[Update] Dark Souls 2: Seamless Co-op - World reloading and Bosses

I hope everyone is doing well!

I've been rather focused the past week on pushing past some of the obstacles I've encountered during DS2 seamless development. In this post I'll go over the progress I've made on these issues and where the mod is at right now.

It has been longer than I'd like since the last post but I've been distracted by mod development. I'm still here!

Player respawning & world reloading

In my last post I went over the issues I had working with Dark Souls II's engine in getting players to respawn correctly after they had died.

Within a day or so after that post I managed to get working functionality that allows guest players who have died to remain within the host's multiplayer session and 'seamlessly' respawn in the world at the last bonfire they have rested at.

Making the other online players appear as normal and behave correctly was fairly straightforward. What was a lot more challenging was dealing with just how much the game hated me doing this. I encountered many issues such as spontaneous game crashes, map objects that were malformed or unloaded, and enemies which would have bizarre proportions stretching all over the map.

In any case - after a couple more days I managed to identify that there was an interaction between the enemies that were present and the map object components which caused race conditions during loading screens - ultimately leading a very frustrating and difficult set of crashes to debug.

Here is a (very brief) video showing functional player respawning and bonfire resting online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de9Kw2jXKdI

Boss rewards

Again, in the last post, I discussed how I had made the necessary modifications to allow players to persist in a world after the boss (or objective) had been cleared.

Whilst that was done, there was still the issue of rewarding the players. In the current state of online, guest players will not receive a reward (e.g. boss soul) when defeating the boss and may only instead receive a small amount of souls.

Fortunately, getting this working took no longer than 10 minutes or so. One of the most satisfying things about reverse engineering a new game is how dead-ends that I have encountered when debugging other issues (e.g. why items in chests weren't appearing) were actually the solution to problems encountered at a later date - In this case I had already documented how the aptly named "EventBossBattleManager" is structured and it was relatively easy to activate this for guest players.

Further development goals

Now that players can die, reload, and warp freely. I can finally start making progress in the game and begin fixing the issues.

I understand that this mod has taken a lot longer than previous projects and I have explained why and that is practically a new game. At this point I have a good understanding of the game engine's mechanics and how it handles multiplayer sessions - I'm hoping that there will be a lot more satisfying progress in the future.

As always, I appreciate feedback on every post. I'm still new to this and trying to figure out what a good level of information is to provide here. Expect a further update early next week

Thank you for your patience, and a huge thank you to all of my supporters <3

Take care

~ Yui