Multiplayer Development

[krugman25]

To start with MW was designed as a single player game, it would not translate easily to multiplayer and secondly I do not want my playing enjoyment to be ruined by some snot nosed kid whose mother told him to turn of his computer and go to bed.

I don't understand what your problem is Tinker, if MP did come to OpenMW it would be entirely optional as MW is a single player game, I would also imagine there would be no centralised server like there would be with XBL or PSN so unless that 'snot nosed kid' was on your LAN and you chose to do MP with them, I can't see how your enjoyment could be ruined just by the fact MP was a feature in OpenMW unless you willingly chose to use it.

Having MP in OpenMW would not only be interesting to see in MW, but would be a really useful feature for OpenMW when it comes to people creating stand-alone games on the OpenMW engine, it would increase the audience the engine appeals to and result in more people working on more stand-alone content for OpenMW post 1.0. Your negativity put's people off who may be thinking of contributing to the project and community which is the last thing anyone wants, although I can't wait for OpenMW 1.0, seeing what non-MW creations the community comes up with after that point excites me more.

I agree with you, having MP in OpenMW may unlock a who new subset of features people way may to create that would only be interesting with 2 or more human players. I am sure once there was a stable and solid MP feature, then content creators may start going down the road of creating new game play types like PVP, or who new MP stype story lines.

I don't agree with Tinker but I can see he is coming at it from a purist standpoint. Although I think it's kind of fruitless to argue about a personal opinion, especially for addons that would be optional. If someone really wanted to they could argue any sort of mod that moves the game further away from it's original design is bad. The question for a purist is going to be what is acceptable modification of a game and what is not, and of course you would get a 1000 different answers because it's all personal opinion. For that reason my approach is that there is no line in the sand, just let the community drive the modifications. If a modification is created and the community hates it, it won't garner any interest and die off naturally. If the community loves it they will want to see it mature and people will begin helping and adding their own content.

[psi29a]

Just keep in mind that while OpenMW can play Morrowind, it isn't limited by it either. OpenMW is a game engine after all.

[krugman25]

Making OpenMW as an engine multiplayer-capable probably won't be that huge of an issue. The problem is that the MW game assumes only one player is running around with autonomy. Scripts and condition checks assume there's only one 'player' ID, and assumes one player is activating all the dialog and journal updates, and assumes one player is in or adjacent to a loaded cell. Certain behaviors expect gametime to pause while in dialog (e.g. crime, NPCs become hostile and attack you while guards attempt to talk to you; when the guard talks to you everything stops, so you're given time to read and respond without everyone continuing to attack you), and it assumes certain dialogs can't be exited from without picking a choice (which would need to happen if dialog was real-time).

Fixing this would require additions to the scripting engine and NPCs behaviors, and very invasive mods to remove these sorts of assumptions in the game data.

I'm on the same page as you Chris, I don't think getting to the point of pulling in a second player into a single game is going to be hugely difficult, at least I hope not, but there are a lot of game mechanics to consider. Last night I was laying in bed and thinking through all of the scripts and logic that may break with a second player involved. The goal would of course to be as simple and least invasive as possible, but I don't doubt there will need to be modified scripts loaded in to make it work. I should know more once I can get in the OMW source and poke around in there.

[Tinker]

My opinion was just my opinion, nothing more.

I do not mind if other people want multiplayer, so long as I do not have to use it. My only concerns are code bloat for a feature I do not want and the possibility that introducing multiplayer could break some of the single player game and lead to two projects OpenMW and a fork of OpenMW-MP, possibly diluting dev. efforts. I really hope my concerns are ill founded but still will never be tempted to try multiplayer of any game.

[krugman25]

After looking into it more I will most likely need to modify in game metadata for assets, scripts, ect as well as add in a networking library and all of the classes/scripts I write myself. I don't know if "mod" would be the correct way to describe MP, it may be more invasive than that. Or I could be totally wrong and it's not invasive at all, hard to tell at this point. I certainly don't want to fork OpenMW and end up with parallel OpenMW projects, one with and one without MP, and dirty up the repository. I am looking for thoughts here but perhaps the best thing would be to create my own repository, and then pull latest stable versions of OpenMW and try to keep whatever work I am doing in the latest OpenMW builds. I could write a tool for when I pull in the latest build it would take all of my current work and put copy it over the new build. I am still not sure what the end game would be here, but the goal would be for users running OpenMW to install MP as an addon rather than having an entirely separate executable of OpenMW.

[Mistahtokyo]

My opinion was just my opinion, nothing more.

I do not mind if other people want multiplayer, so long as I do not have to use it. My only concerns are code bloat for a feature I do not want and the possibility that introducing multiplayer could break some of the single player game and lead to two projects OpenMW and a fork of OpenMW-MP, possibly diluting dev. efforts. I really hope my concerns are ill founded but still will never be tempted to try multiplayer of any game.

I agree with the code bloat/diluting efforts part. Things like this make me fear OpenMW turning into the Homer Simpson car, bloated and incomplete. The engine itself is not yet complete, hell it just had a major switch with the OSG thing, yet now is the time for post 1.0 features?

I'd break this down into more reasonable things first, with multiplayer as the end goal. For example, implementing a real time dialogue system a la Skyrim/Fallout 4, etc. so players can interact with NPCs while the other runs around.

[krugman25]

Just read post below...

[krugman25]

It's seems pretty clear that forking the project and having a potential case of another parallel version w/ MP is probably not a good idea. As I mentioned in an earlier post I don't at all want to disturb the work going on here. I will approach it from an addon standpoint, and work on it as a separate project. I would like to keep OpenMW aware of the work I am doing and keep everyone updated here if that's alright. It seems like OpenMW's philosophy is to create a new and better engine that maintains the original game and then later on create support for modding and let the modders worry about addons. If that's the case then I will happily be one of the first in line with my own mods. If OpenMW decides to get into the business of modding the game beyond vanilla after 1.0 then I would be open to letting OpenMW take a look any MP feature work I have done and potentially add it into one of OpenMW's build as a permanent feature. We can cross that bridge when we get there though.

Thanks again everyone for you help and comments.

[psi29a]

If someone wants to fool around with the codebase (fork it on github), let them.

For example, maqifrnswa made his fork that supports python bindings to use for scripting. It was said, by Zini, that it wouldn't be accepted into OpenMW for now. maqifrnswa continued working on it anyway because he wanted to and keeps maintaining it. It is an option for those that wish to use it and it hasn't caused any dip in development or other fears.

I'm honestly ashamed at how people here are fear mongering. This is an open community. For those who haven't contributed anything to OpenMW aside from posting on the forum, back off and let the guy have some fun and enjoy hacking OpenMW to his hearts content. You've nothing to lose anyway. Who cares if it never makes it into OpenMW, it isn't taking away from development towards the 1.0 goal.

Just to restate,

Will OpenMW support multiplayer?

The OpenMW team currently has no plans for developing this feature. There are probably some technical factors about OpenMW that would make it extremely complicated, messy, and painful to implement. However, sometime in the future, some sort of co-op feature for OpenMW could be a possibility. OpenMW will probably never support MMO style gameplay.

https://openmw.org/faq/#multiplayer

OpenMW developers didn't get people's hopes up just so that forum posters could nay-say them.

If you think I've made you mad and stepped all over opinion, then you're a nay-sayer, get over it.

[lysol]

Who said that a well working MP branch would never be merged with the original OpenMW project anyway? If it is made by "some guy" who happens to be a talented programmer that wants to do it, then great. "Free" multiplayer for the project while scrawl, zini and the others can continue with the "important" stuff! Just my two cents.