Perhaps introducing a free roam capability? Where either both characters must stay in the vicinity of one another, (just in case the game itself couldn't handle two areas of the world being generated at the exact same time, or loading at the exact same time.)
With the dynamic mod list loading/unloading, the rest shouldn't be too difficult. The game already has a certain “domain” of things actually active in the world. NPC’s and such outside the loaded cell/content don’t process in single player mode, so it would be as simple as keeping a “ping” going between members in the “instance” to basically check their distance from each other and if they were in the same cell ID.
If they were, THEN updates would sync the ID state of content either was interacting with in realtime. (As an aside, there are already “someone is already using that” type checks in the single player game, so some tweaks to that, i.e. if someone is already grabbing something, should be an easy enough addition.)
Otherwise, any changes made by any team member in that room would be stored in a floating “change cache” that would function as a mod to the "room" for parsing on cell loads and get synched from the server to all members the next time any of the group encountered that content (or when there were available threads/cycles.)
The traffic is just plain text file data so no major bandwidth requirement for a company like Bethesda, and no significant performance hit just changing positional data, stats, and container contents. Some other basic checks like synching weather, timescale, and the like would also have virtually no performance impact.
Anything changed by a player in multi-mode would get flagged for sync to the room they were signed in to. Rooms would have limits to the number who could use it at once, but again, I believe that number would be more arbitrary than based on any real performance hit if handled this way. Even if a player went offline before another member encountered what they changed, the room would keep the flags of things being changed by them while in multimode in virtual realtime. Sort of like how your character's position and status in an MMO is maintained on the server even if you lose your net connection.
Anything they had touched when they go offline has been continually synched to the server for that room as a dynamically loaded “mod” in itself while they were playing. This would also allow tracking statistics within the room of who changed how much of what, as each "contributor" to the room would have their own subfolder of "mod" data maintained as historical record even after it was synched.
So, you could literally “go your separate ways” within a room, then go offline, then later come back and encounter things that others of your companions changed or interacted with or “set up” in the world, whether they are logged on when you actually encounter it or not. Also, moderators of the room could choose to initiate a reset to baseline for their rooms, essentially the equivalent of starting a new save or character in single mode, resetting everything back to vanilla and the base mod profile for that room. Any other members who subsequently logged in would have their base character values copied to a new "room save" profile to reflect this.
There would be separate save formats of course for multi vs. single player, with the ability to import basic character appearance back and forth manually. Saves would be specific to rooms. Setting up a save for a room would be a lot like copying a character to a test realm, only since the room starts from scratch and builds, you would only import the basics (facegen, race data, etc.)
Multi mode content which had the sort of “arcing” causality as I touched on in my previous post, would receive a special flag to separate it from the rest of that user’s running “room profile,” and that specific content would be, unlike other content, available to load as a standalone mod in single player mode, to enable that “unlocked” aspect of the vanilla game.
This could be subtle or grandiose depending on how motivated Beth feels to go off with creating it.
I hear a lot of people say this would be against the spirit of TES, but I honestly don’t see it that way. TES has always been about creating worlds, and specifically, building on experiences of the community’s creative vision to expand those worlds. Something like this wouldn’t be against TES, it would be a HUGE step forward in what TES at its heart TRULY represents: The dynamic and interactive creation and exploration of virtual worlds, and new forms of human expression, creation, and communication.
I believe communication is at the heart of what the modding community represents. The fear, of course, is that it wouldn’t live up to expectations. But then there will always be those who automatically reject something outside of their known experience.
As Captain Picard once said, “I don’t see why you have to lose anything, just by adding a convenience.” This would add more than a convenience, it brings a whole new dimension of role playing possibilities to the table. I think it would be an AWESOME idea.
Oh, and speaking of communication, some form of console-based (or equivalent) chat functionality within TES would REALLY help me get that Morrowind book-reading dialogue mojo back on! Something about voice chat was always a little immersion breaking for me when playing RP.
I’d say 70% of my time spent in MMO’s was either parked in trade chat or in one of the global channels. But if you’re gonna do that, make sure you snag the open source spellcheck-as-you-go functionality to go with it!
*sigh*
Wish my programming skills were a little more well-rounded. Somehow coding database apps in Perl with basic networking conceptual knowledge just doesn't seem like the sort of help they'd need on a project like this. I am pretty good with a flow chart though, and brainstorming is one of my specialties, so I'm happy to offer some ideas, FWIW. =)
» Thu May 03, 2012 12:39 am 
