How do WE want StoneHearth multi-player to work?

The sense of freedom on this forum seems to be leaking away. Steve, you are a conversation killer. As Kendrick Lamar once said; ā€œ***** donā€™t kill my vibeā€.

That was a joke in case you missed that. I lessThanThree you Steve. Please donā€™t hurt me.

I wouldnā€™t mind having some game modes with special goals for the players to meet, either together or against each other. There could be more peaceful PvP variations, such as the economic challenge of reaching ā€œXā€ number of citizens or a certain resource, and of course combat-oriented games like capture the flag, regicide, and king of the hill.

Thereā€™s a lot of opportunity here. I personally hope the team has a combination of both ā€œplayers are friendly to each other/work togetherā€ and PvP options together for a truly diverse library of styles and variables to play with.

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agreedā€¦ and while iā€™ve traditionally been a single-player PC gamer, i have really grown to enjoy my multiplayer MC sessions with the kidsā€¦ and as you suggested here, can see so much potential for cooperative modes in SHā€¦

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I think weā€™ve had similar discussions around gametypes before but ā€¦ I would love to have something similar to the Warcraft 3 days ā€¦ in regards to the creative ways that the game can be played!

Things like a capture the flag style game, a wave/ tower defence style game ā€¦ these sorts of things would be awesome.

Well, on paper they would be awesome, itā€™s putting them into practice thatā€™s the hard part :stuck_out_tongue:

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a wave/ tower defence style game

yea, I would love to see that one. Although low on the towers and more wall, soldiers protection and traps. With the occasional small tower. While still having to manage farms and workshops. Repairing walls and building new defense structures.
It is a sort of Action-packed Stonehearth wave defense.

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Perhaps more of an onslaught, with mobs coming at you in waves fairly constantly, but you just have to respond to them regularly?

Of course the game would have to be tweaked slightly; advanced population growth, cheap access to soldiers and start with a decent sized starting town including necessary facilities and resources to produce soldiers instantly.

But other than that my idea would be the two (or more) of you controlling and trying to grow (probably necessary to keep up with the mobs which are ever growing in power) whilst fending of wave after wave of enemies. Some free time between waves, whether that would increase or decrease (I could argue for both, decrease probably better though so you can do the necessary building to make future soldiers possible) or constant, would probably need some tweaking. A bit like CoD zombies in terms of the ā€˜wavesā€™.

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The only thing I want to say about multiplayer is do not screw over single player in any way to achieve multiplayer capabilities. There will no doubt be a large number of people who do not want to play multiplayer at all.

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I really wouldnā€™t worry about that.

Everything weā€™re hearing from the team is indicating that they want to nail that single player experience. So far it seems that multiplayer would be a continuation of single player that you get to experience with friends and family rather than a whole different beast.

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first of all, welcome aboard! :smile:

as my esteemed colleague @Geoffers747 has mentioned, this does not appear to be the direction the team has takenā€¦ multiplayer has been discussed quite a bit (as is to be expected with virtually any game), and it seems the team had a different take on (for example) the co-op experienceā€¦

and looking at this stretch goal, itā€™s still very much a single player experience at heartā€¦

Player vs. Player City Raids: Select a party of adventurers to storm a copy of another playerā€™s city and bring home their treasures. Leaderboards will rank and track the deadliest fighters and most impenetrable fortresses.

Initially I was expecting an open world like Minecraft and you got the option of choosing a location but from seeing the alpha it looks like you get a random slab of land with even more random resources. Dwarf fortress in which Stonehearth seems to be inspired from you get to choose where you start on a map after a resource survey.
Iā€™ll quote another game here for those of you who may not know of it and its a lot more along than this game in terms of playability and thatā€™s ā€œTimber and Stoneā€.
After discovering T&S on the very eve of the launch of StoneHearth I was saddened that one guy has managed to put together a game with more playability in the same time frame. Still he has said that multiplayer was the last thing he will consider doing but IMO he has a start as his is built off the original dwarf fortress land selection process and for a game that could go into multiplayer its a good and bad thing. Good because you need an over-world to select from to start up bad because first onto the server will take up the best lands if you broadcast resource quantities.

So what stone hearth needs to do given the current format is create an over-world you can select your slab of land from and when your online it simply loads it in and its active and when your not it becomes inactive after a while (I say, a while, because in pvp you shouldnā€™t be able to just jump offline in order to defend yourself). This would help with server load as well like the chunks in mincraft are loaded and unloaded to minimize computer resources. I personally would ditch the cube map as well and opt for the hex or octagon map so you have more neighbor borders. Not that a cube style still wont work as traveling to a friends aid needs some mode of transport so you still need the over-world map to either travel through or magically transport your troops. Not to mention trade routes.

