Multiplayer Games

[c1ph3rpunk]

Are there any plans for multi-player games? As in head to head across the network, NABU to NABU? Guess I should ask, are there any now that can do that?

I’m having my team from work over, in May, for one of my team bbq’s, 15-20 people, and was planning on setting up the NABU’s for them to play with, along with my other classic gaming consoles. Be neat if they could play NABU to NABU, even something like ASCII Battleship would be fun. Would also be cool if I could set the NABU’s up at VCFMW in a similar manner and let folks play.

[DJ Sures]

Not yet for nabu to nabu. But there are lots of two-player games! And one of the games I made is a 4-player, but your keyboard would need to be modified for 2 extra ports. Haha, although funny enough, there's a guy that, for the last 4 months, has been telling people he made a multiplayer nabu2nabu networked Bomberman xD but it doesn't actually exist O_o which is too bad. Because that would have been great for your party!

I did create a nabu multiplayer server that's built into the retronet chat server. I never did publish the library in nabulib. I bet productionDave will be all over that! If I get some time this week, I'll publish it - I can't recall its state. Because you're right - some cool games like multiplayer battleship would be super fun.

I also think a multiplayer dungeon-crawler text adventure would be a blast!

[c1ph3rpunk]

Thanks, I sort of figured that’s the state of things, too bad two-way comms weren’t available in the original NABU network or we’d probably have 2 more user areas full of them.

There’s a couple Battleship implementations around, though the ones I’ve seen were designed for UNIX tty to tty type play.

In the meanwhile, I’m thinking I’ll run some brackets for a couple games, Mario Kart 64 and something on the NABU. I have 2 NABU’s and can pick up 2 more controllers, so at least we can run 2 games at a time. I’ll have to run a “beta test” of it here soon, awh, I’ll have to skip some meetings for that. So sad.

[productiondave]

Would be fun to make multiplayer games. I dunno what kind of lag would be involved. Also most multiplayer games run a server of some kind. Either a Central server where all players connect to or one player also hosts the server in game.

Only way to do this reliably I think is to host a server somehow and have the games work against that.

Also a turn based multiplayer game will be much easier to make than a realtime one.

Anyway - I need to finish invaders. Writing it in assembly. Not C.

[c1ph3rpunk]

I was thinking a locally hosted server might be the way to start, in nabud or the Internet Adapter, that’d disconnect any lag issues from working out actually how to do it. Can test with MAME as well so you don’t _have_ to possess multiple NABU’s.

I vaguely remember tearing apart a Quake server many years ago, and there were routines to check lag via ping type operations.

But as I think about this, the fact that the network connection is on the IA itself, and not the NABU, sort of sends my brain into a crash loop. My todo list includes looking at how the RetroNET protocol works, are there any details on it anywhere? Packet/request types/structures, etc.

And yes, cannot wait for Invaders!!

[masto]

https://github.com/DJSures/NABU-LIB/tree/main/NABULIB functions as documentation; the headers and implementation are easy to read.

There is also the NHACP protocol, which is isn't used by as many things but it does have a protocol doc that reads kind of like an RFC with all the MUSTs and MAYs. https://github.com/thorpej/nabu-figfort ... u-comms.md

[LeoBinkowski]

My last game ever is multiplayer. It was called Scimitar, based on the Scepter of Goth. It's web site is archived here: https://drscape.com

I played the Scepter of Goth while still at NABU, and later, when I had an opportunity to buy the source, I did, expanded it, and launched it as a multi-line BBS, as well as later allowing it to be accessible via Alex (Bell Canada's failed attempt at Multitel), National Videotext, from AT&T, and finally as a game accessible from the nascent internet in 1995.

More than one person accessed Scimitar via NABUs.

It would really be great on a NABU, because it could be set to deal with 38 column text. It could be very terse.

It would be even more fun to make it graphical, using the sector combat in real time.

[c1ph3rpunk]

Boy there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while…