Offline multiplayer

[usewriter]

Hello,

I just had a small idea to enjoy the benefits of playing FTL with friends without (hopefully) the harassment of full code rewriting or the loss of the good balance of the game.

The interest of the game is to complete the journey based on a procedurally generated world which define what enemies will be met, what their weapons will be, what systems and jump nodes will exists and so on.
To summarize, the output will mostly depend of luck (and your talent).

With this, you just can't compete with friends because initial "dices-roll" will be different for every player.

If it is possible to get a "shared initial roll" settings, available by a file or seed character string - don't know how it is generated - it will be feasible to compete between pals on different computers on the same environment and to see who can beat defined goals (finish the game, be the first to destroy X ships or anything the players agreed on at the beginning of the game).

The share of the file or the char string, the synchronization between players or the objectives definition can be done with any third party mean and won't be part of the game functions.

Another benefit is you can archive the file/seed string and try to see what would have been the output if your choices would have been different.

Of course, this proposition is not valid if the procedural generation is not done initially once at the beginning of the game but occurs on every jump or system change. In this case, it may require too many changes to be implemented.

What do you think of the idea?
Is it feasible?
Do you think it would be a good thing so we can enjoy FTL with friends without trashing the whole game?

[Blooperluigi]

Hey
I'm developing an online/LAN mod if you're interested. http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=22259
It's very early in development atm but I'm just letting you know that I'd love to see MP too
Thanks,
Blooper

[kartoFlane]

As far as I know, the sector map is generated once at the beginning of the game, which I think includes sector types (civilian, hostile, nebula), but not specific sectors (pirate, rebel-controlled, homeworlds, etc).
So theoretically you could start a game with a ship of your choosing, then exit and send the continue.sav to your friend.
The Profile Editor can provide a means of changing the ship even after the save is created.

[usewriter]

As far as I know, the sector map is generated once at the beginning of the game, which I think includes sector types (civilian, hostile, nebula), but not specific sectors (pirate, rebel-controlled, homeworlds, etc).
So theoretically you could start a game with a ship of your choosing, then exit and send the continue.sav to your friend.
The Profile Editor can provide a means of changing the ship even after the save is created.

Thanks for your suggestion, I will give it a look.

I will also follow carefully Blooperluigi's mod, this may definitely be interesting.