Advanced Coop FA & Coop Lobby Mod v 1.0 (06-20-2010)
by Hyzual

This mod is the continuation of spliff's and neruz's mod, namely Advanced Coop Mod.
The purpose of it is to allow several players in a team to share full control of their armies, economies, etc.
It includes the 4.4 version of the LEM by sorian, and the Big Map Preview of ThaPear (because they're cool and mod lobby too).

Therefore it is NOT COMPATIBLE with the LEM or Big Map Preview, or any other Lobby Mod by the way (sorry :p).

Also, as all .scd files do, This mod will desync with people who don't have it.

Links :
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BzbSsbfPeKMQQXZDcnVsVjJ0SGM
http://www.mediafire.com/?cdcpn88tedy5tjd

Screens !


That's what the lobby looks like. Ah yes, I took this before I added Big Map Preview so the button's not there, no biggie anyway you can view what it looks like there http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=46383

By the way, YES the menus in my screens are in french, so am I, so is my game. I don't think you'll have much trouble figuring out that it's the lobby :p

So let's explain the new lobby a little bit : I've added 2 new columns (which only display in multiplayer by the way) : first is the S-Team which means SubTeam or ShareTeam. 2 Players willing to share full control of their armies must first be in the same team, then choose the same subteam. This allows for flexibility, you can have 2 times subteam 1, one being team 1 and the other being team 2. More : suppose you have a 4 players team, and they wanna have 2 armies : 2 of them choose subteam 1 and the other 2 choose subteam 2 !
The second column, Leader, is to choose the leader of a subteam (this is always in relationship with the subteam choosed of course). The leader will be the colour the whole army gets, and if you choose the SubTeam Scatter "Grouped" Option, this will be where everyone spawns. Simple. Oh and there can only be one leader per subteam, of course (even if a ui bug allows 2 players in a subteam to check the leader checkbox, in the game there'll be only one).


This is the new option, SubTeam Scatter, which defines if non-leaders are spawned near the Leader or at their normal spawning point.


This is it ! You now have a 2 people's army :p


This is what chatting while allied looks like, you still keep your colour in the chat.


Aaaand now scattered, AND with an AI in the team (which does not get in the shared army)

Installation :
- If you have the Lobby Enhancement Mod by sorian installed, please delete the 03_lobbyenhancement.scd file from your gamedata folder.
- Use the installer, provide it with your Supreme Commander Forged Alliance folder, and it should install it correctly :p
- In case the installer did something wrong,
- Extract 03_cooplobbymod.scd in your Supreme Commander Forged Alliance gamedata folder, e.g. C:/Program Files/THQ/Gas Powered Games/Supreme Commander - Forged Alliance/gamedata
- Extract Advanced Coop FA and Advanced Utils FA folders in your Mod folder, e.g. C:/Your account/My documents/My Games/Gas Powered Games/Supreme Commander Forged Alliance/Mods

Usage :
- Go to the Mod Manager in EXTRA menu, activate the Advanced Coop FA mod and Advanced Utils FA
- Host a MULTIPLAYER game
- Enable Cheat codes
- Choose whether you want to spawn near the Leader or not (Grouped or Scattered)
- Form your subteams and choose a leader for each
- Play !

Important notes :
- This mod requires the CHEAT CODES to be ENABLED. Won't work without, I may try to search for a workaround about this, but this could take a long time.
- This mod DOES NOT WORK with AI players, on the contrary of the previous v2 and v3 versions by spliff (which by the way kinda "worked" with non-sorian AI but eventually caused the game to crash).
By this statement I mean : You CAN ally with AI or fight against them using this mod , but CANNOT share your army with them just like you can with humans.
I'm not planning to get it to work with AIs soon since I know nothing of their code at the moment. I may try too, but no promises.
- Due to the above issue, this mod is MULTIPLAYER ONLY.
- As in the Handicap Mod you MUST activate this mod in the Mod Manager OUSTIDE OF THE LOBBY since its activation mods the lobby.
- The whole subteam WILL LOSE if the Leader is disconnected or leaves the game. Might find a workaround for this one, dunno when.
- This Mod is INCOMPATIBLE with the Lobby Enhancement Mod (LEM) by sorian. In fact I modded the LEM 4.4 and included it here so please delete the 03_lobbyenhancement.scd file BEFORE adding this one.

