Raise Player Limit To 16

[CDarrow]

Make it possible for 16 players to join a multiplayer game.

[CDarrow]

This is a lot harder than it sounds. In addition to finding all the places 8 players is hard-coded in, we have to address issues like . . . what colors do we make players 9-16? Where do we display their scores? How do we display the (now much bigger) kill matrix? Do we need to go back to all the old levels and add 8 more player starts, or do we start reusing them?

It may be worth examining how XL resolved these issues.

[roncli]

If you end up doing this, it might be worth looking into how Descent 3 resolved these problems. You can have 32 players in a D3 game.

Regarding ship colors, this resource might be useful... here is a CSS file with all 32 colors used for ships in Descent 3. https://github.com/roncli/descentDSNclient/blob/master/public/css/player-colors.css

For displaying scores, just display the top N scores (N = 5 in Descent 3), and if none of them are yours, display yours, too. Get the full scoreboard from the pause menu.

The kill matrix would probably be the hardest to deal with. For instance, D3 did not display a kill matrix on end of level. However, in game when you viewed the scoreboard (similar to the Pause button in Retro), you could Page Up/Page Down through the player list to view the kill matrix for that particular person. This would require a complete redesign of the multiplayer Pause screen, which may be more headache than it's worth.

For spawn points, D3 reused them. Note that this did result in players spawning on top of each other occasionally, so that may not be the best solution.