Valley 1:Multiplayer

Multiplayer Design Notes

In the main, playing multiplayer is just like playing solo. You connect into a world, and you do all the same sorts of activities. These are the important differences that you need to know, though:

Fighting Enemies

• When fighting enemies, their health is multiplied by the max number of players who have ever been in their chunk. So if 8 of you go in, it's 8x the health of solo play. If all players leave a chunk and it gets dropped from RAM (which happens after about ten seconds of nobody being in the chunk), then that multiplier gets removed and the monster's health is reset to full. So if eight of you went in and fought it and died, and later you come back in solo and want to fight that boss yourself, then you can without any issues.

• Enemies can generally only launch as many projectiles as they can in singleplayer, but can generally melee attack as many players as touch it. Most enemy shots pierce through players anyhow, so they can still strike a lot of players in a line.

Loot And Crafting

• Whenever there's a health drop from an enemy, only a single player can collect those items. Health drops will automatically go to the player with the lowest current health, so you don't have to worry about coordinating that yourself.

• In terms of dropped consciousness shards from enemies, and dropped crafting materials from background objects, those all go into the settlement stockpile anyhow, so it doesn't matter who picks them up.

• Whenever there's a usable item like a spell scroll in a stash, or wood platforms, heatsuits/snowsuits, vitality stones, etc, each player can pick up a copy of that individually. When you pick up the item, it disappears from your view but not from the view of other players. They can then also pick it up same as you did.
  • This is a convenience feature, because otherwise you'd have to do 8x as much stash-hunting if you had 8 players journeying together. While being able to pick up multiple copies of the same item is mildly odd, it's something that really keeps things moving and in most cases is something you might not have noticed for a good while if we hadn't told you about it, anyway.

• The settlement stockpile is both global-for-all-players and... not. That sounds confusing, but it's actually really simple and done to make things easier for you:
  • Non-crafting materials that are used for guardian powers (consciousness shards, cedar logs, granite, etc) are simply global. So are guardian powers themselves. When any player uses these, they are simply gone. But the results tend to benefit all players on that continent anyway, so that's not a problem. Easy enough so far.
  • Crafting-related materials that are used for learning new spells (raw gems, rare commodities, most regular commodities) are the trickier ones:
    • Whenever any player picks up (for example) a raw gem, it goes into the central stockpile for that continent's settlement. It doesn't matter who picks it up, everyone gets the benefit of it.
    • However, learned spells are per-player, and the crafting-materials needed to learn these spells are able to be used once per player. In other words, if three people are playing co-op together, and one picks up a raw sapphire, then each of the players can use that single raw sapphire to learn different spells. If a fourth player joins the server later, they can also use that raw sapphire to learn something right away.
  • Why do things this way? Because progress needs to be shared in order to keep things moving, but at the same time it is a lot more fun if players get to specialize and choose what spells they want to learn on their own.

• In terms of enchants, there are internal points that are kept track of for all players. Whenever any player picks up an enchant container, every player gets the benefit of those points (even players who might join the game later). Only the player who actually opened the container has a chance of getting an enchant right at that moment, but all players make progress toward getting their next enchant -- so next time they open a container, they're more likely to get an enchant themselves.

Chat!

To chat to other players, hit the T key. You'll also see other players noted on the world map and in the dungeon/region maps. Open the tooltip for the region/dungeon/room in question to see who, specifically, is there.

Usernames, And License Key Usage Restrictions

• When you connect to a server, it will show a username. At the moment this can be configured in the Networking tab of the Settings screen. If you change your username and connect back to the server, it will create a whole new character and set of inventory and all that for you.
  • Note: you can try to change your username while connected to a server, but it won't work.

• So if you and a family member (or whoever) want to share a single server on a single computer at different times of the day, just change back and forth between your two usernames and you can do so. Two players with the same license key can't connect to the same server at the same time, but they can both play in one world as long as it's one at a time.

