Solution to the limited number of lobby slots in demigod?

By Exxcentric on January 26, 2011 3:56:13 AM from

Ok here is the concept:

Currently new demigods are limited by the number of lobby slots avaliable (4 random slots). After some thought over this problem (and playing LoL of late), what if the lobby randomly selected demigods from a list and you were presented with 14 demigods (similar to the LoL free to play champions of the week). So you would get a different set of heroes each time you joined a lobby.

This would effect a few things: first each person that joined a lobby would be presented with a different set of demigods to choose from and this might increase variablity of demigods played. It would also open up the potential for adding new (reskinned) demigods to the game.

Mithy has already written code for the ui to autofill slots in shops, and after a small amount of investigation, there is potential for this to be added to the demigod lobby. Add in a randomiser so that you can alter the demigods which are avalible and you have a new viable alternative to simply replacing the random slots.

This would of course potentially take a large amount of work, both to add new (balanced) demigods to the game, and to get this to work properly (and to make sure it did not cause invalid gamestates) but i thought i would put out some feelers.

Exx

+47 Karma | 4 Replies

Stuff like this is fun... modding the lobby requires a brand new dgdata.zip, though, doesn't it? Its not terrible. But then talking about creating new heroes... my you are feeling ambitious today I'm guessing you are just talking about creating or changing skills on existing dgs and giving them a diff name? Or have you magically come up with a way to create new models?

TBH, i am not sure how much work modding the lobby would entail, i was just looking to see if anyone was interested in such an idea (as there have been threads going around on how to balance games) and i thought that if there were new demigods created by the community this might be a valid method of going about introducing them in multiplayer matches.

As for models, i purchased supcom 2 when it was released (another GPG game) and have been doing a *small* amount of experimentation to see if i can get the models to work in demigod. I am not sure how GPG will take this (ie removing stuff from one of their games into the other) due to copywrite restriction so i have not released it, but i am pretty sure it is possible (albiet devoid of animations).

Note here that both use the same game engine and are granny files

Yes, this requires that you replace dgdata.zip. Even if you can search for internet games with a modified data file, there is no way to determine whether or not other players are using the same modified file.

With the FA lobby mods, if you tried to join the lobby for a game that didn't have the same lobby mods you had, a whole variety of things could happen, ranging from immediate problems to absolutely no indication of problems until the game launched, at which point it would instantly desync. Lobby mods in FA were used only for skirmish play for this reason.

Second, the shop auto-fill thing I wrote has little or no implication for a lobby re-write, which would be a fairly significant task. I've looked at the Demigod selection parts of the lobby before, and it seemed pretty significant and confusing. I'm not entirely sure that it's possible to actually change available demigod slots. It should be possible to jury-rig some kind of extra demigod selection by hijacking an existing slot, but it would be messy and a lot of work.

Lastly, I don't see the draw for limiting demigod selection other than for 'uniques' type games. And as I just said in another recent post, GPG themselves tried to pull this off (there are code remnants that hint at such a system), and didn't have the time/resources/engine capability to do it.

Since nobody can effectively make additional demigod models due to the Granny issues, you're limited to shallow copies of existing demigods, using the same meshes and animations. Sure you can tweak a few things, add different abilities, but you can already do that with existing demigods, and nobody has put forth the effort for that kind of single-demigod 'total conversion' anyway.

I'm not trying to crush your dreams, but holy crap would doing any of this be a lot of work. Even if I had endless time and motivation, I'd be hard pressed to pull it off. And given that the game's problems are already too much of everything (so many useless items, demigods, skills), rather than not enough, I definitely don't have the motivation to start on anything this big.

ok worth a though

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Solution to the limited number of lobby slots in demigod?