Hi, we are a team of about 6 people right now planning to create a Coop Mod for Skyrim. We are working on the Mod here:

http://skynet.hipolipolopig.us/

We are mostly looking for Programmers, preferably with network experience. But brainstormers are also welcome, as we need to create some multiplayer friendly PvP and PvE content too. If you are interested and would like to participate, please visit our forums.

And please do not discuss whether multiplayer for Skyrim is possible or fun. We're doing this either way, so please don't turn this into a flamewar. We also don't need a list of things that you assume we didn't consider yet. If you would like to help, visit our forums and critizise our ideas there. Thank you.

I suppose you know better than anyone whether you wish to take on this task and the problems you'll face. There's no interest in this topic yet because all other multiplayer projects for Bethesda games were either ever so slightly successful or failed. Most did the latter. Also, interest will not be high since many people (especially fans who'd say 'ugh after morrowind bethesda sold out' ;p) think singleplayer is all the Elder Scrolls needs. And I'd agree. My personal opinion is that I'd rather see the large amount of programming that goes into this, goes into something else that enhances the singleplayer experience. Wether we can expect results from this, only time will tell. I'm not a programmer, but I wish you luck and will see if I try it out when/if you release something.

EDIT: Uh . . well . . I seem to have put everything you didn't want, in my post. . . sorry 'bout that . . my bad.

Being the instigator of this mod, it's my responsibility to try to sell the concept... Here we go!

Not being able to program isn't a barrier to helping the project! Thinkers and brainstormers are important, too!
Register at http://skynet.hipolipolopig.us to join us!
[Warning! Long post is long, technical and not really suitable for non-programmers!]

This is one of the ideas that I've been throwing back and forth in my head while waiting for the CK; SkyNet, Skyrim Co-Op. I can tell that some of you can already feel the need to flame welling up, assuming that this project would fail like so many before it. The thing is that it's not impossible to create this, it's just damned difficult, lengthy and frustrating. Most people have lives that need living so they can't give what they'd like to heir ideas. This is where I come in

I'll tell you a little about me first, if you wanna skip this go right on down to the [Technical Stuff] section. I'm 19, I've been programming for around 8 years, almost 9, in C# and will gladly disregard most other languages as hogwash (BASIC, Java, Objective-C... Not C++. I respect that ) I first started tinkering with network mechanics in 2009 for a Comp. Sci. class competition thingy and found myself hooked (That might be used as a pun later, we'll see!). I've spent most of my time since learning plenty about serialization, networking structure and (Most recently) CodeDom (Code that compiles code on-the-fly, for those that aren't familiar). Playing Skyrim for a while, I began to feel that it could do with... Well, other people! Could you imagine getting a group together to take down a dragon? (More on difficulty scaling later...) Or raiding Whiterun/Solitude/Windhelm, army against army while 3 or more dragons torch your foes? It sounds fairly lame written down, but I know that I want it.

Now, how the heck do we manage it? (Yes, we. Reading this means that you're in on it, too!)

[Technical Stuff]
Thanks to the team that have previously worked on OBSE and now SKSE (Pre-release version available here), we have a base for injecting our own code into Skyrim. Until the CK is released, we can't hook anything important (Properly, at least) like players moving, equipping/removing items, entering/leaving combat, etc. But we can at least get started. So, the first thing to do (For me, at least. Being Mr. C# ) is to inject the .net framework into Skyrim.

"Well nuts," I thought to myself when this came up, "That can't be done!" BZZT It can. The ICLRRuntimeHost interface allows us to call up the .net framework inside of a non-managed application when injected (Effectively most modern games). Several issues may crop up with this, however. How does this affect the stability and performance load of the game? Things like this will need to be tested. But it can be done (SKSE will be the cornerstone of this, it handles most of the difficult stuff beautifully).

Next on the list is hooking every single little thing that happens on both client and server ends. Hell in a handbasket. This, aside from modifying core-content, will be the most time-consuming. We're not running an amateur show and broadcasting only move/equip/combat events. A Server <-> Client model can't work properly like that. Every time a player goes to loot a corpse, that request will need to be sent to the server, then a response sent to the client to say "This is what's on this corpse, take your pick!", player chooses items (Send message to server; "Took A, B, E") ... You get the picture. Lots of messy code with the potential to go painfully wrong. There are many more questions here; "What about events like talking to an NPC?", "What about quest-line events?", "How are you going to handle mods?" and so forth. All in good time. That mostly fits into modding core content and logic, rather than the server side of things. Let's talk about that now.

