The Laws of Hexen and Strife Multiplayer

[Ijon Tichy]

Strife:

1. The only person with the ring in MAP02 will disconnect.
2. There will always be one fuckwad who takes the chalice.
3. You will not stay in any one map for more than 4 seconds.
4. There will always be someone who challenges the shopkeeper to a fistfight.
5. Under no circumstances should you assume that there will not be acolytes flooding town in two seconds.
6. Do not assume that someone invoked 5 unintentionally. They didn't.
7. The alarms will always be red.
8. Macil is not a punching bag. Your team mates think otherwise.
9. All locked doors will be openable by one person. That one person has disconnected two minutes ago.
10. There will always be someone who has an extreme urge to collect the internal organs of quest NPCs.
11. Trends show that getting the Sigil causes you to disconnect. This is only a problem if you wish to progress.

Hexen:

1. No one knows how to use the mystic ambit scrolls.
2. The seven portals puzzle will confound your team mates for decades.
3. There will always be a fucknut attacking centaurs with a rapid fire weapon.
4. All puzzle items are held by the person who doesn't know where it goes.
5. This is, of course, assuming they haven't disconnected yet.
6. Your team mates most likely think portals are some sort of wine. Do not let them taste it.
7. You will be, at most, ten seconds away from hitting a vital puzzle switch when someone uses a portal.
8. The wings of wrath will not be used to hunt for secrets. They will be used to hide in 5000-foot deep pits.
9. Someone will always be standing in plain sight of the heresiarch, convincing him to invuln.
10. When fighting the player bosses, you will be the only one who remembers what a disc of repulsion is.
11. Everyone will leave the server before MAP40, but after the last weapon piece is presented.
12. Your team mates will consider one ettin worthy of 10 flechettes.

[Vordenko]

Ain't it the fucking truth.

Also, lol IRC :P

[Ijon Tichy]

it's because i'm a blatant reposter

[Espio]

With this new port, does it mean Strife/Hexen will possibly have correct Multiplayer support in anyway possible?

[Blzut3]

With this new port, does it mean Strife/Hexen will possibly have correct Multiplayer support in anyway possible?

Well Strife co-op is probably never going to work right. The game is filled with too many single player oriented hacks, so most likely unless you play the game straight through with the same players you'll always be locked out at some point. Other game modes will "work," but of course trying to be competitive in stock Strife is nearly impossible as well.

For Hexen. Doesn't it work already?

[Tribeam]

Hexen could use improvements...

Heres one:
An Exit System

- When a player hits an exit, that player is put into a state of invurn+no control(can still look around)+no collide+no monster activation/interaction, maybe change their palette translation to show they are in this exit state, ect.
- If enough players(1/4, 1/2, 3/4 of them) hit the exit then a timer is started, the remaining players will have a set amount of time to get to the exit and finish what they are doing before the game continues to the next part of the hub.
- A console command that allows someone to get out of the exit in case they hit it on accident.
- if 2 exits were hit in the same level and they tie with the same amount of players waiting, maybe have a vote? or just have the game always take the first chosen portal as priority, or pick one at random, otherwise the portal with more players wins.

[Synert]

With this new port,

This is just a continuation of Skulltag. I wouldn't hope for much yet.

[Vordenko]

With this new port,

This is just a continuation of Skulltag. I wouldn't hope for much yet.

Imo, Strife mp seems pretty impossible and buggy as hell, Ijon pretty much nailed it.

[Combinebobnt]

You forgot people who think rowan is an enemy AND MUST DIE IMMEDIATELY, and hexen players that think they must have a dark servant active AT ALL TIMES.

[Edward-san]

Coop Strife is impossible. Period.

[Xaser]

Coop Strife is impossible. Period.

Not until someone makes a mod that enables it. Which would be weird if someone is actually doing so and starts vaguely hinting at it in tangentially related threads.

[Ijon Tichy]

Well, we TRIED doing Strife coop online, and you'd pretty much have to forgo the conversation system entirely. All conversation states are reset when leaving a map, and items aren't given properly (even as player 0). Basically, you'd be making a Doom-style map pack (or use loads and loads of ACS) if you want a coop Strife map pack.

Even if it weren't for that, we also found ourselves randomly losing all our items when switching maps. Also, the whole 'one quest item ONLY' deal basically makes Strife unplayable online in coop. Even if it worked semi-properly, we'd still have the Laws to ruin everything.
Also, yes, someone stabbed the crap out of Rowan. It didn't really matter.

[Xaser]

To make it play properly, a script-driven system would be needed that keeps track of what quest items & keys have been obtained and dole them out to players when joining, not to mention syncing them when people actually pick things up.

Realistic? Hell no. But two Ears is better than none. ;P

[Blzut3]

Well, we TRIED doing Strife coop online, and you'd pretty much have to forgo the conversation system entirely. All conversation states are reset when leaving a map, and items aren't given properly (even as player 0). Basically, you'd be making a Doom-style map pack (or use loads and loads of ACS) if you want a coop Strife map pack.

Proper extensions to USDF could allow a dialog based mod to work realisticly in multiplayer, but getting stock strife to work is hopeless. Even then, you would still have people screwing up the mission like you said although a co-op oriented mod could try to reduce this by making the game properly reset itself when you lose instead of hoping that the swarm of guards will kill you.

[Ijon Tichy]

To make it play properly, a script-driven system would be needed that keeps track of what quest items & keys have been obtained and dole them out to players when joining, not to mention syncing them when people actually pick things up.

Realistic? Hell no. But two Ears is better than none. ;P

Hey, [url=ttp://filesmelt.com/dl/sharedresources7.zip]Shared Resources[/url] could do it...

[Vordenko]

Even if it weren't for that, we also found ourselves randomly losing all our items when switching maps.

We died too actually, everytime one just went to an area where the map has to change, as soon as it happen, everyone just died randomly on the transition with the obituary "Playername died.", the next area loaded anyway but then a little telefrag fest started, it was quite random still haha

However, I didn't lose any items... I think?

Stock Strife Co-op is impossible it seems, its a shame :/

[MP2E]

Coop Strife is impossible. Period.

Pretty much this. If you make maps using the Strife IWAD intended for online play with new scripts for that purpose and everything, then we can talk. There's just no point even trying to fix the present multiplayer bugs because more will just keep showing up unless we either hack in exceptions for every little bug the single-player oriented scripts throw at us or the entire wad is rebuilt with coop in mind. The second seems a lot more likely, but something the community should focus on doing ;)

As for Hexen, report them bugs :P

[Ijon Tichy]

Coop Strife is impossible. Period.

Pretty much this. If you make maps using the Strife IWAD intended for online play with new scripts for that purpose and everything, then we can talk.
...
The second seems a lot more likely, but something the community should focus on doing ;)

HexaDoken and I were throwing around the idea of porting Strife to ACS, but I believe copyright blurriness kept the idea from getting off the ground.

[Nubcakes]

I haven't tried coop in Hexen or Strife since the mid 90s and that was on a serial port connection! Back then Hexen was do-able but took some good teamwork to avoid fucking up some parts and make the game impossible to complete. Strife was... pretty much unplayable(for coop). For some reason unexplainable bugs would happen, like alarms going on off in town for no reason or NPCs refusing to talk at all. Strife was pretty fun for Deathmatch purposes though! :3

In general I think its best to stick with Heretic, and Doom(1,2) for Co-Op.

[Qent]

Because of quests and dialogs.