I'm thrilled to announce that, after three "release candidates" full of bugs, the multiplayer version of Cosmoteer is finally feeling stable enough that I'm comfortable releasing it as an "official" update. (Thanks to everyone who played the RC builds and reported bugs!)
Download Cosmoteer 0.13.0
What is the gameplay? In this first version, multiplayer is a simple team-versus-team battle of up to 8 players spread across two teams. Each team has a certain amount of money (configured by the host) to spend on a fleet of up to 5 ships per player (or fewer, as configured by the host). Then the game starts and the players control their own ships, attempting to destroy the other team's fleet. The game ends and one team is declared the winner when either the other team's fleet is sufficiently destroyed or the timer runs out.
Who can I play with? In this first version, you can play with anyone on the same LAN (Local Area Network) as you. You can also play with a friend anywhere else in the world by typing in the host computer's I.P. address. There is not yet a public online list of games.
This is just the beginning! This first version lays the coding foundation for more improvements to come. In the long term, I may add entirely different game modes, such as multiplayer co-op and creative modes. In the near future, I plan to add:
- A.I. players in multiplayer battles
- Observers (for streaming tournaments)
- More than two teams & free-for-all battles
- Some sort of boundary around the playing area to prevent people from being able to run away indefinitely
- Limit price per-ship and not just total price per fleet
Let me know if you have any new performance problems. Due to the changes I made to the underlying game simulation & physics code, it's possible that those changes could make performance worse for some players, even in singleplayer. I haven't noticed any significant difference myself, but I have a pretty nice computer.
Players running 32-bit operating systems cannot play multiplayer with people running 64-bit operating systems, without the 64-bit players running in a special 32-bit mode. This is an unfortunate technical limitation due to the way multiplayer has been implemented (a technique called "deterministic lockstep") that's necessary in a game as complex as Cosmoteer to keep bandwidth low, but it causes incompatibilities between 32-bit and 64-bit programs. However, there is a Cosmoteer (32-Bit Mode)
shortcut in your start menu when the game is installed on 64-bit OS's that will force it to run in 32-bit mode so that players who have 64-bit OS's can play with their friends who have 32-bit OS's.
Multiplayer should generally work fine with mods as long as all players in the same game have the same mods installed and activated. If you have different mods or different versions of mods than the game's host, then you'll get an error when trying to join a game. (Mods that do not change multiplayer gameplay can add ModifiesMultiplayer = false
to their mod.txt which will stop the game from checking to make sure all players have the mod installed. Adding that to mods that do change multiplayer gameplay will not magically allow players to play together; it'll just make the error when trying to join a game less helpful.)
When using the "Connect via I.P." option, you may get a "Request timed out" error unless the host configures "port forwarding" on their router to forward UDP port 35862 to their computer. Cosmoteer will try to do this automatically using the host's router's UPnP feature, but some routers do not support that feature or have it turned off by default.
Full Changelog
Additional changes since RC3 that aren't in the above changelog:
- Instead of waiting for the host to start the next game after a battle ends, the game now returns to the multiplayer game setup screen automatically after 15 seconds.
- The A.I. will now pick from 8 possible attack rotations, including diagonals. But when a human player issues an attack command, it will still only pick from four rotations when choosing a default rotation.
- RC Bugfix: The game would try to auto-save when playing a multiplayer game, which would cause the screen to go black. Auto-saving and quick-saving is now disabled for multiplayer games.
- RC Bugfix: Possible crash when issuing a command after loading a saved game from an earlier release candidate.