Multiplayer development?

[CombatGold1]

Hello - I played OpenTTD and it's greatly improved from the normal TTD. Well done!

I also played multiplayer with ThorRune (Zetor2003) but I noticed some difficulties, which I have suggestions for:

1: The client should not specify what port to use in their config. Only the server should, then the client simply in-game should be able to say: connect to ip:port or hostname:port (internet and lan).

2: You mentioned NAT, this can be solved these days by adding UPnP where a port is dynamicly allocated and used to host the game.

3: Notification on the server, when someone joins the game. It was annoying constantly checking the player list to see if the other person connected or not.

4: In-Game messages, essential in any game Especially in full screen mode, where players wouldn't want to switch application to an instant messenger all the time.

5: Basic management server-side (Kicking players, banning players and IP's, passworded games, etc).



But besides those, great game you've made there! Nice work.

[lucaspiller]

1. A lot of users get confused trying to set up a game over their local network, how do you expect them to cope with the port too? Also hardly any (if any) games let you connect like that, they either let you change the port in a menu somewhere, in the config file or don't let you do it at all.

2. I don't think NAT really works like that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT. NAT allows many IPs (e.g. a local network) to use one IP to connect to another network (e.g. the internet). You cannot connect to the machines behind NAT unless you set up port forwarding. Also if it does work as you say it seems like it will be a lot of work.

3. Don't you get something saying a new company has started? But yes this would definately be a plus.

4. Someone is working on a patch for this, I was but gave up.

5. That would be good and I think it is being planned.

[dominik81]

Multiplayer is not officially supported, because it is not finished yet. We're working on finishing it for release 0.4.0 (no ETA yet). In-game chat (by sign_de) is one of the things that is almost finished.

[VladP17]

So will the version 0.4.0 for linux support a server browser?