[Question] The Multiplayer Mod -- Is it Possible?

[Alpaca's, Starving]

Yeah but he's done it like 4 times already. It's annoying. If he wants to make a "kill all multiplayer requests" thread, he can go ahead and do that. But not in my thread.

You're refering to me saying this on 4 Multiplayer threads?Can I have evidence of this.

[Kevin]

A multiplayer mod would be very ambitious. There is currently only very limited support for net code in the engine - just a tiny bit for metrics collection and remote debugging. So you'd have to add that. Then you would have to come up with a way to synchronize between the clients. On shank 2 we used determinism and input passing like an rts. This worked pretty well but it took a lot of work to hunt down and kill all of the desynch bugs that could occur. We also had to add client side prediction which was a fundamental architectural change to the simulation. It took a long time.I think that that stuff is the hard part. Once that is working you would have to go through all of the player aware entities and make them work with multiple possible targets. Then you would have to change the player centric conditions like sleeping and insanity and permadeath do that they would make sense. Then you'd have to rebalance everything to find the fun again.So it would all be possible, but it would take a lot of time and expertise that would frankly be better applied making a whole new game. I would be pretty impressed if anyone were up to the task! But I am in no way against people trying

[redjoker5]

Just knowing it is possible makes me happy

[shoseta]

Hehe well that's at least nice to know.Though it does sound pretty intricate to say the least. So we would be talking about figuring out a way to keep players' clients synced and then applying the same process to all of the game's assets. And we're talking about certain balancing issues too I figure. I think a mod like this would require some sort of enriched launcher, since I think that heavily modding the vanilla launcher would break the end user license agreement, even for the purpose of hosting one's own server. Anyway I'm just rambling, glad to hear it "might" be possible to achieve, even if we're talking about really tough work. I mean look at the multilayer mod for torchlight 1. They did have something playable at one point.

[redjoker5]

Also, some functions of the game would have to be basically re-done for multiplayer play. Like death. Would you permanently die on death or would your teammates have the option of crafting an item that revives. Or maybe when you die, a grave spawns and teammates can bless the grave and after a few days you come back to life. The posibilities are endless but theres no denying that while incredibly hard, it could result in a lot of fun. This almost makes me want to take up coding xD

[WrathOf]

Yeah, on death, you could get a grave and then your client reverts to "death" mode where you are locked onto your grave to see the other player(s) visit or pan around to see what they are doing....and maybe at dusk/night you would spawn as a ghost to roam around with limited interaction. Then you could repawn after several game days or once the other players build something to revive you.

[Xemgoa]

I particularly like the idea of looking around as a ghost till daylight.Though I concern about the whole being a ghost greatly harms anything you touch. Plus being around a ghost causes insanity, so if a dead player wanted to check up on his friend, he'd have to keep a reasonable distance.Unless all this can be countered with logical reasons, and you can be revive the moment a Meat effigy is used with permission from the builder. Like if you build a Effigy for multiplayer, you can set it for yourself, for someone in particular, or for any player to use to get back into the game.And you can stick close to your guy as a ghost without causing (Much) harm to his sanity, but the fact that touching his as he is a ghost should still hurt, as a depressing trade off.As a ghost, you see things in a sort of night vision, instead of just pure darkness. Your controls are a bit slidey meaning as you drift around and make a sharp turn, you'll see yourself slide before fully flying into that different direction.Plus as a easter egg, Ghosts should only be able to catch a glimpse of the Grue before he makes himself vanish, to add the sense of fear that you don't wanna meet it even when your dead. You can even see it break its hand out of the ground to slash the player and retract it back when you witness as a ghost with a fellow player outside of a light source. Like you could only catch his arm, hand or such off a screen, then suddenly see it get retracted off the screen with the sound of the Grue moving away, prompting fear that the Grue prefers NEVER to be seen, even by a ghost and adds to the fear factor that if its that good at hiding, it does whatever it takes to harm anyone outside of a lightsource, even if it means cleverly attacking a victim from many places. From a hand quickly extending out of the ground, taking a swipe and pulling its hand back underground, to Sometimes biting its big jaws out of a rather small bush and pulling back before you could get a good eye of what ever the heck that was.All in all, Ghosts should be able to hold their own, but the right attacks can destroy your ghostly form. You won't be... in a sense spiritually dead, but just misplaced and place back at the grave for the night.

[Zeklo]

The very reason I made this account was to talk about mutiplayer, but there was the "Multiplayer Thread" saying it would not be added. Personally I would enjoy at least co-op with 2 players, and I may learn to code just to mod this in.

[redjoker5]

You could also give ghosts limited vision as to prevent dead people from just exploring the map without consequence. Or make every single mob hostile to them (even rabbits and birds) and at the touch of any of these mobs, you get teleported back to your grave.

