SoC Ideas Multiplayer Campaign Support 2013

This page is related to Summer of Code 2013

See the list of Summer of Code 2013 Ideas

This is a Summer of Code 2013 Idea

Description

Game Engine: Improve Multiplayer Campaign Support

Page for the idea: SoC Ideas Multiplayer Campaign Support 2013

We need to make coding multiplayer campaigns as easy as coding single player campaigns, making it possible to use different difficulty levels, save/restore progress, and switch/remove/add players easily.

Suggested skills: C++ coding (the project some hard C++ coding tasks in a large codebase)

There is 1 student proposal for this idea

Andrius Silinskas (thunderstruck) - Multiplayer campaign improvements

The current multiplayer campaign support from both UMC developers/maintainers and players perspective is far behind comparing to singleplayer support. I propose a project to improve overall quality of multiplayer games by enabling singleplayer campaigns to be used as multiplayer campaigns and fixing most of the well known issues. The old multiplayer campaigns and scenarios should remain supported.
See SoC2013 thunderstruck MP Campaign Support for more information.

Additional Information

For a long time, creating the configuration for multiplayer and singleplayer scenarios were handled by different code paths. An effort was made to streamline and unify those paths, to remove some of many bugs that existed there.

Now, based on this work, we can do further changes allowing a single campaign WML configuration file to work both as a singleplayer and a multiplayer campaign - all the scenarios would be usable both in singleplayer and multiplayer. The multiplayer scenarios might have a different number of players - e.g. scenario 1 might have 1 human player, scenarios 2 and 3 might have 1-2 human players, and scenario 3 might have 1-3 human players. Proper between-scenario GUI dialogs must be created to make it easy to get additional players on the MP server join a game, to make it easy to select who plays which side, and to select additional configurable scenario options. Parts of this work would be usable outside of multiplayer campaign context, in stand-alone multiplayer scenarios.

To do those changes, wesnoth engine must be improved to load the game configuration correctly (in correct difficulty level, once selected), and to make sure all blocking bugs would be fixed.

As a result of this work, one of Wesnoth's campaigns would be made available as a multiplayer campaign, in time for the next stable release of Wesnoth.

Whom to ask about this

Crab_ on irc.