Only one CO-OP map?

[Hexatron]

Is it right that there is only one single CO-OP map? My friends and i love playing with each other against AI oponents. So finding out that this game has only one map for this is a huge disapointment. Also the steam workshop only offers player versus player maps.

That one map is great fun, but there should be more!

[Ar-Pharazon]

Your wish has been echoed many times! Unfortunately, a co-op map like the one we have requires extensive scripting, and so probably isn't possible in the workshop. Co-op vs. AI has also been suggested, but that would require significant changes, and isn't likely in the short term.

[Scavar]

That's too bad, I just came on here to ask about the samething. I don't particularly see how it would be such an issue to make it so in unranked online matches you can use the bot instead of players. It shouldn't be that much of an issue scripting wise from my limited programming knowledge, but maybe I'm missing something.

Edit: Sorry I didn't mean to sound condecending or to make it seem like it's a trivial matter, I'm truly curious as to why it would require significant changes to make such a thing possible?

[Ar-Pharazon]

Understood. :-) In a nutshell, designing the bots around an existing AI "connection" object in Torque, similar to our prior scripted opponents, allowed me to focus on the behavior of the bots, rather than fighting with the infrastructure. So one thing that needs to happen is that we would need to find and address anything that makes them incompatible with the networked situation in a co-op game.

Then, our dedicated servers would need to support having some players human with network connections, some AI with no network connections. We need UI to let you choose such games. The first 30 seconds of the game are used by the AI to plan its maze in a very CPU-intensive fashion, so we would need to ensure that having multiple AIs running at once will not lag the servers.

Finally, the bots would need to be updated to understand how to play "team positions", as it were. Only one bot may be allowed to touch the maze -- or one would design the maze for all, and they'd have to communicate. They would definitely need to communicate in order to coordinate their sends.

I considered the idea of a single bot with the capacity for multiple sends, collecting all the resources for its side, but that doesn't agree with the way the game works. Multiple human players on the same side each have their own resource economy and tech tree. It makes sense to work within the system and keep the bots separate, and have them communicate.

Sorry for throwing this out in random order, I was just speaking off the top of my head.

[Ar-Pharazon]

It may seem I contradicted myself by saying "multiple AIs running at once" and "only one can touch the maze", but it's not a contradiction. Multiple games can run on the servers simultaneously. So even if only one AI plans the maze in each game, there could be multiple games, therefore multiple CPU hogs.

[Ar-Pharazon]

Last thing before I shut up about it. Don't get me wrong, this stuff is possible, just takes time. We knew that once we released the bot update, people would want bots in co-op/2v2/3v3/single-player campaign etc. Rather than pile more work on and delay the bots further, we decided it was more important to put them out there and let people start playing now.

[Valkoor2307]

Looking to play co-op .. anyone else interested? add me!!!! looking for players!

[Pico]

Thanks for the explanation Ar-Pharazon. Do you have a guestimate on when more co-op maps/mode will be available?

[Ar-Pharazon]

I must be honest and say, not soon. New content is something we want to do, but it is not in the immediate future.

[Scavar]

Hey man I just noticed you replied to me! Thanks a lot for clearing that up, and now I understand a bit better. Thanks for the reply, hope you guys manage to get more sweet stuff packed in.