Hotseat Multiplayer

[Nuerginator]

Hello! I'm a GOG owner but this was the only forum I could find where the developer was active. I just want to say I love your game! As a fan of MOO2, one of my favorite things to do was to play hotseat with a friend. I understand that the developers have said that networked multiplayer is challenging to add, which I understand. However, I think having hotseat multiplayer would really complete this game and make it feel more like the older classics it pays homage to. Are there still plans to add hotseat or LAN multiplayer at some point? I know development is still ongoing, as the 2nd DLC is planned. Any reply is appreciated!

[Arioch]

There are no current multiplayer plans.

[Nuerginator]

Originally posted by Arioch:

There are no current multiplayer plans.

I'm sorry to hear that. I know it was an intended feature previously. Is there any chance it will ever be added?

[sven4669]

Originally posted by Nuerginator:

As a fan of MOO2, one of my favorite things to do was to play hotseat with a friend.

Old-school "hotseat" multiplayer is something you could almost approximate already using the "developer" settings. If you were to enable dev mode (with the AI dev features turned on) you could theoretically turn off any AI control for 2 empires, and both you and a friend could take turns driving your chosen faction. It would be a bit more awkward then moo2's hotseat implementation, but with some practice you could probably get a pretty similar experience.

Active development is on hold atm, but if you wanted to take a shot at a modding project, I suspect creating a cleaned up hotseat mod, one that did more or less what the dev mode will already let you do, but without the need to mess around with developer shortcuts, would be a pretty doable project. There are people on this forum who have achieved more ambitious mods :)

[Nuerginator]

Originally posted by sven4669:

Originally posted by Nuerginator:

As a fan of MOO2, one of my favorite things to do was to play hotseat with a friend.

Old-school "hotseat" multiplayer is something you could almost approximate already using the "developer" settings. If you were to enable dev mode (with the AI dev features turned on) you could theoretically turn off any AI control for 2 empires, and both you and a friend could take turns driving your chosen faction. It would be a bit more awkward then moo2's hotseat implementation, but with some practice you could probably get a pretty similar experience.

Active development is on hold atm, but if you wanted to take a shot at a modding project, I suspect creating a cleaned up hotseat mod, one that did more or less what the dev mode will already let you do, but without the need to mess around with developer shortcuts, would be a pretty doable project. There are people on this forum who have achieved more ambitious mods :)

Interesting! How can I access this developer mode? Will the game work fine doing this?

[sven4669]

Originally posted by Nuerginator:

Interesting! How can I access this developer mode? Will the game work fine doing this?

Go to "Browse Local Files", the create a new file with the name "show_hidden_options.bool". After a restart, you'll then be able to click on the "Options" title in the options pane to switch it to "Developer Options". There's a bunch of potentially interesting stuff there (like the "Cheat" button, that just gives a bunch of resources). But for psuedo-hotseat, the things you want are probably "ai_dev" and "omniscient developer".

With "ai_dev' on, you can Alt-click any faction's plant to switch control to that faction. (And with "omniscient developer" on, you can always see everyone's empires, so finding the right planet to alt-click is always possible.)

If you click the little faction name that comes up when "ai_dev" is on (it will look like Orthin (AI)), you can turn off AI actions for that faction, effectively making it a standard player-controlled empire.

The whole system is created for devs / modders to be able to see how the AI is working and tweak / fix it as needed. But it would also give you a lot of what you'd need to play hotseat. And if you were ambitious, and started hacking the lua a little, you could probably get rid of the the need to use dev tools. What I'd do is just make turns auto-swap between non-ai controlled empires by default whenever someone hit "next turn".

[Terry Tigre]

If you want help with the hotseat mod, I would be glad to help, I was planning to create something similar. It’s on line 45 of the mod exel sheet.

[Nuerginator]

Originally posted by Terry Tigre:

If you want help with the hotseat mod, I would be glad to help, I was planning to create something similar. It’s on line 45 of the mod exel sheet.

I'm not much of a coder, but I'd be extremely interested in this project!