That is good progress indeed. I actually wouldn't even care if it has split screen at least till the solution came up for it which I hope would eventually come. But I wouldn't mind it personally. If the co op mode worked 2 player split screen co op would be bad ass though. That is awesome there can the players hurt each other already to? xD

Yeah players could hurt each other and stuff, but the way I was syncing things was super ghetto just to mess around.

A real implementation would be to hook the areas where it updates positions and such and then use those as events to send data over the network, except the idea is that you want your packets to be as small as possible so you only send deltas rather then full data in every packet....

I need to consider how I'm going to do it..

I don't have much experience with d3d either, but in opengl I use glClear, and with 3D games usually graphics programmers set it to also clear the depth buffer and stencil buffer. Sometimes those two buffers are even combined. I doubt this game does anything with the stencil buffer though.

This is the kind of thing I've missed in the past, even when I've written it myself. Then worn myself out for a week trying to figure out why something isn't rendering properly. It's kind of interesting to me that that's a problem that exists in the PC version at all. That's the kind of thing I'd think they'd notice and fix early on in the development of the multiplayer.

To clarify I don't have experience with OpenGL or d3d I've never really done 3D programming I know enough to rip functions and hook areas to do basic rendering of text and menus which other people wrote handlers for but not enough to write my own stuff from scratch.

Well I'm thinking that it got screwed up some how when they were porting to PC because the entire rendering loop for the multiplayer mode is different from the single player,
Multiplayer was never even intended to be functional on PC in-fact there's literally no way to bind controls to the 2nd player.

In theory I could make it happen and add split-screen support by basically updating the memory of the player but that's besides what we're talking about..

So yeah, I had to use PIX to find it and I watched the depth buffer get cleared out here's an example

- depth buffer before clear.
- depth buffer after clear.

It warms my heart to see T:E multiplayer on a PC. I'm excited to be able to play with you all in the future, if possible. Thank you Permanull for all of your work.

You'll laugh at me if I tell you what the rendering issue is but I don't do d3d stuff much.

So I wasn't aware Clear() could affect the depth buffer and the game has a sub routine to render the weapon when it does this in MP it seems to clear the depth buffer before drawing the weapon well when you switch weapons the rendering loop draws the player then draws the weapon causing the player's depth data to be wiped.

I bring you some of the most important progress of all...

I've completely disabled the 2nd player via an actual DLL now.
And... I've overcome the biggest hurdle which would've held me back with this project....

I FIXED THE RENDERING ISSUE!

I've made minor progress recently...

I reverse engineered the engine object spawning system I still haven't gotten it spawning objects yet though I did get it to spawn them to memory (just not place them on the map) trying to figure that part out.

Though the good news is now that I've found the area that I have after some reversing, time and patience I should be able to effectively disable the second player which I'm hoping will also remove the 2nd screen and in doing so will remove the rendering issues due to there being no overlay.

After that I would simply spawn the players manually for additional players joining the game.

With reversing the object spawns I also managed to find the weapon errors, pickups, and etc rendering function so I was able to produce custom text rendering straight to the screen which I'm sure will be useful once I want to display "Player joined", "Player killed X" or etc.

I leave you with a demo of text rendering: