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Lego racers 2 Online server??


ReflectedMantis
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ReflectedMantis

I don't know if this topic has ever been discussed for this game (I know it has for LEGO racers 1, and I believe some progress was made on it and was never completed.) and I'm surprised that's the case, so I figured I'd start one. I'm not getting my hopes up too high that anyone will be able to do this, but I do believe it is possible. However, I know what needs to be done, I just don't know how to do it. That's one of the reasons I am posting this. I am hoping that someone with awesome coding skills sees this, and tries to do it. Anyway, what it would be is a server that would allow the ability to play LEGO racers 2 with players around the world.

 

Do you know what Wiimmfi is? If not, it is a custom server that allows certain DS and Wii games to be played online again after May 20, 2014, the date Nintendo WFC was shut down. This is kinda like that. The difference is, this would be a server for a game that didn't originally ever have an online multiplayer function in it, but it would be a server for only one game, not a hundred of them.

 

 

 

 

 

Basically, this server would be capable of sending and receiving info about player coordinates, what item they have, etc. There would need to be 8 player slots. how it would work is, the first person to join a server would be player 1 The second player to join would be player 2. And so on up to 8. And let's say player 4 leaves. If it is in between races, player 5 is now player 4, player 6 is now player 5, etc. If it is mid-match, the player who left just becomes an AI. The server is controlling that AI and sending the coordinates and other stats to make sure everyone doesn't have different stats for that AI

 

Earlier I said that the first player to join was player 1. However, everyone else would see themselves as player 1 no matter when they joined so that you can control your vehicle because there are no mappable controls for players 3 and up. Here is how that works:

In my perspective, I am player 1. According to the server I am player 2, and player 2 in my perspective is player 1 according to the server. Player 4 sees themselves as player 1, and they see player 1 as player 4. 

 

Server:                                                                                                              My perspective:                                                                           Steve's perspective:

Player 1: Bob                                                                                                   Player 1: Me                                                                                   Player 1: Steve

Player 2: Me                                                                                                    Player 2: Bob                                                                                 Player 2: Me

Player 3: Sally                                                                                                Player 3: Sally                                                                                Player 3: Sally

Player 4: Steve                                                                                              Player 4: Steve                                                                              Player 4: Bob

Player 5: Joe                                                                                                   Player 5: Joe                                                                                    Player 5: Joe

Player 6: George                                                                                           Player 6: George                                                                            Player 6: George

Player 7: Suzie                                                                                               Player 7: Suzie                                                                                Player 7: Suzie

Player 8: Jennifer                                                                                         Player 8: Jennifer                                                                           Player 8: Jennifer

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the server has to assign start positions. The server would assign Bob to 1st place, Me to second, Sally to third, and so on. Even though you always see yourself as player 1, you may start in 3rd. Or 6th. Or last. it just depends on when you joined.

 

While the race is going on, the server has to constantly be sending data: A players coordinates (including rotation), Which way a player is turning (To allow heads to bob one way or the other, otherwise it's probably unnessasary), what item a player has (if any), when a player uses said item, Start positions (see above), a way for everyone to start the race at the same time (Maybe the server can keep the start light's value at 0 for 10 seconds, just to make sure everyone is in), what everyone's next checkpoint is, what lap everyone is on, damage values, what race is supposed to be played and what world is supposed to be loaded, race and lap times (maybe) and, if at all possible, car and player models. That seems like a lot, and it is. But it shouldn't be too hard. I say this because all of these (except car models I think) can be edited through cheat engine. so I don't think it should be that difficult to send those same values to a server. I am guessing, however, that the difficult part is to have those values sent as a different player to everyone else.

 

 

 

In between races, I have two ideas of what we could do:

1. We could have an external window allowing you to vote for the next course, and maybe we could implement a chat feature. We would then choose our driver and car in-game. We would choose our driver and vehicle by the builder menu. This would probably require the game to be run in windowed mode. (This is not my personal choice because it seems a little inconvenient, but it has a chat option :P)

2. We would choose our course, driver, and vehicle through the arcade menu. We would have to disable the YES/NO button at the end, or just tell everyone not to click it.

 

 

 

Lastly, we need a way to tell the game to send the player to the racetrack the server chooses. This seems to me like it might be difficult, but I don't know.

 

 

 

 

These are just my ideas of how the server would work. See any flaws in my idea? Did I miss something important? Maybe you can make this a reality? Let me know. Reply if you know something that I don't.

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Fluffy Cupcake
2 hours ago, TheBerg said:

Do you know what Wiimmfi is? If not, it is a custom server that allows certain DS and Wii games to be played online again after May 20, 2014, the date Nintendo WFC was shut down.

Yes, and it's easier to grab packets (or whatever they were) from a game that use to have a server prior to them being shut down and then try and make a similar copy of the server software then it is to make a server from absolutely nothing to work with. At least that's the impression I get. Also, said games have built in networking menus which makes things way easier. for Racers 2 we have... not really anything to work with as far as in-game menus go. I guess a pre-existing menu function could be overridden, but I can see a lot of disassembly and such work needing to be done for that since we don't like, have the source code or anything.

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20 minutes ago, Xir said:

Yes, and it's easier to grab packets (or whatever they were) from a game that use to have a server prior to them being shut down and then try and make a similar copy of the server software then it is to make a server from absolutely nothing to work with. At least that's the impression I get. Also, said games have built in networking menus which makes things way easier. for Racers 2 we have... not really anything to work with as far as in-game menus go. I guess a pre-existing menu function could be overridden, but I can see a lot of disassembly and such work needing to be done for that since we don't like, have the source code or anything.

He seems to be talking about handling this all through memory editing, like people have done for the original game... Not attempting to re-activate networking code in the EXE that was never even finished.

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Fluffy Cupcake

Well, that kind of server was pointed out, so I thought I'd clear things up about the explanation possibly not being as easy as the example due to it being a different type.

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