Modding core logic and content. Definitely the hardest part. Will probably need its' own dedicated team. Skyrim will need to be told to either act as a client or a client/server, each acting differently. The client logic will need to be told to wait to receive replies and events from the server as well as send requests to the server for every final result of each action, whereas the client/server will need to be told to listen for requests from clients, distribute responses/events and handle its' own client. We may as well be re-writing everything from scratch.

If you've read all of this, understood it and don't feel the need for flaming, you're the kind of person that would be an invaluable asset to a team if this were to get underway. Well, more underway than it already is. In any case, please contact me if you're interested and have a steady background in C++, C# or modding Bethesda's various series.

This will be done, I'm not giving up on this and may the 9 have bloody mercy on me if this falls over!

Don't listen to flamers, I believe this is possible its just going to take a massive amount of work, I'd be glad to contribute.

BTW guys, I got in touch with Recycler, the lead dev of VaultMP and he's fine with someone taking the VaultMP source and porting it to Skyrim. I've looked through the source a bit and pretty much the main requirement for a port is to fill out the opcodes for all the functions and junk in https://github.com/Recycler1993/Vault-Tec-Multiplayer-Mod/blob/master/API.h (link to VaultMP GitHub repo). I highly suggest making use of the framework they already have in place. Recycler mentioned they have a basic sync (no interpolation) working, and that would definitely be the way to go for a barebones Skyrim port.

Thanks, ChairGraveyard! That'll be a massive help! I'll take a look, but I don't want it to be too much of a port. It may give me some ideas on how to do things, though. I've already talked with Ian from the SKSE team and he's been quite helpful

Honestly, I'm surprised that this thread hasn't been locked down yet. Maybe Bethesda haven't seen it yet. Maybe Bethesda think that this is just a joke. Maybe Bethesda are watching with intrigue. Who knows?

I've recently come up with a far more efficient server model than my original idea of injecting the .Net Framework, goes something like...

• Inject our SKSE plugin. This will have a TCP Client object which will connect to an externalized server program and relay hooked information.
  
• The server can't run the world without information from a client, there's far too much there. The first client (Or perhaps a client on the local net/localhost) will begin supplying information like NPC positions and core game events to the server.
  
• Once other clients connect to the server, the real distribution can begin. While having an external process for the server and connecting via TCP to the plugin may cause some minor latency issues, it's far more stable and efficient than injecting the CLR.

Best of luck, however, being here since all of the Morrowind/Oblivion/FO3/FONV multiplayer mods that never came to fruition, ... from experience, I can only feel like I'm watching the Titanic sail for the first time.

Thanks That's understandable, of course. Though I'm not so keen to give up on a project with such weight on it. so you'll just have to wait and see

Good luck with that. I'm among the sceptics. It surely is doable, but whether this is actually playable and enjoyable remains to be seen. But i hope this will just motivate you to prove all sceptics wrong.
I did some projects with .Net Framework code injection myself. I did it by writing the base injection code in C++/CLI and a seperate assembly in C# which is loaded during runtime.

As for the network architecture: I don't think the proposed Client-Server model is a good idea, because it just adds unnecessary latency. I'd suggest that one of the clients actually assumes the role of the server because this way you have a full representation of the current world state at hand and don't need to send all data to the server first before it can be forwarded it to the other clients. A standalone server couldn't do much on it's own anyway because the world is too complex to manually emulate all things that are happing without a running game client.

Writing netcode in a managed language is plain wrong You never played Magicka? Great C# + XNA game, crappy multiplayer 'cause of the netcode.
my 2 cents

ICLRRuntimeHost, I know But it's proving to make the game unstable in my tests.

That was the original plan but it's proving infeasible. Just having the CLR running in Skyrim is causing issues like CTDs and immense lag (Could be actual core issues with Skyrim, unsure). I'd rather have a stable client with a little more negligible lag than a client that is crashing all the time. but as I've said before these things will need to be worked out. Everyone's coming to the table with their own ideas on how the system should work, so I may need to say "This is how the code will operate. End of story". Though I don't want to be a dictator on this project, too much indecision will destroy it from the inside.

We're not using XNA. If you've used XNA at all you'll know that the network code there is horrible to work with. We're using TCP or, if need be, UDP. I'm not sure what protocols XNA uses, but I know that the system for establishing connections and games is horrible. We're not using XNA.

I'm 40 and habe been programming since I was 16, and that's your first mistake. You use the tool required for the job, not the one you "like". C# (or any managed language) is the wrong tool for this listen to RYO, he's right.

If you actually want to get somewhere with this, my recommendation is using SKSE (which means C++) to do the communications stuff (streaming/synchronizing objects between clients) and do the simple stuff with normal OBScript.

