I completely agree with multiplayer being a distraction from OpenMW's real goal of providing a contemporary recreation of Morrowind's engine, which is why – aside from occasionally asking for your input and opinion on various high-level matters – we don't intend to take up any of your time or resources in the form of coding assistance or changes tailored specifically to us.Zini wrote: My main concern is still the same. Dealing with MP at this stage in any way will eat man power that we need for other parts of OpenMW. Or rather it may be that we simple do not have the man power to deal with MP at the moment. That being said, I don't think a subforum would cause any harm, as long as it is made clear that MP is currently very low priority for us and we may not always be able to provide assistance in timely manner or sometimes at all.
Instead, we will attempt to go all the way on our own and then work towards convergence with and absorption by OpenMW – should that be desired by you – once both OpenMW and tes3mp have achieved their main goals.
Assuming that we stick to the current implementation where most of the logic is run client-side and the server merely acts as a relay for information, the changes made to OpenMW are not extensive and could easily be disabled entirely through an isMultiplayer boolean.Zini wrote: As for merging the MP fork back in: I don't think we ever promised that such a merge would happen. It depends on if their idea of MP makes sense and fits into our project. I haven't even gotten around to look at that thing. It may be helpful to ask them for a design document that specifies exactly what they understand under MP and which changes to the basic structure of OpenMW are required to support it.
If we were to move more logic to the server, then OpenMW also moving more of the mechanics and world logic to the shared components would help and prevent us from having to duplicate it on the separate server app.
For the time being, however, no changes in the structure of OpenMW are required.
I think that should absolutely be the recommended and default way of playing. For a cooperative experience with minimal quest and script conflicts, a single player should be allowed to talk to NPCs and move across cells, with the other players being mute henchmen forced to follow that player around and their state being entirely shared.Zini wrote: I am pretty sure that MP is possible at least from a design standpoint. But there is really only one option. One main player and the other players act as a player-equivalent of NPC-companions (kinda like a party).
They would have to share a single quest state and probably also things like reputation, criminal status and so on (need to make a list of that at some point).
However, I think the server settings should be extensive enough to allow all and any restrictions to also be turned off, for fun or experimentation. If a server host wants a system where players can split off and be on opposite sides of the world doing conflicting quests, it should be entirely possible, but simply unsupported and not embraced by the rest of our development efforts.
I agree that our focus should be on getting the Morrowind content to work well first and foremost, but consider that – with toggleable options also allowing for an alternative approach – something like UIX Redemption can be played straight out of the box and be enjoyable in tes3mp as a freeform role-playing experience even with a lack of premade NPCs.Zini wrote: The implementation of MW content (both original and modded) does not allow for anything else. Any alternative approach would require special MP content instead of the regular content files. That is not something we want.
Certainly, there will be many situations that were never meant to be possible in Morrowind, such as attacking an NPC while another player is talking to that NPC, or a player going off alone in an area and triggering a script that blocks the path of the others.Zini wrote: Even with this approach there might be some problems with the existing content, but these should be minor enough that they can be patched.
However, through constant testing, we hope to find workarounds for most of those problems, though we worry that they won't all be automatic workarounds and some may need to be done on a case-by-case basis. Time will tell.