Many of you know I'm working on a Spectre remake. Spectre was a 3D battlezone-style action game where you drive a tank around. I've been programming my remake for quite a long time, and one of the biggest features is the ability to have 4 players on one client, even connecting to other games. How popular would a feature like this be? I guess I should be realistic and know this game would never appear on an XBox, etc, so would split-screen on a PC be worth it, considering the effort I'm putting in?

"Multiple players, single PC" is a design concept that just doesn't work. Very few people have two keyboards/mice/joysticks/etc., so your controls are limited. Sometimes, having two of a device just simply doesn't make sense at all (two PS2 keyboards, two mice of any nature, etc.) so you are again at a disadvantage. Hotseat gaming is annoying at best and simply doesn't make sense for realtime games.

Overall, multiple-player-single-location gaming is by and large only useful (IMHO) for consoles, which are generally designed with that sort of gaming in mind from the very beginning. The PC platform is extremely difficult to use effectively with a more-than-one-player-per-computer approach. Location-agnostic multiplayer (i.e. network/internet play) is much more suitable to the PC's design realities; if your players really want to be in the same physical spot, the LAN party is a tried-and-true solution.


My personal opinion on the matter: it isn't worth it. Spend the effort on making the game better in other areas; make the network multiplayer more robust, for instance. The payoff will be miniscule even for those players who would have the patience to use it, and the payoff will never justify the required expense in creating the feature to begin with.

split screen only works if the game is horizontal, if the player needs the vertical view then it's pointless. so in my opinion, LAN would be better. or P to P.

Don't forget games like WORMS. Playing several people at the same computer is a blast. Especially as your opponents are within physical punching distance if they happen to kill your worms.

Personally, I feel the feasibility of single location multiplayer comes down to the control scheme. If you have alot of buttons, then you probably can't accomodate more than 2 people, that is if the buttons can be mapped completely to a controller. If it were a simple game like tetris, I had a friend who was able to have up to 3 players simultaneously on 1 PC, just because tetris can be played with one hand and 4 buttons. Even the old fighting games on PC were stretching the playability of 2 people using 1 keyboard at the same time with up to 10 buttons required for something like Street Fighter 2.

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Original post by Puppet Don't forget games like WORMS. Playing several people at the same computer is a blast. Especially as your opponents are within physical punching distance if they happen to kill your worms.

And Worms is not realtime. It's turn-segmented by design. Hotseat can be made to work very effectively for turn-based games - but it is also terribly easy to screw it up (see Exhibit A: Civilization II). For realtime games, it's not even an option.

Worms may not have a realtime mode, but Liero definitely does, and that game was a lot of fun. Pretty sure you could play Scorch in realtime as well.

I can't see it working for games with more complex controls though - WeirdoFu has the right of it. Movement controls will be especially prone to keyboard limitations.

Okay, I painstakingly removed the split-screen code. Anyone who askes me to put it back in gets beat up :P

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes split screen only works if the game is horizontal,...

Agreed, but I look at it from a different view...

Our human eyes' natural field of view is about 150 degree horizontally, and about 60 degree vertically. So our view is NATURALLY widescreen, which is why we find widescreen movies more comfortable.

Consider cases like Command and Conquer series, how it changed it's control bar from the side to bottom, is not only because of populaity, but it's about giving player a view on the field in a widescreen style. All RTS after that have followed this style

I hope that with the availability of Xbox 360 controllers for Windows which have a simple API and support for up to four players with a known button layout, split screen games will become more prevalant on the PC.

I for one intend to make (where appropriate) an effort to support this aspect of play in games I make, because it's actually easier (IMO) to code split-screen than a networked game, especially when it comes to testing.

I prefer split screen gaming to network based games, especially for more arcade titles like Spectre.

I guess it's unfortunate that you removed split screen support, it might be worth noting that (in my experience) professional games design is very fickle (often due to ill thought out comments from a publisher and the ensuing kneejerk reaction) and it's often better to just disable bits of the game for a while, just to make sure it really is a dead feature...