Multiplayer

[tlsa]

Hello @tompickering!

Thanks for making this, and thanks to Jan Klose for allowing it to be released. 🐱

I used to play it in multiplayer mode back in the day. I see that multiplayer is disabled at the moment for both classic and enhanced modes. Is it not fully implemented yet?

[tompickering]

Hi @tlsa - thanks for your interest in the project and for the pull requests you raised! :)

This is a bit of a tricky one I'm afraid. A bit of context;

When I initially started out on this project, my goal was to implement the behaviour of the original 1:1, including multiplayer. However I never really expected many people to ever actually play this implementation of the game (much less any commercial release!) - I was really implementing it for myself (and hopefully one day some of the next generation in my wider family).

During implementation, I found that multiplayer was actually quite a fiddly thing to account for. The structure of this implementation is very different to that of the original, and multiplayer was implemented in what felt like a very precarious way (the memory for "Player 0"'s data would be swapped in and out for that of another player). This made it quite stressful to think about correct hadling of the "active" player at each point in this new structure - and in all honesty, I was never actually too keen on the multiplayer gameplay anyway. So I'm afraid that at some point, I made the decision to drop it, and introduced that DISABLE_MULTIPLAYER toggle. It's actually a very rare thing that I stick with a project to anywhere near completion, and at the time it felt like trying to persevere with it could easily end up with me getting frustrated and demotivated to continue with the project at all.

For a while thereafter, I added some "TODO_MP" comments where multiplayer support would require attention (and there are a few FIXMEs which reference multiplayer), but as I got more and more entrenched in the non-supporting of multiplayer, these dried up as well - to the point that (to my shame) I began to use "exostate().get_player(0)" with reckless abandon.

I'm afraid I myself have no interest in completing the multiplayer feature. And as the game did ultimately see a release on Steam, I also need to be very careful about any changes which extend the game state classes in any way which could conceivably risk breaking compatibility with any players' existing game saves - at least on the master branch.

However if you feel up to the challenge, I'll happily keep an eye out for pull requests for a multiplayer-enabled branch, and/or would be fascinated to see how your fork develops... ;)

[tlsa]

Hi @tompickering, thanks for that response! It's very understandable.

I can't promise anything, but I'll probably at least look into the issues some time.