Give the community the necessary tools to create a Multiplayer mod, BRAD!!!!1

You ask how hard it could be, then you say you know nothing about programming... you just invalidated your own argument.

Do you honestly think that if it was such a trivial task, we would have done it ourselves already?

What would you need?  My guess based on talking to the devs is the full source code to the game 

This made me smile. Thanks OP. Personally, I'd hate playing this game on multiplayer. I'd be constantly yelled at for watching TV and not noticing it's my turn.

I guess this means that there's not going to be a ToA Saturday Night Battlecast. My dream, once again, has been crushed by the cruel JackBoot of Despair. Wail! I wanted to be an announcer sooooo bad!

I find this incredibly amusing. You know nothing about programing, and therefore have no idea how easy or hard this would actually be, then assume that it much be very simple, for no apparent reason, and ask someone else to prove what you've assumed to be true.

I'm no real programmer either, although I have dabbled with some minor coding, but I can tell you that it seems to me that a LOT of MAJOR changes would have to be built into the engine to support this. I don't really know, because I don't know enough specifics about how the engine was built, but I doubt it to be any simple task.

You already answered you own question, easy on one machine but very different in network environment. The lobby system would be the easiest part to code and is just a meeting place nothing much else. All connected players for one game would have to be sort of synchronized before the turn ends. I think that is the real challenge considering the complexity of 1 turns action per player plus the eventual AI players.

Plus the fact that you can actually do stuff while the AI moves, the diplomacy would have to be recoded completely, ship designs, logos, consistency check on data files, AI interaction with multiple human opponents, the whining of the 'imba' MP crowd who can't deal with a game that has actual differences between races, host/client communication, the host component itself, cheatproofing, ...

As an actual software developer, I find the assumption that MP is something that could be modded in, or would be easy to include simply hilarious.

Thx, you were faster, and edit gave me a blank box but your admendments popped up

Sorry, I have this thing about lying. As a programmer, I know the technical arguments, and they all work against what you say. That is, the people with the knowledge of how networked games work all know that it is in no way "very simple."

Your entire argument is grounded in ignorance.

Maybe, if he stays at a Holiday Inn Express tonight, he'll be able to do it with ease tommorrow.

I would love to see a multiplayer environment, just for playing with friends, but it would be a TON of work.

* You would need a dedicated server application or let them host a game from the client.

* You would have to add in:
Chat, Some kind of new viable trading, Server Side checking to prevent cheating (ideally), Concurrent moves (I think the AI moves AFTER you do, I'm not sure), Save/Load support on the server and letting the client join, transmitting the maps to the clients, transmitting AI moves to the clients, sharing ship designs, so on and so forth ....

Brad has also mentioned the UI changes and class balancing that would be an issue.

The OP clearly has no concept of how ultra-freaking hard it is to implement multiplayer modes in games that were never designed for it. It reminds me of the numerous attempts to mod Morrowind into a psuedo-MMO, all of which ended in catastrophic failure.
Even when the developers themselves try to add it to an existing game it doesn't end well, take the multiplayer version of Civilization, CivNET. It was clunky and nigh-useless.
It wasn't until Civilization IV that the series had viable multiplayer because that game was designed with it in mind from the ground up.

Absolutely - they went through a living Hell providing it on first release, causing a near Rebellion in the Fan Base. They had issues in the practical areas of the needs of team/game coordinators, hand off's to AI when a player dumped out, and a Huge Network layer/IP/multi firewall issue they had underestimated as it was their first multi-player. Throw in an underestimated server capacity to run it, and I would not like to have been a tech/dev in the middle of that lot sorting it out. 11 out of 10 to them though, sort it they did, but it took months to settle properly.

It was that saga that first threw me into GalCiv - had never even considered it before then, *bows five times to Stardock Central in humble penance :LOL:*

Now GalCiv is my main game - they say good things often come out of nightmares if you look hard enough. Still enjoy playing CivIV single player, great game, but that's normally only when I want a break from Torian prolls swarming all over my space - geez those guys breed like flys

Regards
Zy

sorry guys, im so stupid

Dang. That'll teach him to ask a question :NOTSURE: 

From what I've gathered on other threads about this topic, especially "The Case for no Multiplayer" posted by Frogboy, it will never happen. It would basically take an entire new game for MP, one that is totally seperate from the current one which has good AIs. In order to make a MP game, the AI becomes inadequate.

No your not - there's no such thing as a stupid question if you dont know the answer. I'll stop learning the day they put my carcass into the incinerator ....

There is such a thing as an easy Quiz question, we all have tons of those, but only because we already know the answer

Regards
Zy

Don't get down on yourself Slurple. A lot of people, myself included have no idea whta it takes to implement something like multiplayer into a game. With a lot of todays games having SDKs and all sorts of modding tools it can lead one to believe that modders can do just about anything with a game nowadays. GC2 is not one though that allows modders to have access to the source code, so anything that ambitious is just not possible and I think even if it were, it would be beyond the capabilities of all but the best of the best.

I was being sarcastic. I am a professional troll. /end. kplzthx

Never underestimate the modding community. MP mods have been made for games that were never intended for MP. GTA for example. Someone even managed to make a multiplayer mod for Oblivion. However it was barely functional, and the creator stopped working on it. Nevertheless, it did allow players to connect and interact with each other.

Why not give us the tools and let us try? Unless of course this would require the source code.

And I'd constantly be annoyed at having to wait for my slower-playing friends.

I used to play Alpha Centauri with a group of friends, and I would have an additional game of SMAC running on a second computer at the same time so I wouldnt get bored. Birth of the Federation multiplayer generally worked a bit better, because we used an in-game turn time-limit.

Sentient species taste better...

I remember playing PTO II (SNES TBS game) with my little brother, where we'd have two systems set up, with two different games running. I'd do my turn on one system while he did his on the other, then switch. God that got confusing after a while!

Again, clearly answered... you would need the source code. MP is simply not moddable.
This requires a huge change in the gameengine, UI, etc... and at least ~1 year for a whole dev team coding.
Such a tool will never exist, since its almost impossible to quickly create a tool with that capabilities. I'd consider it avery advanced tool, in terms of software architecture. Basically, you asking for an official GC2 hacking tool, omg
Seriously, you have no clue of programming in relation to time .

I haven't slept for several days, and I think its because Brad will not acknowledge this thread.

Maybe because you said you were a professional troll?  

There's no point in Brad's answering this thread. He's already done so in multiple other places. It's not possible to "give us the tools." He'd have to give us the source code and someone would have to re-write most of the game. There are so many reasons that either one won't happen that it's near ridiculous.

If it's been done for other games, it's simply because the engine of the other games made it possible. This game has no such capability.

Give up on making GalCiv2 multiplayable and work on pursuading them to put that feature into GalCiv3.

Where did Brad say this would require the source code?????