Dungeon Master Forum

Have any of you DM clone authors/coders considered making a clone that allows people to play DM online in coop fashion? I think that would be SICK! Imagine walking and hunting down monsters through those cold grey corridors alongside a coop buddy. Damn. With the brilliant other clones we've seen from the likes of Sophia, George, Alandale, etc, I think this is actually possible.

What are your thoughts on the feasibility of such an idea?

If you search there have been a coupel of projects started, nothign came to fruition. It's easier said than done. There is an atari clone called 'Master of Chaos that let two poeple go head to head, that's on the encyclopaedia though not sure how to run it.

And could you edit out the swearword, we try and keep the language general in most forums here. Thanks!

sorry Beo.

Thanks for the heads on MoC. I"ll check it out. Hopefully things will change in the future

To be honest, I don't think it would really work, at least not with usual dungeons. Too often, two parties would stand in each other's way, or one party would accidentally run into the other party's fireball. You would also have to design a dungeon where the different parties cannot block each other and with puzzles designed to need a second party. And even if that works, I'm still not sure if playing with somebody else would be just as fun. One of the many reasons why DM is so great is that you actually feel alone in the dungeon, left to yourself. It's up to you and to you alone to make things right again.
That doesn't mean I'm totally against this idea, and I would certainly try it out if someone creates such a clone. But I'm skeptical it would be as great as imagination might want it to be.

I was thinking about a flashgame in this direction.. How hard is it to export dm to flash? This would be awsome
I guess it is easier creating a multiplayer/lan game in flash than it is on a computer.. But as I have no experience of creating flashgames I am just guessing

well, I personally do believe someday it will happen...
@trantor
parties would not stand in each others way if they will be hyper-incorporeal(that is more than just ghost-like) to each other.
you see them, they walk through you, cannot activate your pressure plates... they can in no way interact with you or your surroundings. all parties have their own dungeon and just happen to see the other parties. If you have not been able to open up a door, and one of the other parties have, they will continue and walk through your closed door- for them open that is.
Spoilers are apparent.. if a party enters a secret wall you will notice they vanish.. or they could have used invisibility but I would not go that far.
For speed run competitions this might work. The dungeon is an instance, like 100 players start at the same time, 1 finishes as fastest , many die.. needs some additional info, like who died , current position(maybe sometimes not entirely clear)..

if there was a real co-op mode! hmmm Parties should consist of 2 champions and being able to share space on occasion. I would then probalby vote for a hyper-incorporeal friendly fireball.. so you don´t hit your friends..and have the dragon have regeneration.. problem to be solved would be how to distribute items... you could also make items double. If party A picks up hardcleave, the hardcleave will still be there for party B. But not anymore for party A, they cannot pick it up a second time.though it should be visible(hyper-incorporeally) to partyA. So party A knows, when or if the hardcleave has been taken by party B. Clear?! No argueing about items. A bit lame, maybe too;)

you could emulate some sort of tower defense (in viewport 3d).
Each player with his party represents a tower(space in wall next to corridor, so does not get the big picture)
monsters in increasing numbers and strengths run through that corridor... for the damage done players earn exp and when enough damage is done, monsters drop items you can upgrade your party with. Maybe have points and buy system to do that.

Touchscreen will come to dm, it is expected to be.

Maybe I will make some kind of testclone with a chatbox, but just that way, that one player can watch what the other one is doing. That isn't really worth much, but I never programmed a client/server-system and I'd like to see if I can.
That's just testing an UDP-packet class, and trying to install some kind of communication interface. That's somehow like the replay facility of CSBwin then.

Bit wrote:Maybe I will make some kind of testclone with a chatbox, but just that way, that one player can watch what the other one is doing. That isn't really worth much, but I never programmed a client/server-system and I'd like to see if I can.
That's just testing an UDP-packet class, and trying to install some kind of communication interface. That's somehow like the replay facility of CSBwin then.

That's sounds awesome. Heck, I'd be satisfied with something that would allow us to spectate other players within the game in real-time. Awesome!

But don't hope for it soon. I just returned back to the basics to build absolute 1:1 testclones on low level, that can be used to try the one or other feature. Treating a party as a monster group to battle each other in a duel is definately not low-level

I'd assume that the multiplayer variants of some of the roguelike projects would be a good starting point. At least what belongs the handling of players in a cell based world.

The problem is, that the datastructures of DM/CSB are not really made for such things.
Party and monstergroups are treated in a very different way.
To modify that, we'd need a very well-structured sourcecode that would be easy to handle.
CSBwin was made to keep things as original as possible - so it's basically still structured as the original. Whereever possible, Paul used first classes and splitted the variables for it out of the long linear dataset. But with all of the old rest-'spaghetti', the necessary WINapi and debugging stuff, not mentioning the DSAs that forced a new extended gamedata-format, that's not a source to start making mods easily. Then again, all that starts from the scratch to be a brandnew clone, will end in a never ending hunt for the right formulas - even with the encyclopedia available. Ask Rasmus and Sophia.
My clones aren't that high developed as CSBwin is, and - even running fine on the first view - I surely made a lot of mistakes by typos. So I try that now again with a more or less automated process, controlling version by version against the last one. The goal is to have a source that reflects the original as close as possible, but is very readable, so that we maybe even could reorganize the whole knowledge of the encyclopedia.
It's not meant to concurrent with CSBwin or DSB, it's meant to support both and can help for new ideas like DMT. But - as I said - that needs a lot of time!
Currently I optimize and modify my sourceprocessor to handle all three versions, DM, CSB 2.0 and CSB 2.1. The source of CSB 2.0 where I began a year ago is definately dangerous, so bad that I found the source of CSB 2.1 that late...

