I know that the developers have mentioned possibly getting netplay in the future for Libretro.
Whether or not we get that, my suggestion would be to support local co-op specifically for Libretro (not for any other content).
The emulators in game already support multiplayer. I’m not sure if all of them do, but I know Mame does and you can actually check the settings for other controllers.
The gamepads are already mapped properly.
Tower Unite itself just doesn’t support additional controllers.
So I’m suggesting that the game can read extra inputs for use in Libretro.
It’d be cool to locally play co-op with friends in person (or on Parsec) through Tower Unite.
I don’t know about others, but for myself - Tower Unite has become my preferred way to play retro games. I love the virtual hangout space and just having that aesthetic that I can customize. I would love for it to not be limited to singleplayer, even if its just locally.
TU is not an emulator frontend, your character plays alone in the playground built by TU. If you want to play multiplayer arcade games locally with your friends, standalone emulators are the better option.
Of course, retroarch natively supports netplay, but this does not mean TU supports it. achieve this function is more complicated than it seems. Currently, only EmuVR partially implements this function among all emulator-related VR game environments.
I mean, New Retro Arcade was able to play local somehow last time I recall. But not the point of this. Sorry.
I feel this is the similar argument why MP3 or portable media player were to exist in TU. Both sides do have a point.
I feel this game overall it is all-in-one kind of game. Not something like Anarchy Arcade where it’s very close to TU’s condo experience but for your shortcuts.
So, I don’t know. It’s really up to the devs what they think of this honestly. If it’s possible, it’s possible, if not well, it’s not.
Both NRAN and EmuVR are single-player games, and they can easily realize local MP3/MP4 media playback. But TU is an online game, and TU limits the playback to only online videos in order to let you share the same video with other users in the cinema. Although theoretically, TU can also play audio and video locally without considering the sharing of remote users.
But running an emulator game online in VR is much more complicated than playing an online video. It needs to synchronize the input of each user participating in the game and share the game screen output among multiple users (including participating players and spectators).
I think that’s what Kirby meant. I mean it make sense. It’s like that handheld console that you have in your hotbar. You’re not sharing any local data with online players. From their point of view, you’re just standing there ya know?
Yes, I know. I even suggested a solution, which is the ffmpeg core of libretro.
I would also like to mention that Anarchy Arcade is essentially a bootstrap that does not run the emulator within the game, but directly calls the emulator itself. So it is different from the VR environment that calls librerto API, such as TU, NRAN, and EmuVR.
The summary is that AA is a bootstrap launcher, NRAN and EmuVR are libretro front-end, and TU is an online game that uses the libretro API.
Fair enough, thanks for pointing out about AA.
Now I know why it’s annoying to use it for emulator games and I only use it for my shortcuts and media player.
Compare to TU and RetroArch. lol
Yeah, standalone emulators are the better option. if they weren’t then I wouldn’t be suggesting this.
Not sure why you’re talking about netplay since my post isn’t related. I updated the post to try and be a little more clear. I would absolutely love netplay, but there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get it. Local co-op would at least be a way to have our condo-atmosphere included in our games with friends and should be much easier to implement.
Local Co-op is nearly supported, our system can connect multiple controllers. I have to setup assigning the second gamepad to the second controller while in this mode in Unreal. It’s something I was looking into during the development of Libretro, so there’s a bit of code stubs laying around to get it going again.
Anyway, I really envy you for having friends who are willing to sit with you and play games in reality. My friends can only netplay though steam and it’s almost impossible to sit around and play games together.
I also enjoy playing arcade games in Condo because I can run several games at the same time, and the noise is like the time I spent in the arcade when I was a child.
BTW, how did you retrieve the menu in the screenshot? I am unable to access the internal menus of MAME or FBneo in TU.
All good! Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough. Yeah, you just gotta find the right peeps.
I pushed in the right analogue stick on my controller to get that open. I think you can also hold down F1 or F2 or something. It doesn’t work in some games. It might be only the Mame ones that work and not FBNeo.
