Thoughts about turning Dark Crescent into a huge single player campaign/rpg

DC Forums

Now Dark Crescent was meant to be as close to an MMORPG as possible, with tons of extra features and things never seen before. Everything we promised is still possible, and maybe even more so when 1.13 comes out. But it just doesn't seem worth it, it would probably be hard to get a full house with it, and have people only play the mod. Plus we need our own bnet server to make it work. Which we can't *legally* have.

So what I am proposing, is turning Dark Crescent into a single player campaign/RPG with almost the same amount of features. But with the sacrifice of a few features, it will make it much much easier to install, set up and play. There will also be a few NEW features added into it. Like (somewhat) random dungeons, easier saving, better mercenary control, cutscenes, cinematics, multiple multiboards and more. It would be much like Diablo II playing single player. Except hopefully better. We can also have more than 20 abilities per hero (if we actually need that) and past level 100. This would require mostly starting from scratch, but right now we aren't really making progress, because most of the original team has left.

For any of you who are interested in helping in any way, please post here, email me, or PM me. This will be a big project, and probably my last one until I move onto HL2.

Please, for the sake of.. well, me. Make it support one -OR MORE- players. Honestly, a one player campaign can be great but being limited to it no matter what is such a drag... Especially if it's a great map. If at all possible, make it support multiple players but playable with only one as well.

Yea releasing it single players probably best, it beats not ever finishing it.

Can't you just ask blizzard about having your own B.net server?

Sure, you'd have to pay for it, mantain it, run it, etc., people would have to agree to a disclaimer, etc., but I'm sure Blizzard won't object...

I would seriously prefer Dark Crescent as multiplayer, but singleplayer would be better than nothing.

As to getting a server, Blizzard isn't tight, and I'm sure if it was up to most of them they would let you have a server straight away, but there are legal difficulties in the way.

I would also prefer it to be multiplayer, but just having saved on your hard drive via cache is alot easier, we don't need a super program, we dont need a server and we dont need to have a 30 second wait.

Multiplayer would be much better, but the limits of bnet are just too high. Especially if I were to just use the regular bnet servers to host the mod on, people would attempt to join without having the mod active, they wouldn't know what it is all the time, and theres also the fact of desyncs for almost every function to enhance the gameplay. Plus I like the idea of (somewhat) random dungeons and stuff. Which is impossible with multiplayer, where everything would have to be on 1 map. Maybe I could even talk to stonedstoopid, and have the source for his program to run many players at once (in the future) for multiplayer support via single player.

NWN has better Multiplayer support problem is the game is different from warcraft. Im begging about that blizzard would game cache multiplayer support. it would just give so much more life to wc3. I hope that they would do that in 1.13.

umm... dc sounded great as multi player- sounds retarted as singleplayer. people will play for 10 min, and go do something else, never to come back again. this is for one reason, anyone who can actually get the map (knows where to find it) obviosly plays online as well, there aint many maps on bnet that aren't worth playing as much as a single player RPG.

soooooo if you aren't even going 2 attemept makeing it multiplayer, and u actually got a lot of stuff... could u just put what you have available, and let everyone scavanger what they wand from the pile and give credit to the dc team?

Stinky_Pooh, we'd rather not, too much time that can be ripped from us, so many people that won't give credit.

Another feature I am going to implement, which will take lots of coding, but will be very much worth it (ONLY available for single player use) is have EACH individual item have random abilities, like those in diablo II, and yes, there will be certain limits in can be randomized by. IE:

Some sort of charm item, that adds bonuses could have bonuses like this:
+1-4 strength
+5-20 life
+5-20 mana
+1-3 defence

Something like that, it will all be randomized. The reason this can only work on single player, is because for each item you carry, there will be about 200 bytes of data needed to be stored. And for all the items on you, and your mercenary(ies) you would end up transferring a meg each time. Which will take a huge amount of time.

Now, a question for you. What do you think would be better:

Extremely slow game loading time, limited tilesets, less detail to some areas. But to run without absolutely any other minor/major loads unless you restart. OR
Fairly decent loading time, almost-limit-less tilesets, more detail to areas, but with loading (5-20 seconds) for each area (depending on the area, dungeons will take about 5-10 seconds tops)

I can't decide, although the latter seems a much better idea, but the loads may become annoying.

nope. multiplayer, or not at all. BTW: you can actually run a bnet server legally. its in an unethical way, but, put many disclamers saying its for provate use (while itts REALLY for public use) and its all good. unethical, but 100% legal (in the states)

Read the EULA.
It says you can not run a battle.net server emulator for private or public use. Owning and operating & (maybe even connecting to one) voids your warentee, and can be a reason for blizzard to sue yo ass.

Yeah, and I talked to blizzard, and they won't let me run any kind of emulation. So that war forge or whatever it was before could have been sued hardcore by bliz.

Guys, what would be better, no loads or little loads

...anyone?

Can I just say that blizzard are making a big mistake?

Their losing money...without custom games, TFT would have put them totally out of buissness, as WC3 would have died.

The last thing that they want to do is annoy the custom map makers...

Little loads