Battlezone Universe

Seems the latest fashion at the moment is co-operative campaigns.

It wouldn't be hard to do with help from Fishbone and more programmers on the team. I think it would be a great idea to maybe take SOME of the missions from the single player campaign, or some bonus missions to make so multi-player missions.

NOTE: For a more-informed vote, read THIS POST (http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php/topic,9579.msg146447.html#msg146447), by GSH, a well-known Battlezone 2 developer from Pandemic Studios.

Hmm..

I'd vote to make the entire campaign open and coop mp playable, as well as in Single player for those who cant play online or dont want to.

Maybe after the single player versions are done, the mp ones can have easter eggs put in them or bonus stuff for players to have fun finding :)

Making things coop doubles the scripting work. At least. Either have coop in from day 1, or never. The worst thing you can do is try and add it partway thru.

-- GSH

Which pretty much means use Overmind's dll scripter or C++ and not BSer's dll scripter.

Its just a chip-in idea anyway. get a nice big idea pool floating around.

I put in a vote for not being interested. I'll never get to really enjoy the benefits because of my internet. I'll change my vote though if it has the chance to tip the balance.

I would love to see some coop missions which have different objections.  MPI gets boring after a while because the objective is always destroy the enemy factory and recycler.  There isn't much variety to it.

I would love to see this as a separate thing, but possible in the mod. It could be tied with the story, or re-hashes of some of the missions in CO-Op form.

I answered not sure because I like the idea but I don't want to program it.

I'd love to see the entire campaign coop as i said. N1 u once said you could make single player missions use C++ dlls, so we could just use the same missions in the single player menu too.

QuoteI'd love to see the entire campaign coop as i said.

And I'd like one beeeeelion dollars. Doesn't mean that either will happen w/o a LOT of work.

Figure out your talent, and what they can accomplish. Then, cut the amount of work planned in half. It's better to do three things well versus five things poorly.

-- GSH

I reckon that there should be a bunch of Coop bonus missions... but I recommend that the SP campaign stays SP.

That will be hard enough.

like GSH says it would take alot of scripting to make the entire thing CO-OP and some things may even have to be cut if it was all CO-OP. SP missions are nice because you can add a helluvalot more stuff to them to make them so much more immersive. Also if youre going to try and make it optimized for SP and CO-OP you're basically making two different missions anyways.

I'd say do like Splinter cell (Chaos theory I think) does. The single player missions reference the separate CO-OP missions alot (and vice versa) as they're another group of agents doing something else parallel to the main storyline.
That way you don't even need to release it along with the main project. It can be developed along with or after the core project leaving some options open for the developers. The main project won't have to wait for the MP mission to get done, and could possibly even add some replayability to the SP campaign if its released a short time after.

I chose to vote against this mostly since it is going to take a lot of effort to get a SP campaign that is also completely compatible for co-op in MP. However I am not completely opposed to the idea.

Perhaps a CO-op ST: game mode? Say up to 4 human commanders can join the game and are allied together against an AI opponent that scales in difficulty based on the amount of players in the game and through server side options. Secondary objectives could be added to spice it up rather than just making it one big MPI. Perhaps capture-able objectives? Say a communications array that if captured will give radar view on the map, or an alien factory that if activated can produce special units for a cheap price, and such.

Yea, ind of like, oh... what was it? That ZTV mission map? That was a pretty fun map when I had the capability of playing it  :-D. Just a stand-alone multiplayer mission in a map-pack that'll be made for the mod for the sake of pure entertainment instead of taking a piece of the story out of the single player campaign (unless there's plenty of room for finding out cool story easter-eggs :) ).

Yeah would be interested in co-op defiantely.

I recently finished a game at work (Mercenaries 2) that had co-op. I'm speaking from experience when I say that co-op is at least a tripling of your work and test time.

- All scripts must account for what *2* players could be doing. If your script says "Do A". "Do B" "Do C", then for co-op, you've got to check if player 1 (P1) does A, and P2 goes off and does C. Or the reverse. What happens when P2 is most of the way towards an objective, then drops out? Or if P2 joins partway thru the mission? Basically, at every logic check, you've got to consider all players - joins, dropouts, and what they're doing.

- If you add co-op after scripting starts (as we did), then you have to revisit all the code, and add in checks for what all the players are doing.

