Connecting Hearths
With this release, we are finally enabling multiplayer on the unstable branch! This has been a long time coming, and it’s still very rough around the edges, but we’d love for all of you to take it for a spin. To get an overview of how to host and join multiplayer games, please watch or read the Desktop Tuesday on Multiplayer.
Here's the very short summary: Stonehearth Multiplayer allows up to eight towns to embark together on the same map. To play, first figure out which of your friends you'd like to play with, and which of you has the beefiest computer and the internet connection with the fastest upload speeds. This person should be the host of the multiplayer game -- the person who runs the server and to whom everyone else connects. Once this person starts up a multiplayer game through the new main menu button, selects their kingdom, biome, and difficulty level, their friends can now connect to their game via the Steam friends list, or the host can invite them from an in-game UI. As your towns grow, you can trade items, create and decorate a joint space, and use your militaries to help each other out as monsters attack you both.
Note: If you’re not on Steam, you can still totally play multiplayer. Instead of connecting via steam friends, you will want to modify your user settings.json file to open some ports and state which machine is the host, and to which machine the clients will connect. You will then have to make sure all computers have the same version of every mod. Find more details in this thread.
Disclaimers!
- Multiplayer is super early and the team is actively working on bugs and performance issues. Until we tackle more of these, please be aware that performance will be slow in any game with a large number of hearthlings--due to say, a large, late-game town, or a large number of people all embarking together.
- Playing with people on the other side of the world can also cause performance issues, as can internet connections with slow upload speeds.
- Players may not be able to connect to a game due to a network timeout and get a “something went wrong” error. We have resolved some causes of this, but are still looking into it.
- Multiple clients trying to join a game at the same time may cause the host to crash.
Changes from the super-unstable branch
For those of you who tried out multiplayer on the super-unstable branch, thank you! Here are the changes we’ve made to multiplayer based on your feedback:
- Added the ability to assign hearthlings to work for another player.
- Added support for saving and loading building templates. Everyone, host and client, can now save/load templates in the new building editor.
- Added support for trading gold.
- Added an option to prevent clients from controlling game speed.
- Added display of the game's biome, difficulty, and age to the join screen.
- Added mod download progress bars to the join screen.
- Added a new multiplayer menu icon.
- Fixed a crash in mod sync when connecting to a game.
- Fixed a connection timeout when joining games.
- Fixed a server crash when a client disconnects.
- Fixed a client crash if disconnected before placing the banner.
- Fixed new citizens spawning near the wrong town.
- Fixed a UI crash in the multiplayer menu.
- Fixed an error with cultist hearthlings belonging to disconnected players.
- Fixed an error when trying to destroy items twice in a row on laggy servers.
⚠️ Note that all future multiplayer changes will be going directly to the unstable branch, and the super-unstable multiplayer branch will no longer be updated.
Organizing the ToolSHED
In this release, we're including SHED, a program that helps EDiting StoneHearth data. This tool is used by our artists and designers to more easily edit items, quests, and visual effects, and may be of use to modders doing the same.
The tool is still very rough around the edges, has almost no documentation, and a variety of bugs and limitations - for example, cloning items between different mod folders isn't supported, cloning recipes isn't supported, adding campaigns through a mod requires manually adding some aliases, and so on. Still, we think it will save modders some time, which is why we are including it even in its current state.
If you're a modder right now, and you'd like to try using SHED, go to the "shed" folder inside the Stonehearth folder, and run StonehearthEditor.exe. If you find a bug or an issue, or you discover a thing you wish were easier to do, please be sure to tell us on discourse.stonehearth.net and we will see what we can add to make the tool easier to use.
If you're using SHED and you’d like to improve it yourself, the program is actually open source and can be found on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome! Some work-in-progress documentation is available in the modding guide.
Builder Updates!
- Added rulers to the building editor - rooms, walls, and roofs show measurements live.
- Added support for patterned roads.
- Added sound effects for placing roads.
- Added the ability to mark blocks as walls or roofs so they display properly in all building vision modes.
- Made building costs update in realtime as the building is constructed.
- Made blocks that cause a building plan to fail to appear over regular building geometry so they’re easier to see.
- Fixed building net worth resetting to 0 on load.
- Fixed a 32-bit integer overflow in building IDs, which caused all sorts of weirdness.
- Fixed building templates having incorrect sunkenness if saved after the building is built.
- Fixed overlapping/intersecting rooms even if their floors aren’t on the same level.
- Fixed some invalid structures appearing valid if they intersected other valid structures.
- Fixed an issue where structures could not be placed on pyramid-like roofs.
- Fixed several rendering issues with the active building area outline.
- Fixed several issues around item placement, especially with fences and mats/mosaics.
- Fixed several issues around item bounds calculations.
- Fixed an issue that allowed building templates to be placed practically anywhere.
- Fixed the builder material list breaking when it has too many colors (e.g. from mods).
Other Changes
- Improved overall gameplay performance (first pass).
- Improved appeal check performance by introducing hearthlings to object permanence.
- Improved mining performance by not merging large mining zones.
- Improved Cleric casting visuals.
- Improved the notifications and combat icons.
- Fixed artifacts produced by bursts of waterfalls as they become empty.
- Fixed enemy camps from pre-A24 savegames not showing alerts.
- Fixed double-clicking dialog buttons while on a slow server breaking campaigns.
- Fixed several UI crashes.
- Fixed a missing sound in the workshop UI.
- Fixed clicks in quest dialog UIs sometimes being ignored.
- Fixed the ability to trigger 2 copies of the town founding quest for the same town.
- Fixed the crafting UI search mishandling letter case and deletion.
- Fixed items from deleted stockpiles not being considered restockable immediately.
- Fixed the game window starting tiny after being closed from the taskbar preview.
- Fixed an AI crash if an in use workshop is removed.
Unstable is Still Unstable
As usual, saves made on unstable are not guaranteed to work between unstable versions, but saves from different stable alpha versions should work.
Have fun!
Team Stonehearth