Mod Request

[Pumpkin]

HELLO PAWNS
The mod I request is pretty hard to make ( in my opinion )...
Well I'm asking for an coop mod , max  2 players each with his 2/3 colonist ... in a few words combining 2 players exeperience in one world .

[Girlinhat]

That would be impossible without heavy rewrite of the core game.

[Jathomas]

Yep, this would have to be an update.. and may be a while off. however, just for funsies, and extension to your idea would be that the two or more players had colours and different bases... they can choose their own alliances on a larger world. they would fight for capturing colonists yet can trade with the comms console, there are big ideas behind this yet it would require a massive un clutter of the game to make it accessable and less laggy for a wider range of players and will definately take a while to make. still... exciting!

[Girlinhat]

Yep, this would have to be an update.. and may be a while off. however, just for funsies, and extension to your idea would be that the two or more players had colours and different bases... they can choose their own alliances on a larger world. they would fight for capturing colonists yet can trade with the comms console, there are big ideas behind this yet it would require a massive un clutter of the game to make it accessable and less laggy for a wider range of players and will definately take a while to make. still... exciting!

One possible extension of this is the 'timed sync' type multiplayer.  Instead of both parties playing in real time, they would both play a certain amount of in-game time, and then sync up.  This is especially relevant for games where you can pause.  Both players could play as they want, entirely, for one in-game day, with as many pauses or fast speed as they want, and then whoever finishes first stops playing and waits for the other, where it'll then compare game data and what they did, and adjust things accordingly.

This style of play really discourages direct conflict, as one player has control over troops while the attacker's troops are left to the AI, which can be gamed pretty hard.  However, it would allow things like one player funding a faction to attack another player, so instead of pistols and molotovs, the pirates would come with miniguns and body armor.

Synchronizing multiplayer is a lot easier, all it really needs is the ability for the game to spawn specific elements at will, like summoning a raid with a particular set of weapons, or to spawn specific goods.  Then it needs to be able to read shared data, and spawn items that are listed in that data.  It could even be done as a restructured single-player where the game auto-pauses at midnight and the players must exchange text files manually, which the game reads and then spawns things, and then unpauses.

It's the difference between playing chess with someone, and playing chess with someone over email, where each mail message lists what move they want to take, and then you move their pieces on your board.  As long as you're communicating clearly, it works perfectly, if a tad slower.

[Jathomas]

I dont know, youre right that that would work but i would find it far too boring.. maybe If you were able to communicate with other 'friends'' colonies, trade and visit (non-real time) or automaticlly send help?
However the comparison i would say is more league of legends or league of legends over email? i dont know how that would work...

[Girlinhat]

Well, it's very much an issue of 'what do you expect?'  Yes, realtime co-op or pvp would be great, but it's also a bit unreasonable.  There's limitations, and this is one of them.  Sync-style is incredibly more realistic to build than true multiplayer, and could probably be done as a medium-large scale mod in the existing version.  True multiplayer would take significant game updates.  It's not simply an issue of tossing another colony down, it's that the game is truly and deeply designed to focus all information and options to one location, your mouse, and trying to split things gets hectic really fast.

It is, unfortunately, kind of a thing where the game either starts MP, or it starts SP.

[Jathomas]

Yeah well the only way i could see this game possiblly being multiplayer is where either two players can control differant colonies on a large map which will present possible lag at the games current un tidy state yet i would say the most fun, or, have accounts and be able to add other players who will be added to the factions list and can be interacted with in a non real state. this way could work well with the game devs for advertising between friends.. but too boring

[Gabriel_Braun]

Hmm I just had a double thought on this but it's going to take more investigation before I can even guess at the potential viability.  Both would require an external program/dedicated server running in the background to handle the heavy lifting as the game just isn't built for multiplayer:

1) Both players start a game as normal but at the time of each autosave their game automatically reloads that saved game before continuing.  As the game is saved the multiplayer launcher program scans the save and picks out the current value assigned to faction relations and trades them between players and editing the saves with them before triggering the reloading of the saves somehow with an API or hook or something...  Basically would allow you to both exist and send silver to eachother but not much else.

2) Similar to the above in the external launcher setup but a bit more simple to implement.  The save transfer only activates every half hour but takes into consideration a new special item in stockpiles called 'bounty' that is made with silver at a workbench called 'Anonymous comm array' that enables a bill that turns silver into bounty at a 1:1 ratio.   When the save/exchange/reload process fires, the amount of bounty could be converted into points added to the next raid on the other player by a faction of mercs.

Idk if it's possible to do it like that but it would be pretty simple to do a play-by-mail type of manual version of either if the players trusted eachother not to cheat lol