PS: C# and Java are THE SAME THING you cant call Java hogwash and say C# is great. Either way both of them are just a modern (and very limited) version of FORTH

What would you think that XNA would use to connect? It has to use a networking protocol, it certainly didn't invent its own, so...

The issue here is that latency is measured (by people) in milliseconds. Think about how many gamers are horrified by a game that forces vsync. How much response delay do you think vsync introduces? Milliseconds worth.

A higher level language introduces milliseconds of performance loss to almost everything that it does. Which is the point I think he was driving at.


Now, to return to the original topic:

I'm exactly the guy you're looking for. I've been a programmer for 20 years. I have extensive professional experience writing networking code. I've written game engines as a hobbyist as well. In short, you couldn't find a more suitable candidate unless you started stealing Blizzard employees.

Brace yourself. I'm about to naysay you. Hard. And you're going to want to brush me off. That's fine. But bear in mind, I'm not some dude telling you it'll fail based on MorrowMMO or whatever failing. I'm telling you that it will fail based on extensive knowledge in this very field.

In other words, I understand this project better than you do. Sure, I'm just a stranger on the Internet, so grain of salt and all that. But I'd advise you to at least consider what I have to say.

Even if this project was my personal mission, with all of my knowledge, it would fail. Even if I had the *source code* for the TESV engine, it would fail.

Let me say that again. Even if Bethesda showed up this morning and hand delivered the entire source code of their engine and a copy of every tool they've used, I would fail at making Skyrim into a multiplayer game.

The game was designed from the ground up to be a single-player game. That influences the design of the engine from the floor to the ceiling. Every single design decision made along the way was based on the fact that it's a single player game.

Every. Single. One.

All programmers appreciate a good car anology. Here you go: how much would you have to change about a car's design to allow it to function as a boat?

The answer: almost all of it. Anything about a car that's suitable for being a boat is there by coincidence. Floating was never part of the design.

Go ahead and try. Jump in and learn for yourself why it's not going to happen. That failure will be valuable experience.

But don't think for a second that the experienced coders that you're asking for aren't lurking around here. They are. They just know better than to try this. Like me, they're writing plugins or tools that have actual usefulness.

(That or they're just playing the game and relaxing. The lazy sods.)


All that said, I like ambition. So I'm going to give you the best advice of anyone in this entire thread. I am about to offer you digital enlightenment.

Your first task is to create a chat client inside of the Skyrim engine. Simple enough: from within the game, be able to initiate a connection with another person who's playing the game, and have a usable chat window so that you can talk back and forth, like any MMO. No need for matchmaking, just a pop-up that asks for an IP:port, a connection, then chatting.

If you can accomplish JUST that much, just pleasant chatting while otherwise playing as we do now, just Steam overlay without the overlay, then I will applaud you and take back what I've said.

(Then I'll buy you a congratulatory beer because you'll probably be 21 years old by that point.)

So go forth and be enlightened. Make a chat box, my son. When you are able to snatch the chat from my hands, you will be ready.

Actually I think a chat in SKSE wouldn't be that hard.
A long time ago I did the Logitech G15 plugin for Oblivion and was very simple, opening a socket for r/w wouldnt be any different, just instead of sending messages to the LCD you send them to a socket. The problem will be keeping all the things in sync (guest equipment/quests/NPC...).

Sorry to snip just about all of your post, but that right there is old school ! ... and so true. The car anology is a staple in my group at work. Seriously, I don't think a day goes by without the car anology popping up somewhere in some conversation; and apparently it is also the one anology management can comprehend

As for the OP...
My take on this would be, if you are willing and able to undertake such a big project, rather than try to convert the game to something that it was not meant to be, why don't you just use the graphical assets to create an arena-type environment? Follow me here for a sec:

When you are talking about playing co-op, you are not talking about playing a TES game. TES games, as explained before, are designed from the ground up to be played by a single person. If I am reading what you posted correctly, what you want is a co-op/MP arena in a Skyrim setting
The above quote tells me what you want is an arena. So, all the dialogs, quests, etc, which are meant to be interactions between the player and game NPCs, those can be disregarded. With that in mind, rather than trying to turn your car into a boat, why don't you just make a boat and take the parts from the car that you can use effectively in your boat?

If you are good enough to effectively manipulate a game engine to do something it is not coded to do, you should be good enough to write a similar engine from scratch: write your own MP game engine, and use the Skyrim map, meshes, animations, etc to play within the engine to create your arena.

I'm pretty sure there would be legal issues with that. We are, however, already planning to develope multiplayer content alongside the network plugin, as we are all aware that Skyrim as it is is not exactly multiplayer-friendly.

