EnhanceMultiplayer

Enhance multiplayer games to allow more than two players

Enhance multiplayer games

Allow more than two players in the Windows version of TTD

2.0.1 alpha 56 or later

-=Switch=-

Configuration file: enhancemultiplayer on|off

Command line: -u

-=Description=-

Normal TTD allows only two players to play a multiplayer game. After enabling this switch, however, up to 8 players can join a game and play together with the Windows version of TTD. Networking is totally different in the DOS version, so this switch does nothing there.

If the switch is enabled, the "2 Players" button in the main menu will change to "Multiplayer", so you can easily tell if it's on or off.

How to set up multiplayer games with this feature:

• One of the players must be a server, others will be clients. The server doesn't need to be the fastest machine because it does no more network transactions than clients do.
• The server clicks "Multiplayer" in the main menu, selects "Host the game", TCP/IP (other protocols may not work well), then waits for clients to join.
• Clients click "Multiplayer" in the main menu, select "Connect to game", TCP/IP, then wait for the game to start.
• Every player is constantly informed about how many other people are in the session.
• When everyone is in, the server clicks "Start" to start the game.

From now on, TTD should behave just like it was in 2-player mode. You can start a new random game, load a previously saved game or start a scenario to begin playing.

This feature doesn't work perfectly yet and it isn't guaranteed to be stable in any way. Use it only if you want to help making it more stable by sending bug reports to the author.

Some things are guaranteed not to work in this first release:

• Subsidiary management and Cht: PlayerID. If you try to use them, all games will lock up or fall back to single player.
• Recording high scores in 2050.
• Since sv2flip doesn't support 2+ player games yet, desynchs can only be solved by loading an earlier savegame.

Known bugs:

• Sometimes when you want to end the game and go back to the title screen, some games lock up. I don't know what causes this, but exiting TTD seems to work fine.

This feature was contributed by Csaba Varga.