Multiplayer Arena

[Jyby]

Something I've always wanted to do in Morrowind was beat up my friend Franky.

Of course we can bring up the moot points... but consider this:

Morrowind Arena as a standalone game. A game that would borrow heavily from OpenMW's codebase(from spell casting to rendering and physics), but would only be used to fight each other or trade!

Key idea: We won't have to manage Morrowind's quests, npcs, pathfinding etc. over a network connection. Not having to redesign the main OpenMW codebase to handle multiple instances of players.

This would be a great exercise and learning experience for me and many other existing and new developers. This might also be desired by the community? What do you guys think?

[Gramblosh]

I just image Vivec Arena to be a real arena to battle with some friends or just random people. Could be fun.

[ezze]

I think competitive RPG are quite strange; where is the skill? What human ability are you trying to push?

In games like World of Warcraft the ability is simply: "I played more than you and I have an higher level character and better gear." Essentially no human ability is involved.
In chess it would be like: "I played longer than you, so I can replace one Rook with a Queen."


Of course, it would be an interesting technical challenge to implement all this ideas and from the graphical, and magical point of view you can probably get lots of code from OpenMW. But perhaps it is better to start from a game like Warsow or Sauerbraten: Cube 2.

[Jyby]

I wouldn't expect it to be balanced... There can only be one champion in The Elder Scrolls after all!
We could generate some balanced characters with some sort of level system. Think CS gun game.

I'd love to race you to that nordic sword in Vivic Arena Gramblosh!

We should have a good discussion and maybe create a brief outline because I think the biggest opportunity we have right now is taking advantage of the years of work put into OpenMW.

Extra crazy idea I just had:

Spoiler: Show

I also had this crazy idea: What if we could "teleport" a player in OpenMW to Morrowind Arena? For example I'm playing OpenMW and I visit the vivic arena. What if we could switch to the standalone as if I just joined a battle? The bring the player back to OpenMW as if nothing changed?

[Br0ken]

Simple cooperative/multiplayer mode will be enough.

[silentthief]

supposedly there was the ability to pipe to external programs in MWSE, and there was a talk once about making it so you could interface with another and then, in your game there would be an NPC that followed the controls of a dif player and hence multiplayer.

It was all theory, but there was some discussion on that back in the day. If you had multiplayer, it would probably turn the MW experience into something more like quake, where you run around an environment trying to grab a weapon and whack at another player. everyone would be equal in status in this environment, and would have the same abilities. There would be items that enhance your abilities, of course. I could see this as having spell scroll items that would be major weapons, such as a fireball scroll. Got hit, hurting? darn near dead? go grab the restore health potion in the upper level, but don't get picked off by the sniper with the crossbow.

This is only one example of multiplayer. If I was making this, I believe that the multiplayer style would have to force players to only use a specific set of items, and not bring in thier own. Likewise with characters, spells etc.

Just one thought of how to do multiplayer. I'm sure that there are more

ST

[Markelius]

An actual Coop mode with a PvP option would be a good way to handle this, I think.

I'm pretty sure most people aren't hoping, or looking, to turn Morrowind into an MMO, it's just not what people want. What would be nice, however, is to play the game with a friend. Take a game like Saints Row, sure, it might be fun when played alone but it's coop really stands well to improve the game. There's plenty of fun stuff you can do with a coop partner that you can't normally. There's also the fun of playing with someone else.

Imagine this in Morrowind, I imagine coop mode could be implemented via special save games, when you save in coop mode, you can't load that save in singleplayer, both the host and user have to load it. Once you're in though, you can both do quests together, explore, loot, and maim. I think it would be wise to make loot be dropped individually for each player for this, so that, if I got Keening, my coop partner could get it as well. Quests would be stored individually, but quest points would update if the other player did something. For example, if my friend and I were on a quest to kill Fargoth, and my they killed him before I could, I'd get the journal entry too. For quest items however, the individualized loot would handle this.


It might require a decent amount of work and maybe a mod to define shared quest points, but it could work out very nicely. Morrowind playthroughs are really fun, I imagine they'd be at least double the fun if I could play with other people.

[onionland]

Imagine this in Morrowind, I imagine coop mode could be implemented via special save games, when you save in coop mode, you can't load that save in singleplayer, both the host and user have to load it.

I would prefer dealing with saves as most coop rpgs do, having one main save file, on which all progress is saved, quests and such, and then only saving character progression for the second player. That way you can play with any 2 characters, and be able to continue by yourself.
That way, before it is decided how the saves should work, openmw could just load a character from another save.

But really, before deciding how to handle loading and saving character, the first thing that needs to be done is to make sure that the basic functionality of a second player is implemented.

[Pop000100]

I honestly would love coop with a PvP option, but OpenMW needs rendering optimizations, I mean I can only get 15 fps outside but I get 45+ in vanilla.

[imec]

supposedly there was the ability to pipe to external programs in MWSE, and there was a talk once about making it so you could interface with another and then, in your game there would be an NPC that followed the controls of a dif player and hence multiplayer.

Pretty sure this technique has been used in at least a few games with hacked in multiplayer. There was a Skyrim multiplayer effort that tried this at one point. Black Mesa also had a mod that allowed another player to sort of hover around behind you as a shiny Gordon torso. Neither one worked at all because there was zero enemy/world synchronization.

As far as multiplayer is concerned, I could see it being really interesting if OpenMW (or a fork of it) had robust customization like Garry's Mod or Arma. TTT in Balmora? Prophunts? Battle Royal? Altis Life across Vvardenfell (Skooma dealing anyone?)? Jump maps with Quake physics? Enemy synchronization isn't needed for any of these and they're still a blast. Probably something that would never happen, but it's still nice to dream.