[Xemgoa]

You could also give ghosts limited vision as to prevent dead people from just exploring the map without consequence. Or make every single mob hostile to them (even rabbits and birds) and at the touch of any of these mobs, you get teleported back to your grave.

That or to the most hostile mobs, and Beefalo, others run from the ghost?

[Flypaste]

omergawd i would pay for the game again to get multiplayer, just 2 people!

[Zeklo]

omergawd i would pay for the game again to get multiplayer, just 2 people!

I would too, I would be cool if they spend the time after release to make co-op, but they already said they wouldn't. :'(

[Flypaste]

i know, from alpaca's ragings in 4 different threads.I will legitly pay anyone to make a multiplayer mod and keep it updated.

Edited March 24, 2013 by Flypaste

[shoseta]

Offtopic:Okay okay okay people.Stop with the "OH MY GAWD I WOULD PAY FOR MULTI" replies. It was stated by the devs that such things are far from their plans. So let's not DERAIL this topic into another BAWW thread ok?Ontopic: Hmm but it would have to be way more difficult to re spawn in co-op than in single. You can't argue that you'd have an easier time with the whole game and such. I think to balance it out, there should be a way bigger penalty .I mean I know that without a meat effigy all players would die eventually and game over for good. But still just a few days is way too little punishment for how Don't Starve aims to be like. There could be a special kind of effigy that requires some materials, some sort of heirlooms from the other players. I'm thinking about Wilson's beard hair for example. Willow could drop a match, the blondie(I forgot ehr name) a flower, etc. And you'd need more rare mats to make that kind of effigy.

[Salsa]

I'm gonna leave this here and ask for an explanation then.Thanks.P.S. I don't really care for a multiplayer mode.

[Xemgoa]

... ... ... Y-you're kidding me...

[redjoker5]

Ontopic: Hmm but it would have to be way more difficult to re spawn in co-op than in single. You can't argue that you'd have an easier time with the whole game and such. I think to balance it out, there should be a way bigger penalty .I mean I know that without a meat effigy all players would die eventually and game over for good. But still just a few days is way too little punishment for how Don't Starve aims to be like. There could be a special kind of effigy that requires some materials, some sort of heirlooms from the other players. I'm thinking about Wilson's beard hair for example. Willow could drop a match, the blondie(I forgot ehr name) a flower, etc. And you'd need more rare mats to make that kind of effigy.

I personally would remove effigies all together from multiplayer. I would only leave amulets and teammates reviving you, but I would make that require some type of item that the team has to build. And it wouldnt be easy. Otherwise people would wildly bumrush bosses without worrying about dying. Another option could be to make it like hard mode in Diablo, where if you die, your character gets deleted. In this case your character is dead for good and your client cannot interact anymore with the current game. Or you could give people a death counter. Like 3 deaths then youre out for good. But youre right, preserving the hardcore survival factor of the game would be a priority for me. Matter of fact, with co-op the game should be even harder, just to force the people to either work together or perish.

http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIjt41__S8A

I'm gonna leave this here and ask for an explanation then.

It's an obvious fake.

[BarovSoap]

This is possibly the first time a discussion about multiplayer has been on topic without flaming each other's opinions. Good job.

[RIPZOIDTRAPPER]

Offtopic: This would take lots of efffort time and teamwork to get a Multi-player mod up And what about local servers and other things like that?"Judgeing off of other games Co-ops" Ontopic: I think the grave Thing is a perfect Idea but also What about if you dont place flowers or offering on the grave every day the person can't be revived or bad things will happen like Monsters ghosts Huantings, Constant sanity dropping.

[redjoker5]

That is actually an awesome idea. In order to revive the person you have to make offerings at their grave at night time or something for a few days with each offering being a rarer item than the last. And each person on the server must make an offering so the more people playing, the harder it is to revive a dead friend, since its a bigger quantity of rare items.

[eLe]

Co-op multi-player has been suggested, but how about something a little different? Why not a mod similar to the one dungeon world[?] game, where one plays the dungeon master, placing obstacles, mobs, traps, etc, and the other player has to try to survive. It would obviously have to be slower paced, but I think something like that could be really fun. UuU (and maybe it could also be melded in with the co-op mode)

[redjoker5]

That would be more along the lines of a map creator mode, where you make your own maps and people play them, which I think it's already possible. There are a few downloadable maps in the mod download section.

[sirmentlegen]

Making something like this would need a lot of skill,effort and a sprinkle of science.

[BarovSoap]

Making something like this would need a lot of skill,effort and a sprinkle of science.

And MAGIC!!

[Excess]

I'm gonna leave this here and ask for an explanation then.Thanks.P.S. I don't really care for a multiplayer mode.

Fake. It's from back when the game wasn't even modable yet.