Personally I think this game should be built off trade, for multiplayer at least. A low resource area will need to establish friends to trade with in order to stop enemies from coming in and plundering them. As for pvp well its a server option to allow it or not so one setting wont effect the original basic game play.

You do? Forgive me if Iā€™ve misunderstood, but you get a little flag and after youā€™ve browsed the map for where you want (and the map will get bigger when they bring in the practically completed terrain generation) you can then place the flag down where you want it and thatā€™s your settlement. And currently thereā€™s still not much tying you to staying by the flag (although Tom has said that will begin to change).

Well, be sad no more, as thatā€™s plain not true. T&S got funded on Kickstarter on October 27th 2012. SH got funded on May 30th 2013. T&S has had 7 months longer than SH, which is twice the development time SHā€™s had.

Sorry what? Iā€™m just confused on this one. What ā€˜cube mapā€™?

Some of your ideas are quite nice though, even if perhaps some would be fairly difficult to implement. :stuck_out_tongue:

Co-op

Perhaps have it linked to a friends list, where you can invite people from that list to help you. Here you could assign different rules for each friend.

Here you could also assign one worker (most valuable worker :stuck_out_tongue: ) which other players could use as a helper, so if someone has a well geared warrior you could ask for assistance when a large monster invades town.

Multiplayer/PvP

I like the idea the devs have already mentioned about saving the players world and stitching them together.

Either that or have a player select his troops and invade the players village/city and try to defeat their defences. (Again this should be a saved copy of your world, I donā€™t want some random invading and destroying my hard work)

Adding weekly leader-boards where the top players get rare resources/rewards would also be cool.

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Starting position on your map is one thing and regardless of the size of that map for multiplayer its almost irrelevant except for tactical positioning. Its your positioning on an over-world as well that would really count at least in a grand scheme of multiplayer. I imagine that traveling from one section to the next would include load time rather than that seamless transition you get in open world games like Minecraft, but if they could make it one continuous map at least in appearance I definitely would not be complaining.
As for the cube / square grid map vs Octagon shape, well Iā€™ve seen it done in games before so its not impossible personally I couldnā€™t tell you the algorithm used in the code however, and depending on how they make the multiplayer world experience if the only time you see the over-world map at all is at the start it maybe as simple as x,y,z code to determine where you start.
However everything Iā€™ve seen and heard of the game so far suggests they are keeping areaā€™s to a limited size and apart so the client program can handle it on our limited computers and as another person here quoted ā€œThe Devsā€ that they intend to stitch them together, although still not solid evidence to anything as to how it will function. But without an over-world server map there would be no consistency. Imagine building close to a map border on your plot of land and someone rolls their army into your domain there could be little or no warning time or they could spawn into a body of water.
Then thereā€™s also the issue with hackers, if its left to the client program to handle all local data thereā€™s a serious issue of people being able to manipulate the data.

Iā€™m glad you pointed out that S&T was out before SH as i wasnā€™t sure who exactly was the original concept. I went and looked at his KS after wards and he only got about a tenth of the funding as well. Money aside, still two guys vs one and half the time doesnā€™t that even things out? I also found it ironic that they say they are two guys from Microsoft who as we know has a reputation for using other peoples ideas. Not that it doesnā€™t happen everywhere but I just thought Iā€™d share that insight.
But the truth is a game concept is usually in the making long before its announced its usually rolling around in some primitive form or idea but hasnā€™t come to life due to technology or real life stuff preceding it so time frame could be a very fuzzy line.

Iā€™m sorry, but Iā€™m sure you just said starting position was irrelevant (having previously falsely complained that you couldnā€™t change, therefore saying it is important) before then saying it was relevant anyway? And Iā€™m sorry, but what is this over-world that you speak of? Are you just talking about the landscape, or is there some confusion there too?

The team havenā€™t actually defined their rendering system yet, but it may well be similar to MCā€™s. Iā€™m not sure what you mean by seamless transition; chunks have to be loaded, and on even reasonable computers, you can be left waiting. Heck, on my Xbox Iā€™ve waited plenty of times for a chunk to load to allow me to enter it. So SH would be very similar, were they to do it like that. Except it would be less important, as it is a city-builder and you really donā€™t need to venture too far away.

Youā€™ll be happy to know that it will be :thumbsup:

What are you talking about? What is contained in this cube? Are you just thinking that it will be tiled, with each tile being similar to what we have as a map now? Because I donā€™t think thatā€™s how theyā€™re doing it.

Well, youā€™ve been looking in the wrong places. Here is the Desktop Tuesday where they talk about terrain generation, and here is a quote from it:

The terrain engine can tile land indefinitely

Ah see this might be behind some of the confusion. This is in direct reference to multiplayer, and not really anything to do with the terrain or its generation. This is about one of the multiplayer modes theyā€™re considering, which would be that you could load in someone elseā€™s city and the game would ā€˜stitchā€™ together theyā€™re city into your world, from where you can attack it. Itā€™s not to do with the tiling :stuck_out_tongue:

Surely then people just stop playing on that server? Seems simple to solve.

