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[wolfen1]

Is there anything planned for multiplayer support and servers? I know I would love to be able to build a fortress along side my friends.

[weenog]

There are other boards here.  I think you're looking for DF General Discussion.  This is the DF Suggestions board, it's for ideas a little more involved than "I think multiplayer would be neat," as you might notice from the guidelines above all the thread titles.

You might also want to look at DF Community Games & Stories, as that's a board for playing the only version of multiplayer DF that currently exists.  A bunch of players get together and take turns being the overseer for a single fortress, passing the save file on to the next guy when their turn is over.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The biggest problem with any kind of multiplayer is, "What happens when one player gets bored or needs to attend to bodily or social needs, like urination, sleep, or work?" Currently, if such a situation pops up, we can pause or save, but what if one player does so while the other doesn't? There's no good solution to this.

[knutor]

I could enjoy a ladder-like multiplayer system myself, too.  But like with any online competition, it'd prolly attract the wrong players for all the wrong reasons.  Cheaters with big ugly chips on their shoulders. 

Servers cost money, so I'm all for not having them if it means DF gets a price tag.  Knutor

[GreatWyrmGold]

"Ladder-like multiplayer?"

[Revanchist]

Not sure what "ladder-like" is, but if our Wonder get's contaminated by trash-talking-overcompetitive-swearerserr...Kobolds, then I vehementlyrespectfully request: No. I also don't like the idea of paying for the game. I like  donations.    ^ Unless the payment is for those who don't play. Seems like too much work for too little benefit. Especially since we would attract the  wrong  ^ audiences.

^ = look up.

[Putnam]

"Ladder-like multiplayer?"

See: Starcraft II, Warcraft III, Diablo II.

[GreatWyrmGold]

See: I would rather have an actual explanation than a list of three games I don't play and mostly don't like the genres. Maybe Warcraft, is it RTS or TBS? I prefer TBS.
But we digress.

[weenog]

Whoever has the most points sits at the top of the list of players who have the most points.  It's pretty crap, really.  A high score list does not a multiplayer mode make, and it's not like ancient arcade games where the game meant to kill you the player and the closest thing to farming cost a lot of real money.

[thisisjimmy]

It's not so much a high score list as it is a statistical model to rank how good players are relative to one another.  The ladder system assigns players two values: their estimating competence and the uncertainty in the estimation.  Each time the player plays a match, these values are altered.  Beating players of a higher rank will earn you more points (increase your estimated competence) while losing to players of a lower rank will have the opposite effect.  Likewise, if you play at a very consistent level, you'll have a low uncertainty.  If you sometimes beat amazing players but then lose to novices, the uncertainty will be high.

It's a good system for competitive players who want to see how they rank against their friends or the world.  It only works with games that have player vs player matches, so obviously, it's not possible in Dwarf Fortress.

If the suggestion is to make a multiplayer versus mode where two players can build up fortresses and attack each other, well, that's not going to happen any time soon.  It would be a huge project, and it's a completely different direction from what Toady is currently working on.

Despite the fact that it won't happen, I actually think it could be rather fun to send my dwarven armies against another player.

[assasin]

the way I see it working is that a small group of players getting together at predetermined times [like lans or tabletop sessions] and playing a few hours each time. the internet would just act a medium for those who don't live close enough to one another for a normal lan. though lans should still be an option.

[darklord92]

I've always seen DF multiplayer as the server being in fortress mode and the clients being adventurers that have migrated to the fort. allowing clients to help bring more life into each fort as each client is a real person, something DFs AI may someday come close to but never be.

[Wellincolin]

I'm surprised this thread went up to more than 10 posts. I'd hate to rain on your parade, but Toady himself said he is strongly against it for any matters.

That said, I think the BEST POSSIBILITY for DF are the online servers, like other roguelikes do have (i.e. Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has crawl.akrasiac.org (American, ASCII) and crawl.develz.org with graphics tileset and European (http://tiles.crawl.develz.org if you wanna see what I mean).

Crawl is a dungeon crawler rogue-like, which is way easier to rank and make a score system. The best you get on these servers is that you can spectate other peoples games real-time, chat with them, and after every game, the server stores a kind of dump which contains every single thing that happened to your character.
I don't know if that could be possible for Fortress Mode, could be a nice feature for Adventure Mode if you could spectate, chat, etc. But again, CAO is played by a console and CDO is played directly through the browser, the best shot we could get is something like CAO but Toady doesn't want it, and he's the boss.

[10ebbor10]

I'm surprised this thread went up to more than 10 posts. I'd hate to rain on your parade, but Toady himself said he is strongly against it for any matters.

That said, I think the BEST POSSIBILITY for DF are the online servers, like other roguelikes do have (i.e. Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has crawl.akrasiac.org (American, ASCII) and crawl.develz.org with graphics tileset and European (http://tiles.crawl.develz.org if you wanna see what I mean).

Crawl is a dungeon crawler rogue-like, which is way easier to rank and make a score system. The best you get on these servers is that you can spectate other peoples games real-time, chat with them, and after every game, the server stores a kind of dump which contains every single thing that happened to your character.
I don't know if that could be possible for Fortress Mode, could be a nice feature for Adventure Mode if you could spectate, chat, etc. But again, CAO is played by a console and CDO is played directly through the browser, the best shot we could get is something like CAO but Toady doesn't want it, and he's the boss.

Spectating and such is already possible. Look for Dfterm on the forum, which is an app that let's you set up a df server and then connect multiple people to it. Controlling with multiple people is possible, though there's only one virtual keyboard, so you 'll constantly be interfering which eqch other.

[weenog]

stuff

I see someone is unfamiliar with Diablo II, doesn't know about bots, and gives entities like Blizzard Entertainment way too much credit for the quality of their sorting algorithms.