Have you ever thought about online AG?

[Hollister Man]

Or give the player the ability to 'bump' another player and steal an item, but if it is not used for an interaction within X amount of time, it is either returned or dropped.  This, of course, would not be as desireable as the player giving it to you.  If the you steal it and use it in the time limit, they lose points for not giving it to you.  If you steal it and DON'T use it, you lose points for stealing it in the first place.

[RLacey]

This hardly refutes the premise that online point-and-click adventures can work.  Maniac Mansion, one of the earliest adventure games, had multiple players, each with their own inventories.  You're only thinking of a specific instance in which players can theoretically hoard items and keep everything to themselves.  What you need to do is come up with an alternative solution rather than give up on the idea entirely.  You could, for example, limit a player's inventory to one or two items, and give players the ability to drop items.

Of course, this is only a problem if you were to have players competing against each other - in which case this would be a sensible idea. Personally, I believe that a co-operative style of play would be more desirable at first - especially with the whole issue of player interaction to worry about. Certainly, trading could be one answer - if the size of the inventory were limited, then one player could not hold all the items, and so would have to trade them for the things he wanted. But, in a co-operative environment, I'd be interested in seeing someone play with the use of multiple characters at once to solve puzzles (for instance, one character might have to keep a button pressed down so that another character could walk through a door, while different characters would have different dialog trees, and be proficient at different tasks ala Maniac Mansion).

Don't give up on the multiplayer idea - it's one thing I'd be particularly interested in seeing...

[Pau]

I think the key (and the most difficult part) will be to create a very dynamic system.

Imagine the case referenced before. I need an object that someone has, then the game could create a puzzle where the other player needs some of my objects and we have to find each other and exchange them in order to solve the possible interblocking situations. (The difficult part is to make it fit into the history).
Also the disconnection of a player could be problematic.

[Migs]

One solution which I'm exploring to the disconnection problem is maintaining a temporary external list of all the players' IP addresses on the server, which persists if the game ends abnormally.  If the client attempts to reconnect within 5 minutes, his IP address is checked against the list and if valid, successfully reconnects.  If the server disconnects, the IP list will still be there and when the server boots up again, it will automatically attempt to reconnect to all the clients.  This would also require regular automatic savegames to take place on the server, so all the GlobalInts are stored (the server would be the only one which keeps track of player and object locations and such).

In your scenario, the game could create a new puzzle and give the player a new objective if the needed player disconnects and doesn't return.  However, I really do think a multiplayer adventure game shouldn't depend so heavily on the presence of another player.  Personally, I'd just rethink a different game design than try to make such a game work.

[kl4Uz]

hi there!

I'm very interested in all your plans and I also read Migs thread about the future of multiplayer games in AGS and don't get me wrong: I think your ideas are great, but imho a bit complicated.

Why don't you start with minigames? Such as an insult-sword-fight like the ones in MI?
there would be 2 players and each one has a range of possible insults and answers and they would fight each other.

exactly like in Monkey Island only that the AI is replaced by a human opponent. You could even use the same view for both gamers, as if each one would play Guybrush in single player Monkey Island.

Further on you could even use the inbuilt dialog function of AGS...

And I think it could be a really funny and simple game!

I'd love to do it, but my AGS coding skills are very weak so far and I don't haven enough time right now... but there seem to be so many people that are motivated to do a multiplayer adventure game, so feel free to use this idea! I'd love to see the result.

greetz

[Migs]

hi there!

I'm very interested in all your plans and I also read Migs thread about the future of multiplayer games in AGS and don't get me wrong: I think your ideas are great, but imho a bit complicated.

Why don't you start with minigames? Such as an insult-sword-fight like the ones in MI?
there would be 2 players and each one has a range of possible insults and answers and they would fight each other.

exactly like in Monkey Island only that the AI is replaced by a human opponent. You could even use the same view for both gamers, as if each one would play Guybrush in single player Monkey Island.

Further on you could even use the inbuilt dialog function of AGS...

And I think it could be a really funny and simple game!

I'd love to do it, but my AGS coding skills are very weak so far and I don't haven enough time right now... but there seem to be so many people that are motivated to do a multiplayer adventure game, so feel free to use this idea! I'd love to see the result.

greetz

I actually did state in the thread that I'd like to start something smaller and simpler first, such as a Spy vs. Spy game.  A multiplayer insult fighting game would definitely be interesting.  Anything involving network programming is far from simple compared to single-player counterparts, and one thing I'd like to see happen in the development of AGS multiplayer games is the creation of code that can be reused, mostly in the form of functions.  That way, we won't have to keep reinventing the wheel.

[Moox]

Hmm, maybe an external program could store a list of ips and controll all the users connected to it, like on the server.
If multiplayer becomes available and easy to implement i may add it to my rpg template for ags

When a player doesnt return or is idle for a long time, their stuff could "drop" or respawn

[kl4Uz]

I actually did state in the thread that I'd like to start something smaller and simpler first, such as a Spy vs. Spy game.  A multiplayer insult fighting game would definitely be interesting.  Anything involving network programming is far from simple compared to single-player counterparts, and one thing I'd like to see happen in the development of AGS multiplayer games is the creation of code that can be reused, mostly in the form of functions.  That way, we won't have to keep reinventing the wheel.

I don't know how this plugin by a-v-o actually works, but me and a friend of mine coded a little chat using the winsocks dll. I'm quite sure most of you know how winsocks works...
The first version we created had problems that seem to be very similar, to those we're discussing right know... But I can't code a single line in Delphi - I only can code  in C++  so I can't actually improve the plugin and I know that a chat is a whole lot easier than such a multiplayer plugin... I'll think about it and I'm going to read all the other threads about this plugin, cause I may talk about stuff that has already been solved and/or discussed