I don't think there would be any legal issues with it unless you attempt to market it as your own. As long as you give credit to Bethesda and adhere to the EULA for mods, i.e., your work belongs to them, you should not get sued

You guys being young... I'm an old fart with kids about to go to college, but if I were you, not only would I recruit programmers, but graphic artists as well, and create my own game on the same setting.

Bethesda don't allow art assets from one Elder Scrolls game to be ported across to another, even in mods. You use the art assets shipped with the game, and your own original assets. They certainly wouldn't be ok with their art assets being ported across to another engine, even if it was distributed as a free 'mod'. Plus, all the art assets are in the NIF format, which is a proprietary format - the team would have to pay a license fee to Gamebase USA for permission to use them in a new engine. As for creating a new game in the Elder Scrolls setting... well, Bethesda own the intellectual property on that, and I doubt if they'd give their permission for such a thing.

Anyway, it took Bethesda, with many millions of dollars and 3 or 4 years and a team of about 100 people to create a single player game (Skyrim) in the TES setting, and they had an existing game engine to build on. I don't think a small team of modders, however talented, are going to make a whole new multiplayer TES game with their own engine. Even a simple arena game.

And if they can, then if they have any sense they'd be doing it commercially, because they'd be world class game developers with a powerhouse work ethic !

Yargh! So many posts to deal with! I'll pick a couple...

The only reason I say Java is hogwash is because some things are just... Out of wack xD "public byte x[]" in Java = "public byte[] x" in C#. It just comes down to stubbornness and grammar-Nazism

I fail to see how there's a mistake there. I'm learning C++ as I go to write the plugin for SKSE (Not as hard as I originally thought it would be I'm in talks with Ian about his thoughts on the project right now). The only tool that is "required" for the job is C++, C# is there to make the networking and object-oriented code far simpler to deal with.
I'm not saying XNA invented its' own protocols lol (Though it wouldn't surprise me if M$ could ), I'm saying that the front-end is horrible and there's little-to-no access to the back-end processes.

I'm not brushing you off, but thanks for the warning. Though, if you'd be keen to try prove your own ideas wrong, you'd be most welcome My point of this project is to prove that it can be done. To paraphrase Mozart, as I've done so many times; The bytes are all there, I just need to put them in the right order.

Not much of a beer person, but I'll hold you to it nonetheless

I realize that many people here are thinking about Skyrim multiplayer as some new pseudo MMO where we run around in a city and see dozens of other players doing stuff... Not to be discouraging but you have a better chance of entering yourself into the fortune 500...

However, something more bite size would be having the game be able to read and spit out coordinates for single entity with coordinates and what cell it is located in on a text file then have a completely separate program parse the file and send it to another computer. You could hypothetically have another players spirit located in the world. combine that with separate floating chat window and the use of a script to allow you to trade items via the placeatme. You could potentially at least have minimal interaction to some small extent.

Why on earth would we write it to the disk? o.O

Thank Goodness someone is looking into this.

I would love a Co-Op Companion mod, possible to play on LAN as well as internet. I was discussing this with friends at work - they'd all buy extra copies of Skyrim right now if they could have their signficant others playing as a companion.
I understand the reasoning behind the refusal of a co-op for Fallout because you are alone. You against the world.
But in this one, I can trip over a companion and a spare like that damn dog. I'm not alone.

Co-Op Companion Mod. Take that, WoW.

I don't think you understood what I was saying. No one is talking about combining assets from different games.
As for the time, people, and money it took Bethesda to come up with the game, I don't want to go on a rant, but if you don't have any working background in technology in either development or engineering level, I will tell you that a group of talented modders would not have the constraints and impediments that are imposed on devs and engs who work for a company.

And a quick edit to add: no one said it was going to take them a month to do what they are trying to do. It is going to take time.
And why not give it a shot? They all seem to be young fellows still in school... if they have the knowledge, and I take it at face value they do, it'd be not only a great experience for them, but even a resume builder once they graduate, or even before.

You lost all credibility right there. I can understand if C# is your language of choice, but disregarding other well established/historic languages just proves your lack of knowledge on the subject. Obviously BASIC isn't used anymore, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a necessary step in the evolution of programming that we know today. And since you're specifically saying Java is hogwash, you do know that Microsoft outright copied it and made C# from it, yeah? As proven by the lawsuit and the royalties payed because of it. Now I can't say anything about you're specific coding styles or anything, but I'm sure that if you want this to happen and you keep at it, then it'll happen. But don't go flaunting your self taught knowledge as the end all of programming. You obviously mostly know what you're talking about, so don't bash things just because you don't happen to like them.

If this works, I will give you a million fishysticks.