Building Worlds in dot big bang

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Multiplayer Editing

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Overview

Any game made in dot big bang can be worked on by several creators at once, allowing you to do everything from carefully dividing up work on a project to making an open brainstorm space where anything is possible. Whoever created the game will need to stay part of the editing session, but anyone can contribute changes to the environment, add new voxel objects, and create scripts for the project.

Starting a Multiplayer Session

You can start a multiplayer sessions the exact same way you would with a game:

  1. Click the Invite friends button in the top right corner and then the Publish and Go! button in the menu that pops up.
  2. Copy the URL at the top and send it to anyone who you would like to invite.
    • You should see ?mp= in the URL followed by some characters. This makes it a multiplayer session.
  3. Click the Edit icon to swap to the Game Editor. Everyone in the multiplayer session will now be in the Game Editor as well!

Saving

Once a session is live, only the creator of the game can save changes. You probably want to do this regularly, and warn the other participants when this is going to happen. Scripts and voxel objects save separately, so this only applies to saving changes of the game itself.

You can also choose Save As to make a new copy of the project and not change your original game. This is great for trying out new ideas to add to the main project later.

Permissions

If you started a multiplayer session, then you already had to mark your game as Published. When others add their work (scripts and voxel objects) to the game, they will also need to mark them as published and remixable in order for everyone in the game to have access to them. You may want to remix copies of scripts and voxel objects made by others if you want to use them in the long term, so that you keep access even if those permissions change later.

How Multiplayer Works in dot big bang

When someone creates a multiplayer session in dot big bang, they become the owner of the session and host it for everyone else. In a normal game, if the first owner leaves, the game finds a new player to be the owner and keep the session going, so that it doesn’t just end the game for everyone. In the Game Editor, this happens as well, but the creator of the game needs to have it in edit mode in order for anyone to edit. This means that if the creator presses refresh, it goes back out of edit for everyone until they press the Edit button again. What will also happen is that someone else becomes the owner (the host, not the actual creator of the game), which means only that person can press Start, Stop, and Play.

To avoid problems, if the game creator needs to refresh the page, everyone else should refresh the page afterward to make them the owner again.