Thief 2 Multiplayer - TTLG Forums

jtr7 on 8/9/2008 at 04:10

Which mission would give you the best chance to show off the accomplishments and current limitations?

If all the players could record a vid simultaneously, each going to different parts of the map to work separately yet in coordination to meet the objectives, and the vids could be edited together to show which actions affect the individual, and which affect the team and mission....:sweat: :)

Wille on 8/9/2008 at 06:09

jtr7 on 8/9/2008 at 06:22

There ya go! Thanks Wille.:thumb:

The player waiting outside the vault door can look down through the grate to see the other player lower the locking bar.

One player can lob a flashbomb from a distance to blind guards while another player jumps out from behind them and takes them down with the blackjack.

One player can place a rope arrow and another player can shimmy down from above.

Two players can mantle a big crate from opposite sides.

:cheeky:

Tos on 8/9/2008 at 07:27

Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett

Ah, I see... but yeah, I think the OMs are more important than FMs at this point in time.:)

Um, let's see... mission video ideas... Hmm... how about Shipping and Receiving? Or is that one off the table for any reason? Oh:idea: Here's a thought: Perhaps requests should be based on missions that you know are working well enough to showcase by video so that we don't waste time requesting missions that aren't ready for video.:)

The only mission that I'm aware of that can't be completed at all yet is Precious Cargo. We haven't tested Trace the Courier, Soulforge, Casing or Masks all the way to the end though, so those may have issues as well. Some missions are a bit more stable than others, and some tend to have more of the sound problems that I mentioned earlier in this thread than others, but for the most part they're all playable.

Shipping and Bank both work fairly well. Bank is one of the missions that tends to get buggy sound playback after playing for a while, but the recent builds seem to have made this happen much less frequently and we haven't tested it in a while. It can happen on Shipping as well, but most of the time it does not.

We'll try and get a video of either Bank or Shipping tomorrow.

Wille on 8/9/2008 at 07:32

A few more:

-Swimming; how it looks when both players are in water and how it looks when one player swims and other player watches
-Player dying
-Player kills another player
-Stacking crates to reach heights
-Invisibility potion
-Ladders

It would be great to have these feature videos in Youtube for example where they could attract more people :).

vort on 8/9/2008 at 10:01

We're gonna try to get a side-by-side video of us both playing Bank tomorrow night.

Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett

how about Shipping and Receiving? Or is that one off the table for any reason?

Shipping works fine and I honestly think it's the most fun OM in co-op. We don't tend to take it too seriously though so it might be too long for a video if it isn't a speedrun.

Quote Posted by Wille

I would like to see a collection of different scenes from different missions. A few examples:

-Other player solves the vault puzzle in First City Bank & Trust, while other waits by the vault door
-Ambushing guards with flashbombs and blackjacks
-Using rope arrow
-Mantling
-Sword combat against AIs
-AIs with magical projectiles as weapons like Mechanist priests
..
-Swimming; how it looks when both players are in water and how it looks when one player swims and other player watches
-Player dying
-Player kills another player
-Stacking crates to reach heights
-Invisibility potion
-Ladders

As for your list, not sure if we'll be getting a video showing off everything but I figured I would at least respond to a few things

Flash bombing guards and taking them out works fine, probably too well with two people. Maybe once things are working a bit nicer and since we can apply changes to the gamsys without editing it, we could add in toggleable options to make the AI smarter, better and faster.

Both players can climb rope arrows others have deployed, unfortunately you can't pick them back up. Really annoying bug we haven't been able to fix yet, but for now, it kind of acts as a form of balance considering you essentially get double, triple, etc per mission depending on the player count. There's animations for climbing ladders & ropes as well as mantling, but people tend to warp a bit when performing those actions so it looks a little odd.

Stacking crates and like works, you can see when the other player throws a crate and it updates the location.

There are no animations for swimming at the moment, so you just sort of see the other player running in water. :(

I'm also pretty sure invisibility potions don't make the player invisible to others, but that could easily be fixed.

potterr on 8/9/2008 at 16:10

Quote Posted by Tos

I'm having some trouble getting the changes we need made to the network avatars in the gamesys to be patched in dynamically as the mission is loaded however -- it's lead to unexpected problems when loading saved games that weren't happening when we were playing with an actual modified gamesys file. Without this working, I'd have to distribute an edited gamesys along with the multiplayer patch and a fan mission's gamesys would have to be modified before it would work in multiplayer.

Anything I can do via GL for this? I would need to understand the process a bit more but I may be able to do some coding that would modify the gamesys on the fly. Or it could be a seperate exe that can be added to GLs plugin toolset which GL can launch before start up of Thief 2 (would work for both original missions and presumably fan missions as well). So if you are unable to resolve the issue then there are other ways to handle it.

Additionally what does the patch do to the thief exe (if anything), just curious as to being able to detect if someone has the multi-player patch or not.

Tos on 8/9/2008 at 16:56

Quote Posted by potterr

The problem may be solved, actually. I made a few changes last night and we haven't run into any more problems yet, but we'll see.

In order to make the network avatars (in the physical->Avatar->Network Avatar tree) work properly in multiplayer, they have to inherit from the Garrett archetype (which they do not in the default gamesys). It's actually simpler to just delete the existing archetypes, create a single archetype under Garrett, and then give it a few extra properties: creature type Avatar, "player" for the motion tag list, the model "Garrett", a height offset of 1.41, and the flag Focus Script for the world action frob info (I use this last one to display a player's name in the center of the screen when you're near them and have your mouse over them).

This is all done on the fly as the mission is being loaded. We were having problems with save games before because the objects in the current mission (including the other player avatars) were being read in before the new avatar archetype was initialized by the multiplayer DLL, and that caused some strange things to happen. The new archetypes are now created immediately after the gamesys is loaded but before the mission objects are, and things seem to be working all right so far.

The .exe itself was only changed enough to load the multiplayer .dll at startup -- all of the other changes (and there are quite a lot of them!) are patched into the game's memory by the DLL after Thief's started up. If you need to detect whether a player has the MP patch or not in GL, I can tell you what you should look for in a PM.

sNeaksieGarrett on 8/9/2008 at 22:22

This is so exciting!:angel: Thanks for the info guys!:thumb:

Tos on 9/9/2008 at 08:23

The Bank video is now available (http://s149432842.onlinehome.us/files/bank_combined.avi) here.

We decided to do things a little differently this time. This is actually two different videos displayed side by side -- the one on the left is from my perspective (as a client) and the one on the right was recorded by vort as he was hosting the game. Only the left video has sound.