thievious kind of annoyed me because the guy was doing so much work to just recreate a worse version of TDM from scratch. Imagine if he'd put all of that work into a TDM branch? And I expected it to disappear because that's what always happens with projects that big for one person. But I can't fault people for wanting to make their own projects themselves, and I wished the guy luck with it. Somebody posted another UE4 project like us on TTLG recently. I thought the same thing to myself, but I wished him luck anyway.  In his case he at least has a different aesthetic (more modern) and different systems (popup menus for interactions), so you can at least argue it's a bit different game.

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9 hours ago, demagogue said:

Thievious kind of annoyed me because the guy was doing so much work to just recreate a worse version of TDM from scratch. Imagine if he'd put all of that work into a TDM branch?

Thievious seems to aim for a different genre though. I did not see any stealth in his videos. But there is plenty of doom-style combat going on. Starting with TDM probably does not make much sense if you only want the classic fast-paced DOOM action anyway.

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18 hours ago, demagogue said:

Somebody posted another UE4 project like us on TTLG recently. I thought the same thing to myself, but I wished him luck anyway.

I think it's kinda funny, since there was a discussion here some time ago on possible switching to UE4, and the main argument was that it would be too hard to do from scratch, even for a team. And that person basically made the whole groundwork alone (while looking/copying/modifying solutions from other games, obviously, but still). Of course it's not as polished as TDM, e.g. the AI is hardly there, yet it's a proof that a lot can be done, to some extent, just by one person. We'll see if he/she has the patience and determination to finish it.

As for his choice, I'm not surprised, although it largely depends on what will become the final game. If it's something to be sold as product, then TDM was out of question anyway. But even if it's a platform for different blend of stealth missions, in the vein of TDM, modern tools and better workflows have much greater chance to attract today's content creators. Making stuff for DarkRadiant is Ancient Geek era by comparison.

Yet, that alone doesn't guarantee success, a lot of that is good PR as well. Remember Motorsep creating a enhanced version of idtech4, the Storm Engine 2? For may reasons, PR stuff included, nobody followed.

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On 4/30/2020 at 9:12 AM, peter_spy said:

Ithe main argument was that it would be too hard to do from scratch, even for a team. And that person basically made the whole groundwork alone (while looking/copying/modifying solutions from other games, obviously, but still). Of course it's not as polished as TDM, e.g. the AI is hardly there, yet it's a proof that a lot can be done, to some extent, just by one person. We'll see if he/she has the patience and determination to finish it.

Seems fascinating to me... It sounds like this individual is not really "known" in the TDM community? Did anyone talk to him/her about intention of this game? Do you know whether this person would accept help from an accomplished community building a medieval stealth game (the TDM community, that is ;) ) - and if so, would some of you consider splitting your workload between TDM and this new stealth game project?

 

edit: I just watched the first demo video. Apart from the running speed, which is hilariously off (way too fast), I freaking love what I see here...

edit 2: The menu style seems heavily TDM-inspired (though really unpolished still from an arty perspective - I think menus / GUIs are still placeholders)

Edited by Nico A.
Watched the link video, want to share impressions.
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  • 2 years later...

I was in contact with a fella I think "agent smith" on skype and these forums. He had a very basic working multiplayer back in May 2014. I don't know what happened him or his code, I don't see him on skype anymore. I found it hard to work with the engine because I'm a newb so even just doing things like adding this option text button in the main menu https://gyazo.com/47813b5be21df0beef86de1db1614a36 was really hard for some reason. I don't even think it was clickable either heh. Also experimented with trying to add an invisibility potion but could not figure out where or how items were defined in the code  but I had a good go at trying to help.

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