Some question about MP

[Rello]

Hello everybody from Italy,
I' ve played both MMG games and I just came across the Gettysburg news which made me rejoice.
Being mainly involved in multiplayer I'd like to know whether we'll have a dedicated server to play (like GS/Steam/GameRangers...) or it will be left to direct IP connection (which I hate because of the firewall, router problems).

How many players will be allowed?
Will there be any neutral ipothetic scenario (forces of the same strenght) on different maps from the 4 provided for the Gettysburg battle?
Will be possible to play online mods (I'm a big napoleonic fan...) ?

I've started to advertise your next game in the total war community largely disappointed by the too arcade oriented style of Empire. If you ever need an italian localization I'm ready to provide one, of course free of charges.

[Little Powell]

Hi Rello, and welcome to the community!

I'll do my best to answer your questions:

Being mainly involved in multiplayer I'd like to know whether we'll have a dedicated server to play (like GS/Steam/GameRangers...) or it will be left to direct IP connection (which I hate because of the firewall, router problems).

I'm not 100% sure on this one, but I do know there will be a game lobby for users to join games. Norb or Jim would probably better to answer this one.

How many players will be allowed?

There is still some testing to be done to determine how many it can handle, but I know we've had at least four players before. The system is designed to allow as many players as there are commanders, but again there is still some testing that needs to be done on this.

Will there be any neutral ipothetic scenario (forces of the same strenght) on different maps from the 4 provided for the Gettysburg battle?

If I understand your question correctly, the Sandbox games are designed to choose equal forces on both sides. It still needs some work/testing, but I believe this is the way it will work in the game. There is also the option of user created OOB's that will work in MP, and those can of course have equal strengths on both sides.

Will be possible to play online mods (I'm a big napoleonic fan...) ?

Thats a good question and I'm glad you brought it up. My guess would be that mods will work in MP, but we'll need to test that.

And thanks for advertising the game!

[norb]

I'll add my 2 cents to LP's responses. One point that I want to make is that we do not consider this a ship it and forget it release. Many features that we cut in order to get the product shipped, will be added in future releases/patches. We are just too small to do everything at once. That said...

Rello wrote:

Being mainly involved in multiplayer I'd like to know whether we'll have a dedicated server to play (like GS/Steam/GameRangers...) or it will be left to direct IP connection (which I hate because of the firewall, router problems).

It will only be direct ip out of the box. I have not done any dedicated server code in the game. I have been working very hard with RakNet and their NAT punchthrough in order to make this happen. So far we have had not problems with this at all, well none that we have no been able to overcome. The initial server or host must have an open or mapped port. But everyone that joins will not have to do anything to their configurations. We plan to support a lobby, but the server will still have to open the port. I anticipate that these initial rules will change as we get feedback from the community. We hope to support more types of play, but for our initial release we just want to do one thing and do it well out of the box.

Rello wrote:

Will be possible to play online mods (I'm a big napoleonic fan...) ?

No mods out of the box. This will be added probably in the first patch. It's just one of those things that can cause a ton of issues with the way I coded mp. So we're going to dedicate a lot of time and testing to it after release.

Rello wrote:

If you ever need an italian localization I'm ready to provide one, of course free of charges.

Thank you. We have no prepared for this as of yet. But in one of the early patches we will get all of our text files together and publish them. I want to have the language chosen in game, so it's all one release. But I'm just not prepared for that yet. Once we get all of the files together, we would certainly appreciate submissions from the community. Then we can publish different languages as mods. From my previous designs, you know that I do put almost everything in external files, but I have not been as careful in this dev process. So it's something that we will address soon after release. We realize that almost half of the audience for these games do not have english as their main language. So we're going to support it. I do not think that we will support the UNICODE languages. Unless a publisher has a big check to do the work

[Rello]

I see your points and are strong ones.
I've done in the past my own try on a napoleonic tactical engine and I know that trying to add too many things leads to disaster.

I know you're very committed in supporting the game and the community so I don't care if tons of features are included at once as long as we have a good AI to deal with.

Is a replay function going to be included for MP games?

[norb]

You need to ask better questions, because I would like to say yes

But no, we are committed to replay, but it won't be in the first release.

I am a foundation builder. So I work on a strong foundation first, make sure that's 100% solid, then I move on. When we started mp our only goal was solid gameplay with 2 players. Solid being the key word. We decided to bring on testers early just to make sure that becomes a reality. In the design we placed no inherent limits on the player count, so we moved that goal up to as many as we felt comfortable with. We just now finally feel mp coming together. We won't really know until we go live. So many things can go wrong in mp, that's it's better not to add too much out of the door. So we're going to keep it simple first. Then we'll add the candy We have so many great ideas, the community has so many great ideas, and we'll work towards them. But my first goal is for anyone to jump in a lobby and join an mp game no matter what their computer knowledge is. It will take a little more to start a server. When mp runs all the time, we'll add the replay, for that and single player, as well as many more features. We just have to make sure that the foundation is solid.

So it will give everyone time to get really good, learn to work with the courier system, then we'll get ways to go live with scores and replays.