- You must have a lot of testing in co-op. For Mercs2, we had a 2 dedicated testers doing co-op testing, and only co-op testing, every day, for 8+ months before we shipped. Towards the end, at least half the test team was testing co-op. If you don't have people signed up to test co-op regularly and diligently, you're going to ship with tons of bugs. Given how many BZ2 people want to test, this should be a BIG consideration.

As I've said before: figure out what resources you've got. Then scale your work to that. Not the reverse. On a free/volunteer project, NEVER set out on a goal, and then say "now we need recruit workers to do what we've planned."

(Update): after Mercs2 shipped, some surveys were done. Most people were like "co-op? You had that?" or "co-op? Tried it, didn't like it." The amount of work put in did not justify the very little reward from the general public. I know I may get flamed for this, but I feel co-op campaigns is demanded or seen as a "I'd like that" by a small minority of people, but the general public barely gives a hoot.

My bottom line: if you really want to do co-op, do a MP-only thing. Team Strat and MPI are co-op. That works. Plenty of MP games require co-op, e.g. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Team Fortress, Battlefield, etc. That works. Go do something like that in BZ2. Don't bother with campaign-coop unless you've got a TON of resources. MP-coop is a big bang-for-the-buck payoff. Campaign-coop is a really lousy bang-for-the-buck payoff, imho.

-- GSH

I perfectly agree with what GSH said.

Good god... I never even CONSIDERED drop outs. I already didn't want to do it.

GSH? Flaming? Here? Never.

I know it would be difficult, but I suppose I never really considered it. I now know how much work Zeeder and TimeVirus must have put into The Journey.

I Imagine that some sort of system where mp maps could be forced into a sequence to create a sort of co-op campaign could be figured out. So that map2 could only be run by the server after map1 had resulted in a victory on that server...?
Not good at coding things myself, anyone else see a way to do that?

I believe Fishbone did just that with DuneCommand.

I think various people have tried to do that by writing files containing unlock keys out to the BZ2 directory. That's not compatible w/ Vista and up.

I posted some quick source code that does something similar w/ the registry (which IS vista-compatible when using HKCU) for GreenHeart a long time back.

-- GSH

I beleive you refer to that registry demo zip thing? Got that if you do.

DC never stopped me form playing whatever mission I wanted.

Same as Nielk1, i could jump into any mission i wanted to straight away.

You can enter the missions, but it automatically fails you after a few seconds if the previous mission hasn't been completed.

Never did that for me. I started in the middle and played it a good 30 min before stopping.

Maybe it only works in pb1 or it could be one of those Vista thingos.

I HIGHLY doubt Nielk1 uses vista like me :lol:

But yeh, when i tested on Vista it didnt work for me. I never really got 'into' Dune Command, i was kind of annoyed how i was looking at a brilliant loading screen at one minute, then when i was in game everything looked really cheap, and i kind of got bored of the look.

That said, i did enjoy what i played of it and there were definately some great ideas in there.

Quote from: AHadley on July 03, 2009, 01:17:47 PM
GSH? Flaming? Here? Never.

I know it would be difficult, but I suppose I never really considered it. I now know how much work Zeeder and TimeVirus must have put into The Journey.

Link to "The Journey" if you please? Sounds nice.

IIRC it was part of a map pack.

Get ZTV: The Long Journey here:

http://www.timedisruptor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=639

Just make it have the missions as maps in MP. That would probably be the easiest.

You didn't read the thread, did you, Cheesepuffly?

Yeah im reading it. But instead of making a brand new system, cause you would need to  make it a separate mode am i rite?

If you want to make multiplayer missions, its freakin EASY to make them work in single player. Hell i doub't you'd even need to change the .dll, depending.

This would essentially be like playing an MPI, just with slightly different objectives. Probably still a 5-player maximum capacity.

As has been said before, the DLL would be much more complicated, because it would have to keep track of the whereabouts and doings of ALL of the players, not just one.  It would also have to keep track of whether a player leaves or joins.

i know that, but im saying that porting a multiplayer .dll to singleplayer would be EZZZEEEEE

Actually.... NO!!!

If it's "SO EZZEEE", why isn't there an SP version of Bot DM?

The MP .DLL are coded FOR Multiplayer in all aspects. There is more stuff that would need REcoding from tracking 4+ Humans to just tracking 1 and would need SERIOUS toning down on certain aspects to do so. (This is my understanding, which may/may not be COMPLETELY WRONG)