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Cooperative.


Selvhan

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Once this game will be finish, it will be a great single player experience. But imagine if you could play this game in coop with a friend !

I wonder if it would be difficult to either share 1 base or to have 2 base that each player own separately. Then you start conquering back the Earth.

As I see it, once a player enter a combat screen ( Aircraft battle or ground combat ) the other player join to look at it or to participate. The host of the combat can share an amount of soldiers/planes he wants to, to the other player.

Imagine how cool it would be to play with a friend and to discuss about how you should handle many hard situations.

I am no coder or programmer but I am aware that this is no small suggestion. I just wanted to share it so maybe one day, it will be done.

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Whilst a fun idea, the level of work involved would be insane, it's something I think you'd want to plan from the beginning so you could design around it.

Whilst I think Aliens vs Humans has some potential, they just don't have the resources to pull it off.

Personally I sorta thing maybe the x-com apocalypse style of game would lend itself better to multiplayer, playing as the corporations or something - that game had a lot of potential but was never truly finished.

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Once this game will be finish, it will be a great single player experience. But imagine if you could play this game in coop with a friend !

I wonder if it would be difficult to either share 1 base or to have 2 base that each player own separately. Then you start conquering back the Earth.

As I see it, once a player enter a combat screen ( Aircraft battle or ground combat ) the other player join to look at it or to participate. The host of the combat can share an amount of soldiers/planes he wants to, to the other player.

Imagine how cool it would be to play with a friend and to discuss about how you should handle many hard situations.

I am no coder or programmer but I am aware that this is no small suggestion. I just wanted to share it so maybe one day, it will be done.

All these things are perfectly possible now.

You just need your friend to be in the same room as you :)

I did actually play the original UFO as a hot-seat co-op; I handled strategy and my friend did the tactical battles.

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This would be awesome. I dont think its extremely much work cause after the game is finished the most work is done already. I know much Indie Games which had only a SP mode and switched their mind and developed multiplayer after SP cause there was so much demand for MP and this games had much more work to do then this game would.

Compared to other games which added mp (which was much harder cause another type of games) :

- This game doesnt need much change of the AI cause the AI wont fight against 2 Players like it does in other games if you add MP.

Well i hope you get what i mean. 2 players could share all actions, 1 has 5 Soldiers and the other one has 5 Soldiers. So the AI wont be touched or only minimal. And even if you add the possibility that 2 transports "1 for each player" can do a mission site you could

simply double the amount of aliens or make them harder in difficulty. The last action however would increase the development time cause it needs a realtime netcode/changed AI if each player has a base and can control it/money changes etc.

Depends much on how you do the share/instances and possibilities which 2 players can do on the same time.

- Doesnt need a change in rendering/animations like a FPS would "camera look from 3rd person etc.".

- Doesnt need a UI change, the 2 players just see 1 shared view and can control them together.

And if 2 players would have each their own base/soldiers/aircraft etc. it would be only a new instance.

- Doesnt need a change in world structure cause game hasnt multiple locations for cameras and stuff

Well the game would need a good netcode, shared savegames etc. etc.

Its more or less work, it depends on how you want to do it or how you change it to work as a mp game.

Dont get me wrong, its not done in a month or two, but it would be faster done than you think atm.

As i said it depends on how you want the MP mode to be and aswell depends on the structure of the game and how its made already.

PS: and they could sell it as a extension, i would for sure buy it and i think much others aswell ;)

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not much work? are you kidding?

first you have to add a network command, okay so we got to have a host and connecting player, next we need to sort out what information needs to be sent but not only that received. So if you fired your gun lets say you have to not only fire but first send a command to the other player and get a request to stop there game so we can make sure no moves are happening during the fire animation once you got that then you need get a message back informing that has happen. (of course the fire code at the moment doesn't tirgger anything like this, so adding this could cause bugs but lets side step these for now)

Now the game knows the other game is paused he can fire, so you fire, you do damage. now you have to send these commands to the other player. and show them the same actions. however xenonauts probably doesn't have the code to show the same actions, and dur to random elements if they reshowed the shot it might be diffrent, so they have to add the code to copy a path of a bullet, and show that same action. however paths aren't saved they just happen in the game, so now you got to save that action as a new object, even more code to write.

now you sent that object to the other player and some more code to translate that object in to the on screen fire animation. okay now the second player can send a request back to the frist player to tell them they seen the animation.

first palyer get the recive command and eveything carrys on.

that just firing, not coutning hurting a enermy, or death, or bleading, or moral, or weapon drops, or movement. all these things need to be packaged up in some type of object and sent to another player and then be removed from the object and added back into your game. if this was wirten along side it be easyer but adding it now is such a huge amount, not to mention the bugs.

So you sent the fire command to your friend, but what if the game is working on a counter? (hidden from us) is the time to watch that animation going to trouble the program? what if something is missed and the other player sees a diffrent action? what about colision? what if a wall damage is random? they needs to be package too, but what if something like that is forgot? what if one player destorys a wall and another doesn't, then one player walks though the hole and this action can't be done by the other player so his game crashes?

This is all lite examples, but i can say for sure. easy this is most certainly not. nor would it be quick to add.

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Implementing multiplayer is a LOT of work, unless you're using an engine that already largely supports it - and even then it's a major undertaking. It's several new screens to set up plus a lot of code functionality and testing, plus whatever matchmaking system you want to use.

Sadly our engine doesn't support it at all, so it would be an enormous amount of work for us. Future games are likely to have better multiplayer support but we can't really do it for Xenonauts.

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Thats what i said, it depends alot on how the game is made.

As i said it depends on how you want the MP mode to be and aswell depends on the structure of the game and how its made already.

But still a working multiplayer wouldnt take the same time as the SP does.

There are many possibilities and ways to change a only sp game into a working mp game.

Much ways are extremely much work and others are not so much. Depends again on how you want todo it. =)

The Developers know the best if its possible at all cause they know how there game is made :D

"Cost and all stuff will be the major problem"

If Chris says he cant do it for Xenonauts i believe him.

And Chris you got a PM.

Edited by Megathron
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Multiplayer games basically have to be designed to have that feature from the ground up. Retrofitting multiplayer into a nearly complete game would be a nightmare! I could only see that happening if Chris decided to rewrite a large part of Xenonauts to upgrade to a new engine or something like that. "Xenonauts: Terror from the Saxons" :D

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