Game Development Community

Tge and 4 player multiplayer splitscreen

by Tom · in Torque Game Engine · 07/22/2007 (1:10 pm) · 7 replies

Hi,

i am hopeing to develop a way to get 4 player split screen into tge, and when its ready release it as a resource

however, i am a noob, and i would appreciate some hints or tips as to how i would accomplish this

anyone is welcome to add/contribute in this because i beleive this is an essential part of a game engine that

has been neglected for far too long

anyway, i am planning on using the multiple view ports resource as a base and then enable mulitple clients to connect to the server (all clients are on the same machine, one menu handles all the key binds, then each players view is rendered in its own view port)

i have the view ports covered.

but as of right now i have no idea how i will link mulitple clients, and multipl player objects... thats where i was hoping to maybe get some help, or hints, or inspiration

anyway, if someone has an idea that they want to share, please share ill appreciate any input, and once the resource is done, credit will be given where credit is due!

#1
07/26/2007 (11:40 am)
Hmmm, absolutly no clues? no one? hmm... this might be harder than i thought

i came to the conclusion that i could edit the source, so that it basically created 4 connections with 4 players, then sets 4 game pads to the 4 players and uses the multiple view ports to display....

anyway yeah... ill try to get this to work
#2
08/24/2007 (2:58 pm)
There's a TGB resource here that could prove helpful that's done all in script:

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=11829
#3
08/24/2007 (7:42 pm)
This is a huge task! Search the forums and you will find many people have discussed this over the years. A lot of the problems have to do with the client/server portion of the engine and passing joystick/keyboard/mouse messages for two/three/four people instead of one. I think your best bet would be to require all four players use a separate joypad and map the inputs to each player control via your viewports. However, handling simple things like dialogs will be interesting at best. You may have to rewrite whole portions of the engine!
#4
08/25/2007 (8:11 am)
I was gonna use 2-4 xbox 360 gamepads. that way i dont have to deal with different keys like you have sugested.

i will continue to do some research etc, but since university begins again in like a week:S i dont think im gonna have too much time to rewrite the engine.... hmm

who knows, maybe we could make a petition about this for garagegames to include split screen in maybe v1.6 TGE or v2 TGEA lol

anyway, thanks for all the suggestions:)
#5
08/25/2007 (11:07 am)
It is not impossible, just a lot of work. I really like the idea of using gamepads with at least 2 screens. However, a lot more people have more than one computer in the house so starting with networked solutions even just in the home is a good start.

Another issue is rendering the scene 2 to 4 times. This is going to put more load on the system and a system that runs fine on one screen may slow to a crawl with more screens.
#6
08/25/2007 (3:03 pm)
2-4 screens may be a bit kill:S

i was thinking one screen, that split

with multiple view ports

the game pads is awesome i think, also, now-a-days you can connect ur comptuer to like lcd and plasma tvs (i know, not everyone has one..) but it would take care of like dimension problems

plus, on a quad core, yeah player has a core (at least if there was a way to control wich threats go onto which core:S)
#7
08/25/2007 (4:58 pm)
No, not screens as in video screens, but as in view ports. Unless you have more than one video card performance will suffer unless you reduce detail. Quad core will not help if the video card is the bottleneck.