@Bit: As I have said before and still agree on. The CSBcode is a maze of unknown varibles, so a fresh sourcecode would be really nice

I can't see a future with a multiplayergame created from the sourcecode of CSBWin. As a read somewhere here before, the monsters and partys has entirely diffrent routines, so the only way to insert multiplayermode is to insert a totally new routine handeling other partys. And I think this is to much work for anyone to do. I don't know about DSB, but I can only image that it would be hundreds of times easier inserting multiplayermode there than in CSBWin. In DMT 2 the champions belonging to the party has the same routines as the monsters, the only diffrent is that they either are controlled by AI or keyboard. I created it like this because of the posibility of future multiplayermode. But since I don't know anything about programming network or simular, this ain't going to happen this year..

But I would prefere to see a classic view dm multiplayer game! I leave the floor to you Sophia

Perhaps Sophia could throw a few lines of code
into DSB.......just enough to demonstrate the
proof of concept. Preferably a peer-to-peer
protocol to avoid having any servers involved.
If it could support UDP, that would be nice
because my ISP makes incoming TCP connections
difficult.

No useful multiplayer ability could be added to DSB simply by throwing in a few lines of code. I guess a "proof of concept" doesn't necessarily have to be useful, but I don't want to make it so limited-use and hackish that any attempt to expand it would result in having to redo everything anyway.

I once modified the Quake II-source and remember that I made a simple class for the UDP-Transfer. I'll try to attach it to my primary testclone and see what happens. If it is really easy to use, I will put the source online. One never knows for what it may be good for.

I would really like that!

Yes that would be really cool, bit

Interesting ideas...

A feature to think about with my clone...

The biggest thing with coop in games is finding ways to either force other players to stay near their companions by either locking the screen around them, or by locking areas in ways that required more than one person to get through. Otherwise you have people blasting through areas while the others get to do nothing.. or you go for the MMO model where everything locks when people are in the puzzle or battle and you can get in later when it's reset like an amusement park

Just an idea:
Each player controls only one character. But they can gather on a tile to form a party, as if it were a vehicle, where the leader controls the movement of the group while each player retains control of the individual actions of their respective character (and they can still change their facing).
Some fights or puzzles can only be solved through a regrouping (like minimal weight on a pressure pad, or activate at once the levers on distinct wall faces from a same tile, or fight on two fronts from the same tile, while some would need a split on the contrary.

Each character would be like a special monsters (with front, profil, rear and attack views) whose actions are determined by an external input rather than the AI.
With an engine like CSBwin, if you run the same version, then it is deterministic and as long as you know what were the players actions for this tick, you can deduce how is the dungeon for the next tick.
Each tick, you'd need to share through the net the input of each player: maybe putting all the players input in a common file (or a variable in the server memory) would work: it would need to be updated and read each 1/6th of second, which is more or less the average time of response for a server. If an instruction arrives too late (the file was read so the actions for the current tick are final), it is postponed for the next tick.

It seems doable to me with little effort, but I have no idea if it would be efficient.

To summarize: each tick, each engine client sends its player input, and reads the final inputs of all the players from the previous tick. Then it applies the change for the characters and then calculate the new state of the dungeon, which should coincide on each machine. A checksum should avoid divergence.

A new player connecting would need to receive a current copy (savegame) of the dungeon.
A player leaving the game would have its character stripped and sent to the limbo, still usable if a new player comes.

Paul, does it make any sense?

Paul, does it make any sense?

Sure. The source code is available to you. I'll post the
latest whenever you ask.
I say "Go for it". After you finish Conflux, of course.

I remember how it felt like playing coop multiplayer in the original DM. One would pick the keyboard, the other would pick the mouse. It was enough fun for both.

The key to cooperative gameplay is often asymetrics!

An interesting way to go multiplayer coop would be to have a very dynamic dungeon, one player playing Theron (as a ghost) and the other playing the (physical) champions. Theron would have tools dedicated to check the surroundings (dynamic maps? oracle? oh ew ra, spells like that), would be invisible & immortal but unable to interact - no falling, no stairs etc but he could send GUI clues, pathways, or "wow style" raid-leader warnings to the other player, on top of other good stuff like fearing monsters or maybe freezing time. The other player would be the muscle, the one actually killing stuff. Imagine the third as "the child/princess/president" (very vulnerable, but the main goal of the whole game is to have him exit the dungeon) and you could have a wonderful multiplayer experience. Assuming the princess' role isn't made of boredom but truly that of a horror game.

so we have:
1) the seer (unable to activate/kill stuff, plenty of detection, subtle manipulation and communication tools)
2) the warrior (able to activate/kill)
3) the child (very vulnerable, unable to kill stuff, princess escaping is the goal of the game)
4) ideas?
_the hero? (can do little bits of all)
_the spy? (can infiltrate the enemy and actually do stuff there)

...or just use tvtropes for inspiration