Thoughts on playing solo, on shared worlds?

WarMongerian

WarMongerian

Refugee
Hi folks.
I'm looking for folks thoughts on playing solo games, but all players playing on a shared world?

I was recently hanging out with the husband, of the husband and wife team from last year, and we had so many problems with the game crashing and glitching and such, that it took so much of the fun out of playing together, that we just gave up and each played solo.

I have in the past been able to share my RGW maps with others, but I'm not able to see well enough to do that without help from a friend that can watch my shared screen, while I access my google docs and send the files to my friends. Can anyone help walk me through this process?

Anyway, while my friends and I enjoy exploration, having the same map/world to play on allows us to enjoy attempts to play solo (where we can just hit the pause button and the world stops, unlike in multiplayer), but if we all can play on a shard map, we could still give each other info on parts of the map that the other folks may not have explored yet.

Also, when we make a RGW, can we in anyway change the name of that worlds folder?
 
WarMongerian said:
Hi folks.
I'm looking for folks thoughts on playing solo games, but all players playing on a shared world?

I was recently hanging out with the husband, of the husband and wife team from last year, and we had so many problems with the game crashing and glitching and such, that it took so much of the fun out of playing together, that we just gave up and each played solo.

I have in the past been able to share my RGW maps with others, but I'm not able to see well enough to do that without help from a friend that can watch my shared screen, while I access my google docs and send the files to my friends. Can anyone help walk me through this process?

Anyway, while my friends and I enjoy exploration, having the same map/world to play on allows us to enjoy attempts to play solo (where we can just hit the pause button and the world stops, unlike in multiplayer), but if we all can play on a shard map, we could still give each other info on parts of the map that the other folks may not have explored yet.

Also, when we make a RGW, can we in anyway change the name of that worlds folder?
Click to expand...
Have you guys tried looking into renting a dedicated server? Because you can get one and make it password protected, so just only you and your friends could access it. That's about the only way I can think of a shared world. And if I'm misunderstanding the whole post, I apologize, I'm still working on my first cup of coffee this morning lol.
 
I and my friends did the whole rented server thing back last summer, and the guy that was pushing for it didn't know what he was doing, so it never really was what we were looking for.

When I made my first big RGW (Randomly Generated World), one of my friends that is good with computers, and has good eyesight, was able to walk me through the process of sharing my files from the "Generated Worlds" folder, so I was able to share my map with others via Google Drive.

In recent day, the game crashes or locks up, and my friends and I can only do that new quarry in single player. Every attempt to play together sees lotsa problems.
 
WarMongerian said:
I and my friends did the whole rented server thing back last summer, and the guy that was pushing for it didn't know what he was doing, so it never really was what we were looking for.

When I made my first big RGW (Randomly Generated World), one of my friends that is good with computers, and has good eyesight, was able to walk me through the process of sharing my files from the "Generated Worlds" folder, so I was able to share my map with others via Google Drive.

In recent day, the game crashes or locks up, and my friends and I can only do that new quarry in single player. Every attempt to play together sees lotsa problems.
Click to expand...
What is your internet connection like? What's your upload and download speeds? Are you running on ethernet or wireless?
 
You don't need to manually share a map you make if you're the host. It will be sent automatically when someone joins your game. That's true whether you make it with RWG or by hand or using a third party app or just download one someone else made and shared online. You can also run the game as a server on any computer if you want. There's no need to use a real server unless you don't want one of your computers from the group to be online 24/7 or if your computers are all very slow or internet is very slow so that it causes performance problems.

As far as problems connecting to one another in a game, if someone crashes (mainly the host), it can corrupt the save. Sometimes you can make it work again, but other times you'll just have to start a new game. It's best to have the person with the better computer be the host (or run the server if you want to try a locally run server) to help prevent that from happening. It has been very rare that I've ever had a corrupted save when hosting, so it shouldn't really happen much. If it does happen, you should get help to try and fix it (ask here and provide logs and a description of what's not working) or else just start a new game. Trying to keep using a messed up game will just result in continually having problems.

Also, if the host crashes, it is a very good idea to NOT load the game again. Instead, replace your save with the backup save (keep a copy of both just in case you mess something up) and then load the game. The backup won't be corrupted, but might be off by a few minutes. But as soon as you load the game, your backup is updated and so if your main save is corrupted, then you've just corrupted the backup. If you follow that process, it should make corrupted saves from crashes basically nonexistent.
 