• Note that the server will also need to have a license key so that it doesn't limit the world to tier 2 and a single continent, but that license key by default will just be your main license key from your client. And the server's license key won't block players with the same key or anything like that, unlike if two clients with the same key as each other try to connect to a server.
  • You probably won't even have to think about this unless you set up your server on a dedicated box, but we thought we'd mention it just in case!

FAQ

How Do I Host An AVWW Server?

Go into the Multiplayer section of the main menu, and hit Launch Server Of Your Own. It will then give you a list of worlds that you have created in solo play. Choose the world you'd like to launch as the server, and another copy of AVWW will launch.

Once this server launches, it will simply say "Welcome!" and the name of the world that you launched it with. Just minimize it or otherwise leave it in the background, and you're all done. It also shows things like who is connected to the server at the moment, and you can chat with players from the server console. Later there will be more admin controls on the server.

If you prefer to launch the server from the command line directly (which is what the game is doing anyhow), then on windows launch it as AVWW.exe -server -world "{name}" On OSX it works as open -a 'AVWW.app' -n --args -server -world "{name}".

Is There A Central List Of Servers Somewhere?

Not yet, no. You'll either have to direct connect by IP, or if you're playing on a LAN the game can search for it for you. This is exactly like AI War.

That said, unlike AI War we'll have a central server list up prior to 1.0 of the game, because with a server model like this it's very easy compared to AI War.

For the time being, a kind community member has set up a temporary list utility here: http://septagram.eu/index.php

How Many Players Are Supported On A Server?

You tell us! This is something we really want to have feedback on. How many players are you able to run on one server with acceptable performance? So far we've had at least half a dozen (not completely sure about private hosted servers), and the performance was extremely awesome. We're betting you can get at least into the teens, and 30-50 players might be feasible.

There is a definite finite amount of players before the server process is going to start having RAM trouble, though, so hundreds of simultaneous players on one server is very unlikely. That said, if you have hundreds of players who come and go on a server, and only 30 (or whatever number winds up working) are on at a given time, that will work fine.

Once we start working on the admin tools for multiplayer, we'll have an ability for server admins to set what their desired player cap is for their server. If your specific network setup only supports 10 players with the performance you want, then you will be able to set it at 10, etc.

Can A World Be Used In Both Single And Multiplayer?

Oh, you bet. And you can even switch back and forth if you want.

What Happens When A New Player Joins A World Belatedly?

This is really, really straightforward. They're given a small catch-up inventory, and they're able to learn a bunch of new spells right away using whatever crafting materials other players have already unlocked. Assuming that you've already reached the first settlement (in other words, passed the intro mission), it will just dump the new player into that first settlement. They'll still have some things to pick up before a serious mission (wood platforms and vitality stones and the like), and they'll be behind on enchants, but they aren't remotely helpless. Because of the way enchants work, if the world has been going on for a while then newly added players are going to be getting a constant string of enchants for a while as they go and collect enchant containers, so that's a good idea to do early on in for them.

Known Issues

1. The movement of other players on the world map is pretty jerky at the moment.

Multiplayer Features Yet To Come

List of Players On A Server

Handy for seeing who is even in the world. And potentially a quick way to warp to the location of any other player from anywhere in the world.

Better Handling Of Usernames

Right now it's just that textbox in the Network tab of the Settings screen. We know that's clunky, and it's just a temporary thing we implemented to save time for the moment. Later there will be a more robust screen, with a dropdown list of past-used usernames, through the Multiplayer section of the main menu.

Admin Tools

Kicking users, banning users, setting up access rights and anti-griefing measures, that sort of thing. Also setting user caps.

Server Listing

A way for you to advertise your server if you want to, so that other people can see that in the server list and join. Until the admin tools are in, this may be a bad idea!

PVP Options (May be post-1.0)

We've talked about things like having PVP arenas where you and your opponent can each summon monsters to fight one another, and where there's some Chess-bughouse-style back and forth depending on how successful you each are. Any sort of PVP options would be in this sort of style of play, rather than in direct combat like you have against monsters.