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The MP campaign has been discussed ad-nauseum here at the org but I can't remember seeing it approached from this angle:
Assuming some smart modder can reverse engineer the MTW save game files, we could generate a simple program to change the results of battles, movement, honor, and etc.
Now consider this situation; A person wants to set up a MP campaign and invites several of his buddies to play along. This person runs what is considered a master computer and can be a neutral observer or an active participant(and is henceforth referred to as the referee).
Players first choose their factions and make their first move.
They then save their game and email/upload it to the master computer.
The referee takes each of these savefiles and with the knowledge of who runs what faction combines the player's movement into a single savegame file.
He then clicks 'End Turn' and makes note of who fights who.
Any battles that need to be fought will then be done online or offline by the required players.
The players then email the results of their battles back to the referee and he will modify his current save game to reflect these results.
This save game is then emailed back to the players and we wash rinse and repeat.
There is no problem with the order of players movement -they all effectively go at the same time and without the knowledge of the other MP campaigners.
This solution is fully scalable in that the master computer handles AI players automatically; meat players just supersede some of the AI's moves.
The master computer determines when the players should resolve a conflict in battle and those conflicts against an AI can be done as a custom battle.
The method outlined above seems incredibly tedious but I don't see why we couldn't set up some sort of online server to automate things somewhat. When we get logfiles, these can be sent back to the master computer as a quick record of the results of battle. Otherwise MP Campaigners can fill in an online page. With complete knowledge of how games are saved, I don't think it's impossible to have an application that automatically merges a players movement into a master savegame file.
The save game files are thankfully not encrypted and, I believe, we could probably figure out how they're laid out. Any reason why this won't work?
Tms
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its opted before, and it would be nice if someone can do this. but its beyond the power of our khan...
