Desktop Tuesday: Multiplayer Basics

My computer is about 5 years old now, I’m thinking of saving up a little bit and building a rig that can move mountains. I’ll have to wait, though, for the next time you can buy a decent video card without selling a kidney. Freaking crypto.

6 Likes

I’m going to friend all my favorite Stonehearth players/modders on Steam. I hope you guys don’t mind.

8 Likes

Will we be able to take our three favourite hearthlings with us into multiplayer?

2 Likes

I don’t see why not :woman_shrugging:
The roster / loadouts screens are the same than in singleplayer.

4 Likes

So how do we request access to rickety_building branch, as mentioned in the post? I’m not seeing a thread for it.

The rickety_branch thread is this one:

But if you mean for testing multiplayer, the password might be different. We haven’t opened it yet.

1 Like

Hmmm can you (or will you be able to in the future) host the game on a dedicated host?

1 Like

@Banto are we finally getting a grip to play together after a year since we met?

2 Likes

While I can’t speak for the roadmap, right now, the game requires windows, and in the case of Steam ‘join game’ facilitation, a Steam account, to host games. You could run Stonehearth on a standalone Windows machine, and it would act as a dedicated host today. Of course, the server’s town would sit unmanaged, which would be sad. :slight_smile:

Based on the client/server nature of the multiplayer implementation, I imagine dedicated server should be at least possible. Even more so when the game gets a Linux port. Whether or not it’s in the cards to provide, I defer to the dev team to answer.

2 Likes

Which isn’t a dedicated server in my humble opinion. If it requires to render the whole graphical user interface (as opposed to just running the simulation), then it’s not really usable for server hosters/most VMs out there. Not to mention that Steam Workshop won’t work that way, because it requires a Steam account with a copy of Stonehearth.

I think for the source engine, that was the differentiation between a dedicated server (srcds.exe, really just a console running the whole thing) and a listen server (hl2.exe, running the whole game and a server).

3 Likes

Agreed. I was just talking about ways to provide a quasi-dedicated experience in the meantime, that’s all.

1 Like

Yes, just looking for the builder right now. Thank you!

1 Like

I think investing time in allowing a dedicated server is worth it, unless it would take another half year or more. (political statement of feedback.) If you play with a group of friends, and it is possible for this group to set up a dedicated server, then that would be good for optimisation reasons, right. I don’t remember excactly what is and isn’t run on the server. But if the amount of hearthlings (for example) that can be present in the game before lagging out is determined by the server, then you absolutely want the ability of a dedicated server, as that means towns (multiple towns, with multiple populations) can play and expand longer.


(As a bonus, people who have the hardware for it can maybe get a performance boost by using a dedicated server multiplayer session with just one player, using two computers.)

3 Likes

Hell yeah, multiplayer! This might finally get Stonehearth off my backburner again. Good to see it’s almost here.

2 Likes

No plans for dedicated server support; that requires a whole extra team to make sure it’s up and running all the time. :slight_smile: However, if you want to set it up yourself, just leave it paused whenever you’re the last person to leave play, and I guess, make sure the host hearthlings have lots of food… or don’t worry about it and let the host town die for the extra mysterious Roanoke style experience!

2 Likes

Would it be at all possible to have a Stonehearth executable that only runs the “server” part of the game, without any of the rendering or whatnot? That way people could set up their own long-running servers, if need be.

2 Likes

@sdee -

So a few thoughts.

  1. Personal request, so I apologize ahead of time, and I won’t be offended if you say no.
    Being you suggested people use a therd party chat like Discord, is there any chance the Official Unofficial Discord could become a little more…official? I understand many people will have their own Discord servers for their groups, but for the people that don’t have a group yet, it’d be a good place to start. Plus we’ve already got a good bit of regulars from the Discourse on.

  2. This was discussed with @Sweet slightly on Discord, but as @Albert shared the floating box code, with Multiplayer coming, could y’all share the explorable maps mod from your tests? By itself, the current multiplayer is rather cut and dry, basically just being multiple people playing single player together. Allowing some of the more advanced modders a place to start in turning Multiplayer into what a lot of us would like, I think would go a long way.



Beat me to it. If we could get a server only Stonehearth, then I’m sure we could find a way to run it on Linux through some kind of bashing (whether that be with a hammer or code). Something like 90% of dedicated servers are Linux because of how well they run on minimal resources. As for the Steam part of it, Steam has already taken care of that with a Linux Server version.

On that thought as well, the Server Only version could have A LOT of stuff stripped out of it, such as path finding, AI, and like 70% of other things. Unless I’m wrong, even on Windows, this would run like water.

2 Likes

For dedicated servers, there’s some confusion that might need to be cleared up. We, Team Stonehearth, won’t be able to reliably maintain dedicated servers for people to use.

However, we have a prototype of Stonehearth running in server-only mode on LAN, and we’re looking into whether it’s reasonable to support this on Steam eventually. We’ll try to open it up for people to use, but it may not be as useful as you expect. The majority of heavy lifting is done by the server, and we only use one CPU for the server (with some small exceptions), and another for the client, so whether you also have a local client in the same process does not make a huge difference.

9 Likes

I think the use case here is that you could have 3 people and 4 computers, such that nobody’s separate machine lags, and people can play on rigs that don’t have 32 gigs of RAM. Wouldn’t the clients see an improvement in speed, if the server process is off-shored to a diff. computer? Either way, I’m very happy to hear this is theoretically possible.

4 Likes

I apologize if I confused y’all. When I asked for a dedicated server, I’m not asking y’all to host it. I was referring to what you’ve talked about here with a Server Only mode. I’m more than happy to host a game on my personal server for my friends and I (that don’t own the game) to play on.

6 Likes