Larger map support

[Hyzoran]

Hey all, just got back into Dungeon Keeper again (been busy playing Unreal, Total war, etc.)
and I am very satisfied playing Dungeon Keeper with the latest FX patch. (Tried playing lan with my brother though using tcp/ip...crashed within 5 mins of gameplay lol.)

However im wondering, is there a way, possibly hex editing or otherwise, to make bigger maps? (and possibly have more than 4 keepers, lol)
If not, is it possible for it to be added to FX?

Would be awesome to play an 8 person ffa map on a 256x256 map lol.

I feel im asking for a little too much though lol, as if they needed more work.

[Gold Knight]

im wondering, is there a way, possibly hex editing or otherwise, to make bigger maps? (and possibly have more than 4 keepers, lol)
If not, is it possible for it to be added to FX?

Well it's possible to turn the game into a first person RPG, but that does not mean it's going to happen. Whether it's plausible is an entirely different matter. I would safely say that it is never going to happen. If it was, you would be waiting years. It's hard enough to clean up the code and bugs let alone implement full-scale changes.

You've got to realise why the expansion is being made. KeeperFX is not designed for the purpose of adding more players and larger maps. It is designed to fix bugs, balance the game and improve the overall quality of the game. If someone else wants to have a go at adding these things, that's fine. But I doubt Mefistotelis is going to go to that amount of trouble for something with so little benefit.

Would be awesome to play an 8 person ffa map on a 256x256 map lol.

I feel im asking for a little too much though lol, as if they needed more work.

Yes, it may be awesome, but I'm fairly sure the entire game would need to be rewritten for things like that to work. It would also complicate things to the point where KeeperFX could become more buggy than the original game. And besides, DK multiplayer doesn't work properly (if at all, really) at the moment and probably won't for quite a while.

Short answer: No.

[Hyzoran]

Not knowing the innerworkings of this game (other than map scripts), I had no idea how far off something like this would be, didnt mean to sound demanding. Thanks for the answer .

Back to mapping...

[Ballwinkle]

Larger map wouldnt be that hard to get working. However i dont think more than 4 players will ever be on the cards. You would also have to update map editors to support the new map sizes

[DragonsLover]

Dungeon Keeper uses a grid of 256 x 256 subtiles (the last column and the last row being blank). If you'd like to make bigger maps, you'd have to make the dimensions to use 2 bytes instead of one, meaning that you could get maps of 65536 x 65536 which would be imho, enormous and unplayable.

But the problem mainly comes from the amount of memory required for the things and creatures involved. The way the game actually works has already a limited amount of the things for the actual size of the maps. Without having bigger maps, you can already reach the maximum of things and creatures easily until increasing them as well.

And having more than 4 Keepers means A LOT of processing, without considering the bigger amount of creatures required. Actually, the game may already crash if you play a map with 4 players for some time, so imagine with 8... And for the amount of minions, if you have 8 players, you must split the maximum total of creatures and divide it by 8 which means, for each player: 32 creatures, and this includes imps, meaning that you wouldn't have to create too much imps if you want a good army unless, once again, you increase the maximum allowed.

So, yeah, maybe it could be done, but it would end up by a too big use of memory and processing.

[Hyzoran]

Dungeon Keeper uses a grid of 256 x 256 subtiles (the last column and the last row being blank). If you'd like to make bigger maps, you'd have to make the dimensions to use 2 bytes instead of one, meaning that you could get maps of 65536 x 65536 which would be imho, enormous and unplayable.

But the problem mainly comes from the amount of memory required for the things and creatures involved. The way the game actually works has already a limited amount of the things for the actual size of the maps. Without having bigger maps, you can already reach the maximum of things and creatures easily until increasing them as well.

And having more than 4 Keepers means A LOT of processing, without considering the bigger amount of creatures required. Actually, the game may already crash if you play a map with 4 players for some time, so imagine with 8... And for the amount of minions, if you have 8 players, you must split the maximum total of creatures and divide it by 8 which means, for each player: 32 creatures, and this includes imps, meaning that you wouldn't have to create too much imps if you want a good army unless, once again, you increase the maximum allowed.

So, yeah, maybe it could be done, but it would end up by a too big use of memory and processing.

Are you talking about Online play, because I never wanted these things to be added to netplay, (by 8 players I meant 7 cpus and one human.)

Of course TCP/IP play is bad enough as it is, which hopefully, would be improved overtime.

[P_Hansson]

The *real* issue is that it's just insanely complicated to add certain features to KeeperFX compared to using a normal game engine, primarily because the code has to be reverse engineered from machine code, but also because programmers at the time when DK was developed used coding practices that are considered obsolete by modern standards for large scale application development. E.g. there are global variables everywhere, so it's very hard to see what code writes to what data.

In this particular case of map size, the problem is mostly due to the fact there's a lot of code (both reverse engineered and machine code) that expects the map data to stay in the current fixed size format. So changing it is completely unrealistic unless you want to employ a full time programmer/engineer for a year or so.

[DragonsLover]

Are you talking about Online play, because I never wanted these things to be added to netplay, (by 8 players I meant 7 cpus and one human.)

Of course TCP/IP play is bad enough as it is, which hopefully, would be improved overtime.

Nope, I wasn't. "Players" were meant to be either real players and computer players.

But if I was talking about real players for an online play, so far, only 2 players can play a multiplayer game since more players increase the chance for the game to be unstable and crash.