Insert title here :p
Hello, I'm Hyzual, new to the modding scene and this is my first mod. With permission from spliff, I have continued his work on the Advanced Coop Mod for FA and I am proud to present you this 4th Version.
Basically, I have modded the LEM ,also with sorian's approval, in order to give people more choice in their coop setting. Players now can :
- Choose whether they want to share their army or not using Subteams. A Subteam is a subdivision of a team where player share their armies with a Leader, e.g. In a 4 people team, there can be 2 Subteams, which will be 2 armies controlled each by 2 players.
- Choose the main army (and color) they want to use in coop. In the 3rd and 2nd versions, this was not allowed, the "first" player (which wasn't always the host) was chosen instead.
- Choose whether to spawn near the leader or at our original spawn point. This is done via the SubTeam Scatter option, "grouped" spawns subteam-mates near the leader while "scattered" spawns subteam-mates at their normal spawning point.

Unfortunately I have removed AIs from being in subteams, since when you shared your army with an AI in v2 or v3, the platoon.lua file modded by spliff would allow you to play with an AI but the whole game would crash eventually(in v3 it even rendered the AIs dumb, incapable of doing anything). It didn't work at all with Sorian AIs.
So, since it didn't work, I just removed them. They can still be your allies since they will be created with no subteam by default.

Possible upgrades :
- Break the player limit for maps under 8 players, by allowing additionnal players to spawn in coop. This requires more lobby modding, and could maybe be done without touching the observers, an option suggested previously on the old Advanced Coop Thread.
- Support AIs. Not gonna happen soon, since I need to study the AI code for both normal and Sorian AI in order to prevent AIs from hogging control and allow human players to actually do anything.
- Remove the need for cheats. Don't know anything on that subject either, so no promises.

Changed from v3 :
- Removed the three additionnal required mods (Advanced AI, AI Support and Mod Support from spliff) since I don't really know what spliff was planning to do with them and don't need them particularly.
- Removed the need for prebuilt to be activated
- Added an option box using LEM called SubTeam Scatter
- Added the subteam column to the lobby using LEM as well as its full support in the mod
- Added the leader column to the lobby using LEM
- Removed the "semi-random" choose of the leader to replace it with the Lobby checkbox
- Removed the annoying status renaming of units. This was useful to know what the AI was doing, but since I don't support the AI Coop anymore, I hid it. Those can still be activated via a global variable in the mod.
- Added the need for the mod to be loaded out of the lobby (as in Handicap Mod) since its activation determines what the lobby will look like.

Known Bugs :
- When choosing a subteam, if there alreay is a leader the new subteam-mate's leader checkbox is supposed to be disabled until the current leader unchecks his checkbox (in order to ensure that there is only one leader per subteam). Changing anything else (e.g. subteam or even faction) causes the leader checkbox to be enabled again.
- Due to the above problem, there can be 2 leaders for a given subteam. Normally, the mod's code will choose the second one to be leader.
- The Second subteam-mate may have his name set incorrectly to be the leader's. A simple CTRL+N fixes this.
- The ACUs Thumbprint at the right of the UI in-game might get placed very high, in front of the score board. This is caused by the fact that the army has multiple ACUs (try LD's All factions Mod, it does the same).

Known Incompatibilities :
- PowerLobby by Moritz2
- LEM by sorian (but this mod includes it)
- ThaPear's Lobby mod (but this mod includes the Big Map Preview Part)
- BlackOps Unleashed v3.2
- BlackOps ACU v2.9

Credits :
- Sorian for the LEM mod which I used here
- spliff and neruz for the Advanced Coop Mod which I modified here
- ThaPear for the Big Map Preview Mod which I included there without modification

Copyrights & license :
- As the previous Advanced Coop Mod, this mod is free for non-commercial use. Please give credit / ask us before using our work. Thanks

What a coincidence. I was just mentioning this mod to one of my friends the other day and today I pop onto the forums and see an updated version of it. Absolutely wonderful. Downloading now.

