The Magical "Add Multiplayer" Button

March 24, 2023 10:42 AM

Gomps, short for "Generic Online MultiPlayer System", is an in-development tool that will add rudimentary multiplayer functionality to any of the thousands of games made in Unity. Here's a short video of the tool working in Firewatch, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Ynglet.
posted by May Kasahara (5 comments total)

I played Obra Dinn with a friend over Zoom screen sharing - it was very fun! Due to lag there was no way the remote player could take control, but the meat of the game - the setting, the decisions, the logic - worked out great!

This isn't that. Gomps looks like the "Elden Ring" style of multiplayer.

From the Gomps Steam page:

All you get is a bunch of ghosts floating around you, who happen to be in the same location as you in their own instance of the game. You're able to interact with these players using text messages, and eventually other types of interactions like "taunts", but they will always be purely visual and have no effect on the game you're playing.

posted by meowzilla at 11:18 AM on March 24, 2023

Reminds me of a bit of how the the old XBand network enabled Genesis and SNES cartridges to run two-player games over their modems: they didn't.

They had code to synchronize the startup of two completely independent instances of the games (one at each end of the connection) and then the modems relayed each player's inputs back to the other. I think there was a little on-the-fly memory patching to make sure RNGs were synced, but other than that it was two games running in two places with only the barest of state information actually being sent over the wire.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:51 AM on March 24, 2023

I think a lot of people found an ineffably compelling emotional aspect to the multiplayer-ness of Journey.

I didn't. I got the same thing I got out of watching that video: I'm doing the same thing I was doing before, but now there's a rando that doesn't matter.
posted by gurple at 2:24 PM on March 24, 2023

They had code to synchronize the startup of two completely independent instances of the games (one at each end of the connection) and then the modems relayed each player's inputs back to the other.

This is pretty much what deterministic multiplayer networking is, which is still used, especially for games with a lot of moving objects, like real time strategy! Even when you’re specifically building a game to support deterministic networking it’s surprisingly easy for the instances of the game to desynchronise, so I wonder how well that adapter worked in practice??
posted by Jon Mitchell at 3:41 PM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I got the same thing I got out of watching that video: I'm doing the same thing I was doing before, but now there's a rando that doesn't matter.

I'm excited for it because I see it opening up possibilities that are less like Journey and more like (how I hear) the kids play Fortnite: as a hangout space, in my case for far-flung friends I don't see very often. Sure, I could play with them in an FPS, but meeting up in a chill exploration/walking sim game like Firewatch, while voice chatting via Discord, sounds a lot more fun.

I could also see this being interesting for puzzle game collaboration. Instead of multiple people hashing out a tough puzzle in a forum thread, it could happen directly in-game.

It'll be interesting to see how people put this thing to use.
posted by May Kasahara at 4:28 PM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]