Restarting the MBG local server?

Hi guys

I've been working on a new mod of MBG for the past few years now, however as I was looking through many files, I kept on noticing that MBG must of had a server/multiplayer mode back in the day. There are lots of references to it in many of the scripts, there are multiplayer looking GUI options that seem to be disabled in the client/ui and server folders and thanks to Mr Obvious, there is a server folder in the root game directory!

For testing purposes only, would it be possible to re-enable these old settings to see how it would function back in the day! From what I can see within the scripts, all of the files (gui elements, scripts, networking files...) are in the correct places, but they are not enabled??? Have they been disabled?

I've tried making some functions that might enable some of it but it hasn't worked.

Would this be possible, and how would it be done?

Thanks!

MBG did not have multiplayer, however it seems like it was a planned feature given how much scripts for mp exist. it must have been cut late in development. from what i heard from higuy in 2018 getting those scripts working won't be enough to make mp work

Had enough look and realised the GUI files are for the Ignition Key registration (GG version), silly me!

Still doesn't explain all of the Torque Test Servers, maybe they were in all GG games but never finished?

web.archive.org/web/20071025063306/http:.../general/ch02s05.php

As for multiplayer, prototyping so early helped us a lot here as well. With the marble physics system prototyped, we started to realize how complex it might be to support in a multiplayer setting. Accounting for precise marble physics over a network began to look much more challenging than we originally expected.

At this stage, multiplayer capability was still on the plate. We kept Torque's solid networking core, but we had the first shadow of a doubt as to whether multiplayer gameplay would really be feasible.

Doubting whether mutiplayer gameplay would be feasible led us to question whether it would be necessary to ending up with a great game. If it were truly necessary to the gameplay, it would be essential to work out a complicated system that could fully support the kind of marble physics we wanted. On the other hand, if it seemed the game could stand on its own in single-player, we could nix the multi-play capability, save all that development time, and make the core game that much better.

With this first prototype in hand, we could see the game's potential, and became confident that it could, in fact, stand on its own as a single-player game. We knew that multiplayer would certainly be cool in the setting of Marble Blast, but our best estimates told us that the cost to implement it would be much higher than the possible benefit it could offer to gameplay.

As such, we made the painful decision to cut multiplayer from the game's design. Not everyone on the team wanted to go this way, but in the end, everyone agreed. It was an extremely difficult decision, but it paid off very well in the end.

The only reason we were able to make this decision so early on, consequently saving ourselves a lot of development time, was because we focused on getting an early prototype of the game up and running absolutely as quickly as possible. If we had waited longer to prototype we would have burnt design and development time on a feature that ultimately would be cut.

There's an open source implementation of multiplayer in MBG by myself and others from 2012. You can check it out here: github.com/PlatinumTeam/HaxPackage

The only major issue to solve is networking the marble positions. In PQ we ended up using a plugin to handle this. You could likely throw it into MBG and get decently working multiplayer. github.com/PlatinumTeam/MBExtender/tree/...ns/MarbleGhostingFix