Co-op

[MrTwosheds]

I would say a co-op version of the single player missions would need to be so radically redesigned that it would in effect be another mod. As it is, even as only 2 player the Computer would be crushed by having someone in a thug role and unrestrained by the command activities. A worthwhile Co-op mission set would not bare much resemblance to the existing single player game at all, it would need to be 10x harder and potentially supply enough enemies to keep 4 non command players busy.
Those who wish to see such a thing will have to make it themselves... all 5 of you...good luck.

[Red Spot]

2 Players is also co-op. With just 2 players it isnt particularly difficult to keep both busy.
Take mission 1 of the campaign, player one will follow Shab, the other is ordered to strengthen Red Squad where both squads will do 'something'.
Replay it switching roles and you in effect have 2 campaigns you can play.

[GSH]

Ideas are easy. Implementation and testing not so much. With normal SP missions or IA, you can attach a debugger and examine the state of all class variables and get some ideas on local variables. And, if optimizations are off, you can be 100% certain of local variables too. You can set breakpoints, for when code reaches a point, or when a specific variable changes -- and then take your time examining and debugging. You can generate savegames, making it very easy to repro the bug on another machine.

With co-op, take all of the above and throw it out. There's no pausing a MP game. There's no examining in debugger. There's no savegame. Mercs2 co-op was the biggest pile of printf-debugging I've seen in modern development. It sucked for developers, and for testing. Giant logfiles and hoping you logged enough is not fun anymore once you've experienced modern software development.

Oh, and add a second tester required for every piece of development, debugging, etc. If the BZ2 community was overflowing with people willing to test, this wouldn't be an issue. But, it is.

As above, BZ2 co-op is better served adding a new MP game mode than trying to retrofit co-op into 14+ year old C++ code written by people who weren't really programmers. But, that's just my suggestion. I shall do neither, and work on other areas of BZ2. Others are free to do whatever they want.

-- GSH

[bigbadbogie]

I count three there

Also, if that third one is FS3, please consider letting others in

Each mod counts as one, as does my uni course. QF2, BZ2HD & Uni. Three.

FS3 is a long way off. Plus I need Lizard, and he's buggered off again.


@TwoSheds, RedSpot: It would probably be a bad idea to alter the campaign in any way. All we would do for co-op is add the ability for thugs to enter the game... or even just one thug. We don't need to account for their actions, or even their presence during the game. They can float around doing whatever they like while Player 1 does the actual mission. How hard can that be?

@GSH: If we kept it extremely simple, and did what I suggested above, how many bugs could even result? Simply accounting for the existence of multiple players? Would it even be more than adding a few lines of code? (Don't shoot me, I'm new to C++!).

[General BlackDragon]

To scale difficulty, you can use CountPlayers() to return the number of players currently in the game, and use that to control how many enemy ships spawn

[GSH]

All we would do for co-op is add the ability for thugs to enter the game... or even just one thug. We don't need to account for their actions, or even their presence during the game. They can float around doing whatever they like while Player 1 does the actual mission. How hard can that be?

Strat/MPI let you switch commanders on the fly before & while playing, assuming 1-4 players on that team. What you propose above is that only the host can play the scripted mission, and all joiners are just thugs. That's a step back from 1999.

-- GSH

[bigbadbogie]

Simple machines have fewer issues, and are far quicker and easier to build.

[Ded10c]

You're creating a system here fine, but you're missing the important requirement of "will this actually be fun and will people want to spend time playing it?"

[bigbadbogie]

We can't go about changing the entire SP campaign to make it 'more fun'. It is what it is.

If people don't find it fun, then they are playing the wrong game.

[Commando]

Anyone with the programming knowledge is free to recreate the sp missions for coop. To be honest, they are a little boring and easy for mp, so I think people would be better off making new coop missions.

[bigbadbogie]

If people wanted harder SP missions, editing the AIPs or increasing AI weapon damage would be a more logical course of action than changing the SP DLLs.

[Red Spot]

If people wanted harder SP missions, editing the AIPs or increasing AI weapon damage would be a more logical course of action than changing the SP DLLs.

Afaik the SP-mission dont use any AIP's.
Changing the weapons for the AI mission means you will have to edit the dll's, how else would you do it?

Ideas are easy. Implementation and testing not so much.

Incase you were replying to my reply. I wasnt trying to state that it would be easy to do, just that it would be easy to create a situation where 2 players can follow the campaign as we now know it. One player will basicly follow the original missions and the second has some alternate objectives to follow.
As you said: ideas are easy.

[Zero Angel]

As far as I know, most mods simply increase the amount of enemy AI units to correspond with a greater amount of players and this tends to work okay because it offsets somewhat the extra amount of power that a human team has when it has multiple thugs. A good implementation as I would see it would be to make the campaign have a higher base level of difficulty in order to encourage players to recruit teammates (because massively spiking the difficulty when another player joins to 'help' seems not very logical) and increase the AI size slightly per teammate added (where 4 thugs might mean double the effective force size in most standard games). Other ways to scale difficulty (which arent blatant immersion-breaking cheats for the AI team) may be to reduce reinforcement delay, increase number of waves, increase armor of enemy targets (for 'destroy target' missions), decrease armor of targets to protect (for 'protect target' missions), reduce timer delays (for timed missions), and implement features like rogue attack teams that do sneaky things like attack bases from the rear (FEMPI does this, for example). None of these are highly complex, but all would have to be done by DLL since it would require the ability to detect the number of players that are in-game and modify the mission accordingly.

[Annihilator]

Missing dxtbz2 files for Dune Commander. Please help!

[General BlackDragon]

Alright, give me a bit..

Check http://www.bzscrap.org/downloads/Mods/DuneCommand/

Uploaded a patch that will work on PB6+