NiteViper said:
What is your internet connection like? What's your upload and download speeds? Are you running on ethernet or wireless?
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I have crappy internet service, so that is probably a part of it. I don't have wireless, as I live in an apartment building. I used to be able to play with all my friends back when I got the Game in Feb, 2024. So whatever is going on, it is more recent than that.
Riamus said:
You don't need to manually share a map you make if you're the host.
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I may not have been clear, The goal is to allow everyone to host their own game, but off of the world/map we share agong us. When folks join my game (with me as the host), they can only play when I am playing. They cannot start their own games (with the shared, custom map) unless I manually send it to them.
Riamus said:
As far as problems connecting to one another in a game, if someone crashes (mainly the host), it can corrupt the save. Sometimes you can make it work again, but other times you'll just have to start a new game.
Click to expand...
That's why we are not playing in the same games, we want to have the same maps, but all of us playing it solo.
 
WarMongerian said:
They cannot start their own games (with the shared, custom map)
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The normal solution would be to set up a server, so you all can build on the same save.
But it seems you actually want two-three separate games, as individual solo games and maybe the occasional cross-visit?

- It should be possible for everyone to generate the same map; just use the same (exact!) settings and seed name, you should get exact copies.
- Might of course be easier to share one generated world; I'm not entirely sure of this, but I think all of the necessary stuff is under the Generated Worlds folder, in the named folder. Would need to test, but that's where I'd start...
 
Yeah, from what you seem to want, giving another dedicated server a go seems to be the best option. It isn't that bad to setup one and get it going. And the better hosts usually have good support that can help you configure things how you want. I'd recommend BlueFang or G-Portal myself, based on my own experiences.
 
To play on the same map, but not together, just zip up the folder in GeneratedWorlds that has your map. Send that to your friends and they just unzip in their GeneratedWorlds folder. If they haven't done RWG that folder may not exist and would have to be created. Then just select that "Game World" when starting a new game.

Yes, you can rename that RWG folder.
 
WarMongerian said:
I may not have been clear, The goal is to allow everyone to host their own game, but off of the world/map we share agong us. When folks join my game (with me as the host), they can only play when I am playing. They cannot start their own games (with the shared, custom map) unless I manually send it to them.
Click to expand...
Ah. I see. I think you could still just do a server, either a rented one, or one of you can run it from your computer. But if you are sure you want to play individually on the same map, do as theFlu said... write down (or screenshot) the exact settings you use when making a map with RWG and share those with the others. If they use the exact same seed and settings, they'll have the exact same map. No need to share the map with them unless you really want to do so.

And if you want to do that, I might suggest using a sharing site like Google Drive or One Drive or similar so you can just right click on your world folder and share it and have it upload automatically. Then you can add whoever you want to have access to it as allowed on whichever sharing site you choose and they can download it easily and place it in the right location on their computer. It'll be easier than trying to ZIP it up and send it to each of them if you're not very good with computers.
 
After much grumbling, and annoyed moaning and groaning, I got the folder over to the other fellow. Still not yet working but...

We were scratching our heads, and trying to figure out why he didn't have the option on playing on my map, when I finally got his to share screen of his actual folder, and he had not copied the game files into it.

Sigh.

Now I just got him to validate his files, and we will see if he still gets past the "Loading Biomes" stage, and then I can watch him play.
 
We finally identified the problem, he had a duplicate Biomes.png file, deleted the original, and was failing to load the biomes because all he still had was the copy. Once he fixed that, He was able to get right into the map/world...
 
Not sure why there is so much effort being spent on this. The whole reason we have a seed sharing thread on the forums that gets updated each major update is because all you need to do to share a map is share the seed.

You could also choose the same Peregen map.
 
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Roland said:
Not sure why there is so much effort being spent on this. The whole reason we have a seed sharing thread on the forums that gets updated each major update is because all you need to do to share a map is share the seed.

You could also choose the same Peregen map.
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Well, to be fair, you can't just share the seed. You have to share every setting as well. Using the same seed, but setting a different amount of lakes or rivers will change the map. Even just having different biome percentages will mean the map is different since towns don't cross biome borders and so would be placed differently.
 
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