MultiCave - Cave Story Multiplayer

Sep 22, 2014 at 2:08 PM
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v2
Going to reprogram the game from scratch, random bugs, extremely messy code, yadda yadda yadda.

Here's a demo.

MultiCave v1_260: Download

Server v15: Download

And for people who don't want to or can't play, here's a video.



For the newer version, I'm hopefully going to include editors, to give you the capability of easily modding the game.

F.A.Q.
Q: Game crashes when I start the game, WTF?
A: The music engine crashes sometimes on first start for some reason, try again.

Q: It still crashes...
A: I don't really know how to help you there.

Q: What's with all the "Quotes" in the custom skin section?
A: Every player has to have a unique player skin for the custom skin feature to work properly. If 2 players choose the same player skin, only one custom skin will be shown on both of them.

Q: Do I need to send the custom skins to my friends?
A: The game sends the skins to the other players automatically, though it is not 100% reliable. Sometimes it sends, sometimes it doesn't.


Q: Yo, some stuff is missing, such as the prompt for retrying.
A: I never got around to adding it.

Q: When will the new version come out?
A: http://youtu.be/EmzghgVsU1Y?t=4m2s


v1
Yep, you better believe it!
Not a suggestion, but an actual thing that I have been working on for the couple past days. :D

This is a Cave Story clone with multiplayer in it, built in Clickteam Fusion 2.5.
Basically, someone has to host a server, and players connect to said server, the first one to connect becomes the "host" of the game.
This "host" will be the leader for the group, and all the other players are dragged along on your adventure, this means that only the host can interact with certain things, such as dialogue and map transitions.

Here is a preview:


Screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/5tyuxYz.png
http://i.imgur.com/Vq3ubdQ.png

No downloads or demos as of yet.

Please let me know what you think!
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 2:21 PM
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This looks really good, actually. One thing I will recommend is letting the second player use the health/missile refill. And speaking of the health/missile refill, what do you have planned for deaths so far? Does the person who died make all the others resume at the last save point? Does the person who died just respawn at the last door entered at? I would say the latter option, but the first option would be more true to Cave Story, but also hinder the other players a lot more. Also, how's the second player going to get their guns if they can't interact with anything? Do they automatically get the Polar Star if player one gets it? If so, do they automatically get all the guns player one has gotten? That might cause some problems if player one prefers the Nemesis over the Blade, but player two prefers the Blade over the Nemesis, or if player one wants the Machine Gun but player two wants the Spur.
I know this is a demo and not a lot has been set in stone, but it would help to think ahead of the possibilities. Like, maybe something to make it less of a hassle between players is having player two able to interact with anything but map changing events, so that if they want a gun different than what player one wants, it won't be an issue.
(Something else that you could do but won't really affect much is alternate costumes, so that player one doesnt get player two mixed up with player three if players two and three picked the same character. For example, if player two picks Curly first and player three picks Curly second, player three's Curly would look like Easy Mode Curly from the Cave Story eShop edition, and so on. There's just enough costumes for everyone to play as Curly, if this is limited to four players.)
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 2:43 PM
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Kayya said:
This looks really good, actually. One thing I will recommend is letting the second player use the health/missile refill. And speaking of the health/missile refill, what do you have planned for deaths so far? Does the person who died make all the others resume at the last save point? Does the person who died just respawn at the last door entered at? I would say the latter option, but the first option would be more true to Cave Story, but also hinder the other players a lot more. Also, how's the second player going to get their guns if they can't interact with anything? Do they automatically get the Polar Star if player one gets it? If so, do they automatically get all the guns player one has gotten? That might cause some problems if player one prefers the Nemesis over the Blade, but player two prefers the Blade over the Nemesis, or if player one wants the Machine Gun but player two wants the Spur.
I know this is a demo and not a lot has been set in stone, but it would help to think ahead of the possibilities. Like, maybe something to make it less of a hassle between players is having player two able to interact with anything but map changing events, so that if they want a gun different than what player one wants, it won't be an issue.
(Something else that you could do but won't really affect much is alternate costumes, so that player one doesnt get player two mixed up with player three if players two and three picked the same character. For example, if player two picks Curly first and player three picks Curly second, player three's Curly would look like Easy Mode Curly from the Cave Story eShop edition, and so on. There's just enough costumes for everyone to play as Curly, if this is limited to four players.)

Thanks for the reply! Alot of interesting questions.
For the health/missile refill, I'm possibly going to make it so the host revives everyone by using that.
If a player dies, the game carries on, if the host dies, everyone loses and have to start over at the last save. (How I intended to make it, anyway.)
The other players would share the same guns that the host carries. If a save was loaded, the other players would have the same guns as the host. I might consider the idea, though.
About the costumes...
First off, there's going to be a toggle for showing player names, seeing who is who.
Second, there will probably be a lot more costumes to choose from later in development.
Third, you can have as many players as the server can handle, there's no real limit.
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 2:51 PM
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I'm interested in what you're doing for lag compensation. Since there is a host, I'm assuming this runs on an authoritative server as opposed to P2P, so what happens to the clients when they press a button? Does it predict their motions and then correct with rollback, or do they have to wait for the instruction packet to make a round trip? Not that I'm suggesting p2p would be a better alternative. That opens up a whole new cascade of issues.