By the way, I noticed that when you used the grouped option it will spawn multiple commanders at a single spawn point. I think one of the ideas behind this mod is for 2 people to play a single army with a single commander, not to have 2 armies with 2 commanders fused under 1 colour. That allows for extra micromanagement since there are now more people controlling a single army, allowing them to focus on different tasks and perform them better simultaneously. One person can focus on the battlefield and the other can focus on base-building and economy management. That would result in some very interesting gameplay since the players don't have to juggle between monitoring the battlefield and economy managment anymore, which also makes the game a lot easier for newcomers. Perhaps you could add that as an option along with breaking the player limit for maps under 8 players, which is also a great idea. Either way, great work on improving this mod, as well as the lobby improvements.

Well you're absolutely correct, but while playing with it with a couple of friends, I've noticed that if you spawn "grouped", you eventually end up moving your commanders to the starting points nearby for the mass, so spawning "scattered" just speeds the thing a little bit. And spawning scattered is absolutely not the same as playing normal team, for if you play a subteam of 3, you'll get 3 times more mass than any single player, meaning you'll go to experimental MUCH faster.

And about the idea of people distributing focuses, it can also kinda improve balancing teams, e.g. you have 1 very skilled player facing 2 lesser-skilled players playing together !

Also about the 2 people playing 1 comm, well I liked the possibility to be playing multiple factions under one army (also I don't think I mentioned it, but since the Prebuild option is no longer needed, this mod IS compatible with LD's All factions, Prebuilt Paragon and so on).
If you think it'd be a good idea, I could always set another option saying "Spawn only the Leader ACU" or "Spawn everyone's ACUs"

Thanks for your comment and appreciation :p also let me know if something went weird with the install, I kinda tested my installer only on my system ^^

Yep, that's exactly what I'm talking about. But think about it this way. If say we had a match on winters duel, where 1 skilled player faced 2 lesser skilled players, but the other team had 2 commanders, it would absolutely cause an imbalance since 2 commanders together can completely steamroll the opposing 1 commander without ever having to build a single thing. It's just walk over and kill. So yes, I do think it would be awesome if you add another option for spawning only the leader ACU.

Point taken, I'm working on it right now but I'll only release it with v1.1 when I'll have done the "breaking the player limit" part :p

Sure. Once again, great work on this mod.

Indeed, very cool. Awesome mod, I think this was supposed to be in the original game but it was cancelled, Chris Taylor said in some preview that we would be able to play multiple ppl in one army, for example having one air, one land and one naval general. Really cool, great job!

Great to see someone working on this again! Can you tell me if this is compatible with the BlackOps unit & the BlackOps ACUs mod?

Looking forward to trying this.

Another question...can this mod be packaged as a single .scd file that resides in the gamedata directory, or is it required to have parts in the /mods subdirectory and part in the /gamedata directory?

I'm just asking from the ease of installation; also, some people don't particularly like installing from .exe files.

Your thoughts?

Thanks...

Sorry, yet another question. Can you tell me what the 5-team drop down is for?

Thanks

Hi,

WOW - nice work
will you implement the prebuilt units mod from ThePear ?

Regards
R-TEAM

> HTKatzmarek
I've tested the compatibility this morning, and it appears they're incompatible. I've made tests using BlackOps Unleashed v3.2, BlackOps ACU v2.9 and Advanced Coop, the game is laggy as hell, you don't have any energy, in short : unplayable. However, if you DONT activate Coop Mod but leave the .scd, BlackOps works. So you still get the LEM and Big Map Preview at least. I'll look into this compatibility problem later, I first want to get the v1.1 working.

Now your 2nd qestion : Theoretically, I could package the mod in a single .scd, but that would mean you couldn't deactivate it (since it would no longer be a mod as the mod manager can manage them) and therefore you would have to delete/move away the entire .scd to play with BlackOps. Second reason I'm not very inclined to do that is that merging them would require 1 to 2 hours of work and I'm a bit lazy :p
For those of you that don't like the installer, I'll release a single .zip which will contain the 2 mods (which I will probably merge into one, this is much faster) and the .scd for the lobby, along with a readme detailing where to put them.

Now to your 3rd question :p -> S-Team (it's an S looking like a 5, blame the font :p) means Sub Team or Share Team if you prefer, you and your team-mate must set the SubTeam to the same number to share your armies just like for a normal team. I think I'll re-explain this a bit in the upper post.

