Optional coop-only thing spawning

Moderator: GZDoom Developers

Post Reply
Tesseract
Posts: 25
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:06 am

Optional coop-only thing spawning

Post by Tesseract »

I've recently finally got an opportunity to play Zdoom cooperatively with friend after many years. Netcode was as great as I was afraid of, but after we've gone through desyncs (mostly caused by our mistakes) and eventually dealing even with this bug (by using more stable net connection), we had lots and lots of fun.

Unfortunately, after we had arrived in Doom 2, we've noticed lots of extra ammo scattered around maps. I always thought there is distinct coop and deathmatch flag on things, but apparently vanilla maps have only one, universal multiplayer flag. That means deathmatch specific stuff is always presented in coop, which breaks the game flow quite horribly. This issue was already looked at and worst case (deathmatch weapons everywhere) got it's own dmflag. Other things like ammo and items sadly didn't got the same treatment.

I've found hard to believe noone asked for such feature before, and indeed they did.
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=23196
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=33722
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=13578
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=11609

One guy even did this
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=25544

The requests themselves were NOed, but it seemed to me no strong points against such addition were raised and in one case it was closed mostly due poster's rudeness.

As patch like this is really trivial, I went ahead and coded it.

In addition of weapon removing flag, there are two new ones, one that disallows spawning of extra multiplayer monsters and second that disallows spawning of the rest of multiplayer only actors (minus guns and monsters). Setting everything off effectively makes coop completely like singleplayer.

I've chosen this way just because I didn't want to eat too much new dmflags (as dmflags2 is nearly full), but having separate ammo/items/armor/... is definately an option. I'd also note that 'rest' covers even stuff like extra barrels in E1M1 and other accidentaly multiplayer flagged things.

Also, if explanation for specific 'extra monsters' option is needed, many levelpacks are coop-balanced for several players with appropriate enemy hordes (Scythe 2 for example). If you play 'singleplayer style', trying not to die often, with only two players, this is sometimes not desirable.

These options are used only in coop, but alwaysapplydmflags forces them in deathmatch too (unlike sv_noweaponspawn!).

Hope others will find these useful and enjoyable as much as I do already!
Attachments
coopoptions.zip
(1.14 KiB) Downloaded 205 times
Gez
 
 
Posts: 17834
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 3:22 pm

Re: Optional coop-only thing spawning

Post by Gez »

Tesseract wrote:I always thought there is distinct coop and deathmatch flag on things, but apparently vanilla maps have only one, universal multiplayer flag.
More precisely, it has a "not singleplayer" flag. Everything always spawn in multiplayer.

Boom added "not deathmatch" and "not cooperative" flags; and Hexen (and therefore ZDoom) went the other way by making separate single/dm/coop flags.
User avatar
edward850
Posts: 5886
Joined: Tue Jul 19, 2005 9:06 pm
Location: New Zealand
Contact:

Re: Optional coop-only thing spawning

Post by edward850 »

I'm not a fan of adding 2 different flags for something that should be otherwise the same thing. On top of that, multiplayer was always just that, and people designed maps already around the concept that this meant both Co-op and Deathmatch. This seems like something best left alone, rather then trying to define arbitrary rules for something that already existed.
User avatar
Ryan Cordell
Posts: 4349
Joined: Sun Feb 06, 2005 6:39 am
Preferred Pronouns: No Preference
Operating System Version (Optional): Windows 10
Graphics Processor: nVidia (Modern GZDoom)
Location: Capital of Explodistan

Re: Optional coop-only thing spawning

Post by Ryan Cordell »

"and people designed maps already around the concept that this meant both co-op and deathmatch"
And.. okay, so we can just fricking safely ignore the other/future maps who want to define separate deathmatch/co-op rules now or something?
User avatar
edward850
Posts: 5886
Joined: Tue Jul 19, 2005 9:06 pm
Location: New Zealand
Contact:

Re: Optional coop-only thing spawning

Post by edward850 »

Ryan Cordell wrote:And.. okay, so we can just fricking safely ignore the other/future maps who want to define separate deathmatch/co-op rules now or something?
Gez wrote:Boom added "not deathmatch" and "not cooperative" flags; and Hexen (and therefore ZDoom) went the other way by making separate single/dm/coop flags.
A linear timeline means that these features will continue to exist for future maps :P. If a map is made to utilize this feature, then that would mean it would need to be a Vanilla map to start with, and thus already not a ZDoom map, and thus shouldn't be made for this feature.

... My head hurts thinking about this loop...
Tesseract
Posts: 25
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:06 am

Re: Optional coop-only thing spawning

Post by Tesseract »

Thanks folks for your opinions!
edward850 wrote:I'm not a fan of adding 2 different flags for something that should be otherwise the same thing.
Well, I'm not sure I follow you properly here. For me, these two flags offers separate effects fitting different needs that can be combined further. Setting multiplayer monsters off has the advantage to set difficulty exactly to SP level, while the second option gets rid of things like berserk in very second room of E1M1. You may argument that that's not how it's meant to be played, but rationale behind this is the same as with other gameplay options, to provide customizeability that can simply please larger group of players. Of course, both new options are off by default.
You are indeed right that it's less needed in more modern maps, but my point that player should be able to fine-tune gameplay to his liking stands even here.

Another fancy thing this patch offers is easy way to play singleplayer with respawning, it's just multiplayer with one player and disabling all 3 coop spawning options.
Post Reply

Return to “Closed Feature Suggestions [GZDoom]”