Lemmings Multiplayer Project

[EricLang]

Having almost finsihed the Lemmings Dos Clones, I would like to extend the possibilities of the game.
I could use some help in designing the stuff and a little brainstorming would be welcome.

# Good ideas needed for a multiplayer lemmings game. How is the game played? Competitive, Cooperative?
# Theoretical help on the game-engine

Any help and ideas welcome!

[PIGSgrame]

Mabe you can clone the multiplayer levels and gameplay of the Amiga version?

A cooperative multiplayer mode is also a good idea and would be something actually new to Lemmings, but the levels must be designed accordingly. When playing cooperatively, there must be puzzles that can only be solved together, and this doesn't sound easy to me.

[Chmera]

Like really major multitasking? Four places at once, stuff like that?

[Simon]

Hi,

cooperative gameplay means specially designed levels with distributed skills, so that both players have roughly equal jobs to do. Create a blocker-exploder maze, give one person all the exploders and someone else all the blockers Or set up several starting points and have everyone handle his own group. Why not design levels like this in addition to regular competitive levels? Both modes will use the same engine with just a few rule modifications.

Help on the game engine... I've wondered about this several times already, but bear in mind that I haven't ever written a single line of networking code.

You have to find a way to tackle the lag. Suppose there's a dense crowd of lemmings, and someone starts to mine down through a thin part of the floor. In everyone else's local game, there might be lemmings who have walked across the hole, but fell down on the mining player's game. Another player then makes one of these walkers build, which is not possible on the miner's game. However, the miner's situation should be the correct one, regardless of who is host and who is client.

This brings up the question about what data should be sent. The most obvious solution would be to send what would be included in a replay file. Then have every player store the recent game history for himself. Whenever someone assigns a skill, send this action with a timestamp, e.g. "In tick T, Lemming L starts to do S". Have everyone else revert their games for the correct number of ticks and instantly recalculate the new situation upon arrival of the packet. This would take back the builder assignment and increase the number of builders left again. During the recalculation, when the tick comes up in which the builder was assigned originally, the game will try to assign the builder skill again.

In the meantime, the building player's game has sent information as well. This resolves just in the same way. I don't think there will be any interference problems, neither on the miner's PC nor on a third person's who receives both packets. You just have to see if everyone's games are roughly syncronized to avoid lots of backtracking.

The downside with this is that it's going to take quite a bunch of memory. Nobody knows how much lag will occur and how many ticks should be saved to cater all situations Of course, you can't save an entire map, but only the pixels which have been changed since the last tick. But you still have to save everybody's lemmings on every PC, I think.

Yep, it's a crude solution, but it preserves the required pixel-precision. And it might work if everyone can backtrack and recalculate fast enough - even during intense mouse clicking frenzies...

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

Having almost finsihed the Lemmings Dos Clones, I would like to extend the possibilities of the game.
I could use some help in designing the stuff and a little brainstorming would be welcome.

# Good ideas needed for a multiplayer lemmings game. How is the game played? Competitive, Cooperative?
# Theoretical help on the game-engine

Any help and ideas welcome!

It might be worthwhile to look into Clones by Tomkorp.  They have 5 different competitive multiplayer modes, and you could try talking to the two developers of the game (see "Contacts" on the website) for technical help on multiplayer game engine issues like synchronization.

A cooperative mode might be nice too, but it feels too much like a multitasking level to me which already exists in one-player mode.  Even if you also split the skillset as Simon suggested, I don't think it'd add a lot.  But it's worthwhile to try it out anyway and see what it's like.  It might also be worthwhile to think about adding new, 2-player-cooperative skills to the game to make the cooperative mode more interesting (eg. imagine a "hoisting" skill that allows one lemming from one player A to drop a rope down the cliff, and the first lemming of the other player B that touches the rope will be pulled up by A's lemming).

Remember that with competitive multiplayer modes, if you can support more than just 2 players, there's always the option of team formation, allowing for cooperation within a competitive framework.