Hello everyone,
I am having some problems with developing the multiplayer port of
"Legend of Wesmere" (LoW).
Multiplayer campaigns can come in different types, I will focus on
cooperative campaigns.
Cooperative Campaigns
* The equivalent to Single Player campaigns
* Legend of Wesmere falls into this category
* Players vs Ai
In the example of LoW the multiplayer port uses the same files,
differences between the modes
are handled with #ifdef MULTIPLAYER preprocessor directives.
LoW is split into 5 chapters, all being technical an own multiplayer
campaign but connected
with the gsoc "persistent global variables" feature.
The motivation of the split is the fact that the players, starting with
2 ones in chapter one,
collect more and more allies during the campaign.
Each ally is best played by another human player who is better recruited
from the MP Lobby with
a fresh not started campaign than during a running one.
The definition of a difficult level is mandatory. Without one of the
EASY, NORMAL or HARD symbols
predefined the campaign can't work for obvious reasons.
The first solution was a hardcoded HARD definition.
This had balancing problems and lacked the possibility to let the
players choose.
The current solution parses the LoW directory 3 times, with one of the
difficult level symbols active at a time.
The result does provide the 3 difficult levels but is a mess to code and
clutters the game set-up dialogue with
15 (!) start scenarios for LoW only.
A related issue is the fact that most of the game set-up designed for
independent mp maps doesn't fit the needs
for a multiplayer campaign.
For example does the "faction" drop down selector confuse the player.
Multiplayer campaigns don't feature factions with a leader to choose
from the faction,
they feature protagonists whose come with their own recruit list, most
likely not matching any faction.
To solve the issues mentioned I want to propose a new tag
"multiplayer_setup" being the counterpart to [campaign].
This would guard every multiplayer campaign in a similar way how it is
done with singleplayer ones already.
The usage of this tag triggers a different set-up gui than the current one.
Regards,
Fabian
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