Yes-- the multiplayer will work across *all* platforms. You'll be able to play iPad to iPhone to PC to Mac to Android, if you want. It's all one protocol.
Yes, mage is still capable of doing melee attacks, but you really won't want to. :) It's not automatic any more, you'd have to dedicate a mouse button to it.
Yes you can have people join midgame. Saving is a possibility but won't be present at launch-- it's a complex endeavor (to make it able to remember the remote people, and re-link up to them when they re-join). What's more likely is that certain flags will be saved-- like what waypoints are open and suchlike. Though I'm going to try to do my best, it's very likely only the single player will save every monster position, etc, a full game-state, while multiplayer resume would be more of an approximation, but always starting you in town.
You will be able to disconnect and reconnect with a game though. You can actually run it as a standalone server and allow people to join it.
That's still up in the air. Probably the game will ship, and that kind of persistence will be updated in later, since it's a lot of work and I don't want to stall everything while puzzling it all out!
Only four. If everything works well, it can be easily bumped up, but just to keep the lag and bitrate down, I'm capping it at 4. It's theoretically unlimited, but a crowd of 200 monsters running around sending messages to 16 people would have a definite performance hit.
I wonder how scaling will work in multiplayer games, since up to four times the players seems like up to a quarter of the difficulty. Unless xp is divided evenly between all the players?
The typical way a multiplayer game handles this is to make all enemies 4x harder, and provide 4x the experience, which gets distributed amongst everyone who landed a hit on the enemy.
might be better to be just a flat share of exp instead of anyone that got a hit on them, because in mp everyone will go with more aoe damage and no1 will chose single hit high damage spells like fire, or do it as a percentage based thing, if you do 80% of the damage to a creature, you get 80% of the exp
That sounds fair at first but lets imagine that like youre playing with your friend and you get the first like 10 kills by just luckiness. Then you level up and are doing more damage than he is. So now even if your friend is getting some kills you are most likely doing more damage, so you are speeding through levels while your friend is stuck at level 1 ha.
I do agree that the person doing better should get more exp by killing more stuff, but that system is flawed. I think raptisoft's idea is good. Although it could still be abused for like if a level 1 person and a level 30 person are fighting an extremely difficult boss and the level 1 gets a single hit and gets half the exp when it dies.
This is assuming he meant like equally distributed.
Anyways, it seems there is a simple solution at first but I think it is necessary to put a good amount of time into it to make a good system
yea i was personally leaning more twords the flat even exp, but i figured rapt might not want "leachers" so i was offering the % thing as an alternative, perhaps cap it at 60/40, so theres still incentive to compete to do more damage, but the other person wont be left in the dust, but i guess the even dist as long as everyone hits it works too for that, but it will still lead back to the aoe vs power issue.. as far as coding goes im sure its just easier to do a flat even split irregardless of the hits/damage
When something dies everyone gets exp, but those who contributed get two parts of exp and those who don't get 1 part. lower levels get a exp bonus.based on the enemy's internal level and higher level players get a exp penalty based on the enemy internal level.
Examples:
Level 1 and level 3 hit the level 2 skeleton, the level 2 player doesnt. lets say the skeleton is worth 50 xp total.
the level 1 and 3 get 2/5*50xp and the level two gets 1/5*50 exp. level 1 and 3 recieve 20xp and level two recieves 10.
the player at the same level as the enemy gets no change and just gets 10 total. the level 3 gets his exp modified because he is over leveled. level 3/ level 2 is 1.5, so his exp is divided by 1.5 . The level 1 gets bonus exp to help catch up. level 1/ level 2 is 0.5 so exp is divided by 0.5.
Final results, the level one gets 40 xp, the level 3 gets 13 and the level two gets 20.
Lets try some higher levels with the same formula.
the Level 16 and level 12 deal damage, the level 14 and level 20 dont. Enemy is level 15 and worth 475 exp.
16 and 12 recieve 2/6 each, 14 and 20 recieve 1/6 of it.
158/(16/15)= 148 exp for the level 16.
158/(12/15)=197 exp for the level 12.
79/(14/15)=84 exp for the level 14.
79/(20/15)=59 exp for the level 20.
This also assumes everyone is within a decent range of each other that way it can be assume you are doing something useful.
Like this you could do AoE damage and get bits of exp from everything, or do ST damage for chunks.
(edit your post, mid way through you said the level 2 gets 20, he's only supposed to get 10)
thats an interesting idea necro, and i like it for the most part, but its still going to be imbalanced for any higher player, if its just me and you for instance, and your doing all the killing, im running in circles making pretty lights not hitting anything, you will out level me yes, but eventually it will hit a net and even though your still doing all the work, our levels will rise at the same time (you will still be higher however)
then you say you could aoe for bits or st for chunks, that wouldnt work, because most likely the person doing aoe could still tag a monster with just 1 damage before the st hits it and even though the st did most of the damage, they still get an even split, keep in mind how easy it is to aoe, if spell mechanics are kept the same, a fully upgraded cone hits ~60% of the screen, one spin and it tags every monster in sight, so unless the st and aoe split up (and if your gunna do that modeswell play single player) the aoe will always be higher then the st
but from your idea, just altered a bit, it could work while adressing basically every problem, including the sheer luck situation by super. keep your idea of dividing the exp into portions, everyone gets 1 portion, hit or not, then they get an additional portion based on the % of damage they deal, (every 20%? 25%? 33%?) and also keeping the level difference factored in aswell so people dont lag too far behind (it would still have the issue of 2 players leveling at the same time even though one is doing all the work, but at a much greater level difference, to the point that its almost negligible)
so lets say 2 people, one level 10, one level 15 kill a level 15 monster worth 100 exp. the lev 10 deals 35% of the damage, the lev 15 does 65%, the portions would depend on what percent is chosen above, so ill list the exp for all 3
20%: the level 10 would get 2/6, 33/.66= 50 exp the 15 would get 4/6, 66/1= 66 exp (if same lev, 33:66)
yea, the exp for damage could actually work a lot easier i would think, but might still be dificult for adding the level variable to that aswell... but like you said it depends on how much raptisoft wants to do
Comments
Yes, mage is still capable of doing melee attacks, but you really won't want to. :) It's not automatic any more, you'd have to dedicate a mouse button to it.
You will be able to disconnect and reconnect with a game though. You can actually run it as a standalone server and allow people to join it.