I've been wondering how to tackle this issue myself lately.
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 4:16 PM
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Fluffball said:
I'm interested in what you're doing for lag compensation. Since there is a host, I'm assuming this runs on an authoritative server as opposed to P2P, so what happens to the clients when they press a button? Does it predict their motions and then correct with rollback, or do they have to wait for the instruction packet to make a round trip? Not that I'm suggesting p2p would be a better alternative. That opens up a whole new cascade of issues.

I've been wondering how to tackle this issue myself lately.
For the multiplayer part, I'm using an extension called "Lacewing", it is extremely simple to use.
Once a player has done a keypress, it will send whatever you tell it to send to wherever you want, server, channel or peer, also if you want to send(TCP) or blast(UDP).

For example, when a player presses the left arrow, it sends/blasts the player position, animation value, aswell as direction, to channel (number).
Now, on the other players, it checks if something has been sent/blasted to the channel you specified. If it has, then it will set all the values to the ones you recieved.
For player movement, I used UDP, since we don't ALWAYS need to know where they are. But for something like map transitions, it has to be TCP, as everyone HAS to change map.
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 4:19 PM
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oh.... I didn't think about the clients directly sending their position data. That method is not normally used since it's extremely prone to cheating/hacking. If that's not an issue though I suppose it's not something to worry about.
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 6:30 PM
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Nice, looking forward to a demo. :D
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 9:04 PM
2dbro
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oh my god this is what i wanted since cave story was a part of my life i will 5 star this
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 10:00 PM
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I can't believe nobody made a post on a multiplayer cave story. Looking forward to it.
Two things though, will it allow mods somehow, and will enemies/bosses be powered up with more players?
Because host sitting in the corner of ballos fight while everyone destroys him sounds op.
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 10:09 PM
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Sora655 said:
I can't believe nobody made a post on a multiplayer cave story. Looking forward to it.
Two things though, will it allow mods somehow, and will enemies/bosses be powered up with more players?
Because host sitting in the corner of ballos fight while everyone destroys him sounds op.

Mods? Probably not.
Enemies/Bosses will be more difficult and have more health depending on how many players are connected.
 
Sep 22, 2014 at 11:09 PM
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Super hyped for this, keep up the good work dude.
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 12:05 AM
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Is local multiplayer possible?
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 2:02 AM
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I looked at the thread's title and shook my head in disgust. I clicked on it, and found that this is actually the most promising "Multiplayer Cave Story." Keep up the good work!
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 7:29 AM
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They always said a multiplayer Cave Story would not be possible.

If you can pull it off, that would be amazing. I love the designs for the Mimigas, although having two Curlys in the game might become confusing later on. Maybe consider having two Quotes in two different coloured outfits, or making playable Curly look distinguished. Again, that might be strange, considering how you do tag along with her at one point in the game. :/

Up to how many players will be allowed to connect? There are five characters to choose from, however I only saw four players in the preview screenshots. And about how much longer do you anticipate a demo release?
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 11:10 AM
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Random-storykeeper said:
They always said a multiplayer Cave Story would not be possible.
If you can pull it off, that would be amazing. I love the designs for the Mimigas, although having two Curlys in the game might become confusing later on. Maybe consider having two Quotes in two different coloured outfits, or making playable Curly look distinguished. Again, that might be strange, considering how you do tag along with her at one point in the game. :/
Up to how many players will be allowed to connect? There are five characters to choose from, however I only saw four players in the preview screenshots. And about how much longer do you anticipate a demo release?
I already answered this question:

Anonymouse said:
First off, there's going to be a toggle for showing player names, seeing who is who.
Second, there will probably be a lot more costumes to choose from later in development.
Third, you can have as many players as the server can handle, there's no real limit.
As for a demo, I can't really tell right now, sorry.
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 12:33 PM
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Good work so far! Lots of people have theorized about multiplayer CS before, it's lovely to see it happen. I could imagine it being lots of fun to run through with friends or something :3
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 9:11 PM
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Just a suggestion, because my friend asked, are you planning on porting it to Mobile devices such as iOS, Android, and others? Having it on PC is better than nothing, but it's just a suggestion.
 
Sep 23, 2014 at 10:09 PM
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2DBro said:
Just a suggestion, because my friend asked, are you planning on porting it to Mobile devices such as iOS, Android, and others? Having it on PC is better than nothing, but it's just a suggestion.
Sorry, this will not be possible. I am only able to export it as a Windows executable.
 
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