[Update] Dark Souls 2: Seamless Co-op - Map state location objects and warping design
Hi everyone
Apologies for the lack of development posts this month. Since I got back from vacation I've been hard at work on the finishing touches of the seamless co-op mod for Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin.
In this post I'll be discussing further progress I've made this week.
Map state location objects
Certain objects and levers have special conditions on them to prevent non-hosts from being able to interact with them. This also makes sure that NPCs cannot trigger switches and interact with the world in an unexpected way.
Unfortunately, as with all things in this game, it is made significantly more complicated than it should be and as a result I have had to completely redesign the way that this works so that certain players (e.g. phantoms) can interact with these switches, but invaders and restricted from some, but not all of them (e.g. if it causes the host to be in an unreachable area).
Warping design
Dark Souls: Remastered and the Dark Souls III seamless co-op mods have a shared warp design where the host is the only player to initiate a warp, and upon doing so everyone else in the session will be warped with them.
Although this can be frustrating for players, the reason behind this is because having players split up and go their own ways puts an incredible strain on the mod and makes enemy and map synchronisation especially difficult - in the best case scenario it works, but more than likely it causes dead enemies to be alive or in the worst case a game crash.
The obvious solution to this is to encourage players to stay together via shared warps, however when you have a hub area where you can only level up / upgrade at a specific location, it makes organising the group very frustrating. Some areas in Dark Souls II are also completely non-returnable meaning a warping item is the only way to return to the area.
For Dark Souls II seamless co-op, players will be able to warp, and explore the map separately if they wish however it is absolutely not the best way to experience the mod and will make issues, especially in the alpha stages of release, a lot more glaring.
If there are no invaders in the player's world, and they are not invader themselves:
Players may warp with bonfires separately
Players can use warp items - such as the darksign and homeward bone - separately
Players can get event warped alone (e.g. going to the Abyss)
Whether this will be changed in the future I'm not fully sure of yet, however for now I will try my best to get the mod as stable as possible and provide players with the freedom to explore.
Networking fixes
As per my last post, I have decided to include invasions in the initial alpha release of the mod. As a result, I've spend some more time patching the peer-to-peer packet data parsing functions in the game.
FromSoftware did a great job patching them as I described in the vulnerability document a few years ago, however some lingering issues remain with items and initialisation packets which I will need a bit longer to patch up.
As always - thank you for your patience and a huge thank you to all of my supporters <3
I will make another post in a few days discussing more of the work I've done.
Take care,
Yui