Howdy there. So Stonehearth has Steam Remote Play support, meannnning that I can invite someone to play with me even though they don’t have the game, idealy this would work like uno or other games that allow the other player to act as though they joined normally through multiplayer, however in Stonehearth this isn’t the case. I can get my friend to join me, except he and I see the same things, use the same screen (He controls my mouse and camera movements), and use the same set of people. This is kind of aggravating as ive been waiting for him to be able to play and this really got my hopes up. Anyways if anyone can help much appreciated.
Steam Remote Play is designed to literally stream what the host player sees – think of it like a remote desktop app, or like a Twitch stream that lets certain viewers also press buttons to control the game. It’s designed for local co-op (e.g. couch co-op) games where the other players use either a controller or a different set of controls (e.g. player 1 using WASD while player 2 uses the arrow keys or JIKL)… it will never allow you to “share” the game as though the other person has a copy.
So, Remote Play Together isn’t really what you want for multiplayer with a friend, unless you specifically want to play the unusual style of game where you both control the same town. That’s something which a large number of Stonehearth players were looking for that the game doesn’t technically support (there have been work-arounds to try and get it to happen, but they were unreliable… then RPT came along and made it a breeze!) Such an option is great for people who either want to “share” a town with a friend/partner/child, or to combine different players’ skills e.g. one player helps get things set up and then the other player can take over on building some cool houses or whatever, and if the town comes under attack then they can pass it back to the first player who might be better at defending and organising stuff… that kind of thing.
However, it sounds like for the way you want to play the only real option is for the other player(s) to get a copy of the game too so that they can have their own towns to control.
A quick note: when playing “normal” multiplayer there’s often some latency issues unless all players are geographically quite close to each other (e.g. same town/city), since the game has to send a LOT of data back and forth. This doesn’t happen with RPT since the host player is the only one “running” the game; the other player is literally watching video of what’s happening and only sending some button press data. This means that latency isn’t much of an issue, so it might seem weird that the performance gets so much “worse” in normal multiplayer… that’s because it’s literally running the game in a different way. There’s a bunch of other advice on how to try and help that along, but the short version: make sure that the player with the best internet connection is the host if possible, try to reduce the amount of data that the game has to send by reducing the amount of stuff that’s happening in the game at any one time (e.g. do jobs slowly and methodically + finish one job before starting the next… e.g. cut down trees one-at-a-time and clear up all the logs into storage before cutting the next one), and consider using the Extra Map Options mod for its “small world” option since that can dramatically improve the performance both of the game itself (i.e. saves a bunch of work for your computer) and also the online communication (less map data to send.)
Aye thanks i appriciate it.