Hey everyone, welcome to another Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday! Last week we I mentioned that Multiplayer was almost ready to play. Very soon now, we hope to release a very early version of it on a special password protected branch, much as we did with the new building editor a few weeks ago. Check our fourm at discourse.stonehearth.net for details. Until then, let’s take a look at how it will work!
Multiplayer Basics
Recap from the video:
Once multiplayer is active in Stonehearth, it’s pretty easy to start a multiplayer game. First, figure out which of your friends you’d like to play with, and figure out which of you has the beefiest computer and the internet connection with the fastest upload speeds. This person should be the host of the multiplayer game–the person who runs the server and to whom everyone else connects.
If you are the host, from the main screen, select multiplayer, select the max number of people you’d like in your game, and start the game by picking your kingdom and biome and difficulty level. Everyone else who connects will be able to select which kingdom they want to pick, but the biome and difficulty level are set by the host for the duration of the game.
Start your game as usual! At this point, your friends may now connect to your game. The easiest way to do this is if you’re all on steam together. Friends should make sure Stonehearth is instealled, find you in their friends list, right click your name, and select “join game”. If this option isn’t available, everyone should check their steam permissions and ports to make sure all the right options are checked. Engineer Morgan is also adding some UI to do this from inside the game, in case you like your steam permissions as they are. Anyway, if you select join game, stonehearth automatically starts. If there are mods you must first install, because they are active on the host’s machine, you are brought to a screen where you can verify and accept this step. Finally, you’re taken to the kingdom selection screen.
When the second player is ready to select their settlement’s starting location, they will see a big pillar of light where the first player placed their town. This is so that you can play in the same space, if you like, to create the feeling of making a town together, or so that you can choose to settle far apart, to fulfill the fantasy that many of you have told us about, that you want to build your city while seeing other cities on the horizon.
At this point, the game progresses pretty much as usual, except that as your towns grow, you can trade items, create and decorate a joint space, and use your militaries to help each other out as monsters attack you both. On our team, we tend to play different kingdoms, and then have each player specialize in different areas–food production, military, decoration, road creation, trade etc. One of my personal favorite things to do is collaborate on an epic city or town, with each person bringing their own style to the experience, while narrating the story of our individual hearthlings and their interactions as we go.
One thing I mentioned last fall that worked out really well from our prototypes was borrowing from VR to add a sense of “presence” to the world: though you the player do not exist on hearth, playing together means wanting to know what your friends are thinking and planning, so you don’t harvest the same resources or plan to till the same ground. To that end, we added the ability for people to see each other’s cursors, and whether or not people are dragging out farms or harvest regions. If you press alt+left mouse button, you can also send out a ping, to call everyone’s attention to a place with a chime and a beam of light. Though we recommend the game be played with voice chat through a 3rd party service like discord, we also added in-game chat so that you can coordinate via typing, if needed.
Some additional details! If you’re not on Steam, you can still totally play multiplayer. Instead of connecting via steam friends, you will want to modify your user_settings.json file to open some ports and state which machine is the host, and to which machine the clients will connect. You will then have to make sure all computers have the same version of every mod.
Engineer Angelo, Engineer, Linda, and Engineer Morgan have been working incredibly hard on multiplayer. Most recently, they’ve been working to slim down the amount of data sent between players, which has been creating lag, and we think it’s almost ready for wider playtesting, provided that you’re ready for a whole bunch of bugs and surprising weirdness. Personally, I know this is a feature a lot of people have wanted since the beginning, and I’m very excited to see it in all of your hands, to hear your stories, and see your cities, and maybe even all play together. We’ll post details on discourse.stonehearth.net as soon as we’re ready to go.
Other Announcements
Stream should happen as usual on Thursday at 6:00pm PST on www.twitch.tv/stonehearth. This week it’s Artist Allie, so come bring your questions about buns, tier stuff, biomes, Northern Alliance, templates, or titans!
The new building editor is almost ready for the unstable branch! If you’d like to make sure we get as many bugs as possible before we go, you can check out the details to get to the special rickety building branch, also on discourse.stonehearth.net