Re: Global game design (Was: Re: [Adonthell-devel] Battle System)

[Ricardo Colon]

One a crazier(a much less practical) note, it'd be cool if you could play
a 2-player game in a DualHead configuration, where each player gets one
monitor and have 2 gamepads connected to one machine...


It'd be cool if you could play Adonthell via LAN as well.

                                        -- R:


On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, cirrus wrote:

> All sounds mighty cool - one question though:
> Does this also make it possible to have multiple players on one machine?
> Like if you have 2 or more gamepads or a pad and a keyboard? Obviosly
> they'd share one screen and could walk very far apart but it's still fun
> if you have friends round and they can just join in.
>
>       -James
>
>
> Alexandre Courbot wrote:
> >
> > > Ummm.. wasn't that what we were planning to do? Remember Alex started
> > > redesigning the map-engine in a server/client way to accomodate exactly
> > > such a feature. :)
> >
> > Yes. And the random ideas maturated quite well during these few weeks.
> > Moreover I had a great example of game design that I think would
> > perfectly fit to Adonthell. Hang on, it's gonna be... space. ;)
> >
> > I recently bought Terminus. As you probably don't know this game, it's a
> > commercial title that has the particularity to be shipped for
> > Linux/MacOS/Windows in the same box (otherwise, how could I play it,
> > hehe). But it has another particularity, much more important: it's
> > probably the best designed game I have ever seen. I'll have to come to
> > some description of the game.
> >
> > Terminus (http://www.vvisions.com/terminus/story_frame.htm,
> > http://www.vvisions.com/terminus/graphics_main.htm) is both a space
> > simulator and a RPG game. You can either engage as a military, become a
> > pirate or run as a mercenary. In the latter case (the most interesting)
> > you'll have to manage your ship(s), gain money, talk to people, and so
> > on. You travel in the whole solar system, which planets & satellites are
> > also modelized. I insist that the game as a whole RPG system - but the
> > most interesting is the way they implemented multiplayer mode &
> > persistance.
> >
> > Most often in games, there are a number of key elements/characters, and
> > a lot of less important stuffs. In Terminus, you'll often meet others
> > ships and people. The interested thing is that:
> > -A ship is never a "random" thing or ennemy because
> > -Each ship belong to another NPC character (there is quite a lot of
> > them)
> > -Each characters go on their own business, depending on their alignment.
> > When I say they go on their own business, if you and Random J. Pirate
> > are at the two opposite ends of the solar system, you can still locate
> > him on the radar and know what he is doing. NPC's hijack each others,
> > make contracts, trade, travel, just like a real player. They do not
> > depend on you AT ALL. You can sit down and look at how the world
> > evolves. The game world still exist, with or without you. It's totally
> > persistant.
> > -In these conditions, you can guess that implementing multiplayer is
> > quite easy. Such a design allows the game to be played both in single or
> > multi player, with the same engine, without any change. To my eyes, it's
> > the ideal in game design.
> >
> > How would it work for us? Let's take the map system. A map must be able,
> > like Terminus, to run with characters doing their own business on a
> > machine, without graphisms (they are only on the 'client' part), and the
> > player would only have a special schedule that reacts to the player
> > input, just as we do now.
> >
> > A classic map would just contain information for the game to run. No
> > displaying, nothing. From this class would inheritate another map (or we
> > could connect others data structures), with the same abilities of
> > course, but also ways to render on screen.
> >
> > In single player mode, you'd then have the game that runs on this map
> > with graphical capabilities, and the mapview would just render it. No
> > network connections, no performance lost compared to a totally single
> > player game.
> >
> > In multiplayer, the server would run a non-graphical capable map.
> > Clients that connect to it are sent the map information they need to
> > update their local copy of the map. That is, the client map is exactly
> > the same as the single-player one (and has all the properties of the
> > server one, as it inclues it), but instead of running the game, it gets
> > updated by the information the server sents:
> >
> > ------------------                               --------------------
> > |                |        Update information     |                  |
> > | Client map     |  <--------------------------- |  Server map      |
> > |(server copy)   |                               |    (runs)        |
> > ------------------                               --------------------
> >
> > In this case, we need a way to serialize the necessary map data to send
> > it to the client. There is also a network layer that is used, that isn't
> > needed in single player mode. As you guessed it, a single player game
> > can easily turn into a multiplayer one: clients connects to the player's
> > machine, but will experience pings while the local player will not even
> > use network, as he directly renders the master map.
> >
> > Uuuuuhhh, saying that I realize it's much like Quake III dedicated or
> > not servers. Which makes me think it's the way to go! :)
> >
> > Another advantage is that the multiplayer constraints doesn't need to be
> > considered immediatly. You can program the classes for single player
> > only, then extend them with serializing and communicating capabilities
> > to get a multiplayer stuff. Also, you can easily tune/change the
> > communication protocols if they doesn't fit first.
> >
> > The result for single player games would be exactly the same as the
> > stuff we had with Waste's Edge - NP characters were already not
> > different from the player, and they were also doing their own stuff.
> > This structure has the advantage of being much clearer and extensible,
> > especially extensible to multiplayer games.
> >
> > Please tell what you think - I thought a lot about it and it seems to me
> > that it would perfectly work. But until I start programming it a bit, we
> > can't really know whether or not it's the best idea.
> >
> > Alex.
> > --
>
> --
>    ___    ___  ___       ___
>   /    / /__/ /__/ /  / /__                 Reg. Linux User #148821
>  /___ / / \  / \  /__/ ___/@linuxgames.com  www.twiddles.com
>                                             adonthell.linuxgames.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Adonthell-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/adonthell-devel
>