Well, your answer is neither. Dwarf Fortress is considered the father of these types of games, and there are others around, such as Towns or Gnomoria, or newly developing ones such as Castle Story. They all then put their own spin on it, and Stonehearth has not only put its own spin on things, but put in some absolutely superb graphics that none of the others can rival.

Well, a fair amount of that funding actually went towards Radiant being able to expand their team out to 6 people, as obviously man-power is somewhat expensive. Sadly, I havenā€™t played T&S, so canā€™t compare whatā€™s in/completed as a system and not in yet (thereā€™s quite a lot of stuff like that for Radiant, e.g. Infinite Terrain Generation)/planned to be in it, however with the funding Iā€™m fairly confident Stonehearth can be more ambitious than T&S and ultimately have more content by its full release. Of course, this is all in the context of your disappointment at SHā€™s progress vs. T&Sā€™s, Iā€™m not bashing T&S here.

Can we please keep any form of company bashing down please? Microsoft have done plenty of their own things in their time. And, on your second sentence, not everyoneā€™s stealing otherā€™s ideas, someone has to be innovating. It seems a really cynical view and saddens me that so many people think like that. And, to be honest, when itā€™s a small thing, whatā€™s the point of everyone reinventing the wheel? As a race, we only slow our progress by not allowing anyone to build upon our own advances.

Ok just to clear some confusion ill sum up what Iā€™ve said thus far and given the current game format how I believe it will be developed but most likely they will take it and I hope a step further.
At the moment you are put onto a cube world tile map x,y,z. Maybe we will get to choose the dimensions one day so we could have a map as small as 10,10,10 tile or as large as our computer allows but at the moment they dictate size and on a server setting it would be standard for everyone to have the same.
To make a comparison minecraft has chunks 16x16 in the x and z and only so many are loaded in at a time around a player. SH however and i cant say for sure but given the map restriction size loads all of the given map chunks in thus allowing for your little guys enemies and animals to wander freely anywhere on it without de-spawning and making it very life like etc. This has probably been done this way so our computers can handle it both graphically and the sequencing of everything thatā€™s happening on it.

Put this in a multiplayer scenario if you put everyoneā€™s side by side you could make up a land mass but if its all randomly generated then there would be no consistency from one area to the next and would look rather strange traveling through them. So to make it an endless world you would need an over world- map generated by the server made up of all the individual chunks people can use.

Going back to Dwarf fortress, (yes I am aware there are other games that predate T&S and SH they are just less advanced engines but if you look at T&S its probably not quite as pretty but it has more textures but we are talking early days), you have an over-world map but its functionality stops the moment you choose your base location. So when i say starting point is irrelevant I only talk about the generated terrain map you play on as your choice in the over-world map has pretty much given you a clue as to what kind of terrain your looking at and more importantly who your potential neighbors maybe in multiplayer.

This brings me to the square vs octagon shape of the map tiles, yes its easier to code and still works having four sides to your land and given the squareness of voxel blocks no one likes making roads on angles that would be required of an octagon shaped chunk but in terms of moving around the octagon tile allows more borders to link up with and gives you the option of moving diagonally without having to load in through at least one other persons map. Having said that if its going to be a continuous like minecraft terrain the octagon tile will be pointless when travelling and the discussion about map tiles equally so, it all depends on how the Devs are going to do it.

I guess the biggest question is are we looking at an endless scroll that can travel through others areas or are we going to get a black loading screen?

Iā€™m sorry, but youā€™re beginning to feel dogmatic, and I begin to feel like Iā€™m saying the same stuff, quoting you saying the same things. For example:

Iā€™m pretty sure youā€™ve not read me say that there will be an infinite world. They only havenā€™t put it in due to not really wanting it just yet. But the world will be infinite, no them choosing the size, no us choosing the size.

Iā€™ve mentioned this too. You likely wouldnā€™t get ā€˜your own tileā€™, but just be able to roam the map, as it wouldnā€™t be stitched together chunks of land, but one large landscape on multiplayer, in which you and the other player(s) choose whichever bit of land to settle you like, with of course probably some separation laws.

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Ah yes i see what your saying it will operate like the towny mod in minecraft does, where you own the smaller chunks. Another question though what about mob emulation ?

Well without opening ports you simply canā€™t access the internetā€¦ Opening my terminal and running netstat informed me that I currently have 102 open ports, of which 43 belong to Safari. One of them if currently open and used for discourse.stonehearth.net.

Ohhhhh this topic was 1 year old? :open_mouth:

Just 22 months old :wink:. No worries!