> RxTEAM
Well seeing as it states "Lobby" in the title, there's a good chance ThaPear's prebuilt units won't work with this one. I might look into supporting it, but like I said I want to get v1.1 working first thing.

Speaking of which The lobby modding for "Breaking the player limit" (v1.1) already works (needs a bit of polish), but the game crashes utterly... I'll keep you posted if I manage to make it work.

Thanks for your support, and please keep me informed if you find other compatibility problems.

Thanks for the reply. Looking forward to using this mod, especially if the compatibility issued get worked out.

Thanks again for all the work, I think this is a great idea!

If you can break the player limit....

On a side note, all of these should have been merged into the CEP, shame its dead.

Just tested the mod without Blackops, and everything works great! I'm a little vague on what the 'leader' button gains you, but I'm really loving this mod!

Either one of the BlackOps mods (ACUs or unit pack) causes this mod to malfunction. The non-leader commander appears to be 'half' there, you can't see him, but it shows the outlline. The leader commander doesn't show the line between the comander and what's being built. Also, like you stated, there's no resources at the beginning.

Really looking forward to being able to play both the BlackOps and this mod together. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Ok I've done the explanation of the Leader and Subteam in the main post, I thought I had done it before.
Well HTKatzmarek the point you're stating just lighted things up a little bit. Actually BlackOps ACU mod creates a completely new unit for the ACU, explaining why the Leader is Ok and the Non Leaders aren't. I might need to call a different function for the non leaders. I bet BlackOps did the "hiding" of the normal ACU, so either I try to use a different function or I could detect that BlackOps was active and create a specific thingy.
About the "Construction beam" not showing I can't imagine what would cause that.
About the ressources, well my mod messes with ressources : it takes from non-leaders to give to the leader. That might mess something with BlackOps.

Thanks for your report :p
Also I changed the images links, put them to ImageShack since mediafire seems not to display them anymore. Let me know if something gets wrong or if I missed the explaining part for something :p

Can the handicap plugin for Sorian's LEMM also be used with this mod?

Yes it is compatible, this makes many columns for each player :p
Also keep it mind that handicap must be applied to the Leader if you use subteams.

I just tried the mod, but the option subteam scatter is not appearing.
Also, it seemed you had not accounted for that, as it won't launch without the option being set.

If you change line 40 of mods\Advanced Coop FA\hook\lua\sim\ScenarioUtilities.lua to:and change line 23 of mods\Advanced Coop FA\hook/lua/aibrain.lua toit will default to scattered mode if it's not set.

GreetZ ThaPear

Thanks for the advice, I just did what you suggested. Also I did it for the 2 new options that I've added in the 1.1.
I dont know why the option would not appear though. In fact I didn't do that part, I used a feature of sorian's LEM to add options.

And a little status update : I'm currently totally stuck on the "breaking the player limit" part of the v1.1 . It works in lobby, but for obvious reasons the game crashes when you're on an "unattended" slot, and I haven't yet figured out what crashes exactly and where. And also I'm working this summer so I don't really know when I'll have the time (and energy ) to work on this.
If anyone is interested I could release the half-done v1.1, though you'd only have the options renamed and an added option to choose if the leader spawns alone or not.

I've never heard of a UI mod having compatability issues with a unit mod before. Whats up with that and any idea if this will be resolved soon ?

Resin

Well it's because it isn't a UI mod :p
It mods lobby and spawns multiple ACUs, so it kinda messes a bit with the game.
Well I don't know yet what crashes with BlackOps Unleashed,
but I do know that it doesn't work with BlackOps ACU cause it mods the ACU.

I think I might have to make a special "if" for blackops.
As for the time estimate, I don't know, I'm kinda out of supcom for a bit now, I'll do it when I find the time and will :p

BO Uses custom ACU's by replacing the exsisting units directly... The changes that are involved are extreamly extensive and rewrite a large chunk of the games start up scripts.

Resin

It's not just the BO ACU's, but also the BO Unleashed that causes problems with this mod. It would be great to have compatibility with BO as it's so widely used. If the ACU's are replaced by BO mods, couldn't this mod spawn the BO ACUs instead of the standard ones if BO is present?

I am curious to see if anyone has tried this with 4DC yet...

Resin