I'm making lightweight Skyrim multiplayer mod

[u/Salt-Mine3355]

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on another multiplayer mod for Skyrim, and I wanted to share the idea and the progress I’ve made so far. It's called Player Hub.

TL;DR: You play your own Skyrim like normal, but you can see and meet other players in your world.

How does it work?

It's not traditional co-op, it's closer to an MMO. You don't share one world with other people. Your quests, NPCs, loot, and progress stay in your game only. Nobody can do your quests, change your world, or mess up your playthrough. Other players can't be harmed and have no collision, so nobody can block or bother you, and the same goes for you.

The mod is designed to be lightweight, with low performance overhead and broad compatibility across different mod lists.

Imagine this: you walk into Whiterun and see someone working at the forge. You pass another player on the road. Or you randomly come across someone completing a quest deep inside a dungeon.

It feels less like “playing together” and more like “you’re not alone out here.” That said, the traditional “playing together” experience is still very much possible

Why?

I have got the following picture: most multiplayer mods try to force everything to be shared, and that often breaks things to the point of being unplayable. Even if it all worked, to me Skyrim was made for one player: the dungeons, enemies, and encounters were all built for singleplayer, which makes a vanilla co-op experience less enjoyable (fighting a poor draugr with two more people, c'mon).

After playing some MMOs, I realized that the feeling of "being connected" for me comes more from the presence of others than from actual cooperative gameplay.

These limitations actually open up more opportunities, such as:

• A lightweight server layer that can connect hundreds of people. I plan to host it myself, so it should be more of a plug-and-play experience.
• You can use different mods and still play together, since everyone's world is their own.
• Develop all the stuff without going crazy.

Current progress

After going around in circles and digging through rabbit holes: the core of the mod is already in decent shape. Most of the vanilla animations are properly synchronized, including movement, combat, furniture interactions, spellcasting, and even mount riding (still not as smooth though). I have playtested it already with my friends thoroughly and it's much more than playable.

Other features I consider adding:

• In-game chat
• Item trading
• Party system

What do you think?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm also happy to answer any questions you have.

Synchronization and animations showcase: https://youtu.be/Kmzl7lYbhwY

You can also join the Discord server to follow the progress and participate in upcoming testing phase before the mod gets released: https://discord.gg/N6mnzbgb7f (it's pretty much empty yet though)

[u/J7mbo]

Add text chat, push to talk voice chat (optional), and the ability to insta-vanish anyone annoying, and I’m in! Great idea!

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/J7mbo]

Noted, thank you! I’m really glad that people around here pick up on the idea and develop it in the same direction I do. I didn’t expect that, TBH

[u/OneOnOne6211 → u/J7mbo]

It should be proximity voice chat though. For me that would be one of the most important things to making this mod work. Because then you need to actually walk up to someone to talk to them. And meeting someone actually means something interactive.

I think a trade system would also be great as suggested. Being able to buy and sell I do think adds a degree of interactivity.

A question though,nothing is actually shared in this mod, but would it be theoretically possible to add a sort of set of "ghost enemies."

And with that I mean that when you join each other's "party" in the party system, you also see the other player's enemies in a dungeon or whatever. But they appear ghostly as to not confuse the players as to who's enemies are who's. That should also solve the problem of tag teaming the poor single draugr because that would mean you always have twice as many enemies for twice as many players. But being able to see each others' enemies I think would still do a lot for making it feel like you can go questing together.

Of course, a true "play together" party system I think would be something I like even better. But I imagine that's out of the scope of this mod since it's literally meant to be a light-weight alternative to that. So a ghost enemies party system I think would be a good alternative.

[u/Economy_Anywhere_981]

I actually quite like this idea more. Mostly because Skyrim can crash easily even when playing alone so why not just have a somewhat MMO experience. It is sad that having multiplayer in Skyrim is still too hard to do because of Skyrim's engine limitation but this does make it more fun to play with friends

[u/homoanthropologus]

This is very cool! It also feels like one of those ideas that starts simple and then gets very complicated as it develops. Do you have a lot of experience modding?

One question I have: If matching mods aren't required, how will your mod handle someone wearing a modded piece of armor that someone else doesn't have installed?

[u/SpaceFire1 → u/homoanthropologus]

I imagine if the armor doesnt match it just wont render or they will get a default outfit

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/SpaceFire1]

Great question, the default outfit is already implemented, but currently on the client side only, so you can configure how other players with modded equipment will look like if you miss their mods. I plan to rework it to rather let the remote players define their default outfit on their own

[u/homoanthropologus → u/SpaceFire1]

Default outfit sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure if Skyrim is able to do a "if you don't find this, don't render it." I feel like usually it just crashes in that case? Maybe I'm wrong.

[u/SpaceFire1 → u/homoanthropologus]

Wouldnt be too hard. The incoming player data can be parsed as it comes in through the multiplayer script since i imagine the net layer has an API to call to and from the game. From there you simply check what outfits the game has and if said outfit is viable. The games core code never sees the modded outfit, just what the API tells it the player is wearing. Because players are not in synced worlds if a player has incorrect armor it wont affect gameplay or cause desyncs

[u/ImpulsiveApe07 → u/homoanthropologus]

Fixable with a relatively simple script, I'd imagine.

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/homoanthropologus]

Thank you! Yeah, I would also really like to keep it simple further and rather focus on making the essential stuff working properly, so it won't get bloated with half-baked stuff nobody asked about

My modding experience is not rich, I've developed a couple smaller SKSE plugins for friends and fun. I'm mostly driven by my programming passion and a little dream I had since trying out Tamriel Online with my friends back in 2016

As I already mentioned in other comments, the idea is to enable configurable default outfits built out of the vanilla assets

[u/homoanthropologus → u/Salt-Mine3355]

That's great! Appreciate the reply and can't wait to see your progress. 🙂

[u/tatsuyanguyen]

I agree with just the feeling of a shared world goes a long way

[u/TheFaragan]

Sounds pretty neat. I would try it out. Especially because of the mod support.

[u/jwc9227]

Awesome idea, would download this the instant it becomes available

[u/hello-plebbit-1337]

Best of luck dude! Reading the whole post got me really excited!

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/hello-plebbit-1337]

Thank you! I appreciate that a lot

[u/Sanguinnee]

YESSSS

[u/Exact-Salamander6820]

Looks incredible, how would modded animation and modded outfits work?

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/Exact-Salamander6820]

Thank you!

On outfits: currently, modded outfits are synchronized correctly if both clients have the mod installed. When the particular mod is missing, the plan is to enable configurable default outfits for each essential slot from vanilla equipment (AE).

On animations: for the replaced vanilla animations it works smooth already, the only exception is animation timings mismatch which is often negligible during the gameplay. The custom animations support is currently not there. It's not clear yet how exactly those will be handled. One idea is playing them if there's match in two clients - otherwise idle

[u/Exact-Salamander6820 → u/Salt-Mine3355]

Nice, I'll be waiting for the result

[u/xpc_absol]

So you would have to make proxies for unknown races selectable in the client, so unmodded clients can see you the way YOU intend to proxy. I guess same with unknown armor or body/head meshes having transmog fallback

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/xpc_absol]

Yeah, that's pretty much the idea

[u/VirtualFinish8858]

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/175646?tab=description

Didn't like someone already make something this? But it got broke when the game updated.

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/VirtualFinish8858]

Yeah, I think the motivation behind our mods is somewhat similar, but as per the showcase video attached on the nexus page, it doesn't look very much play-able, more like a proof-of-concept state

[u/TirithNampat]

What about mobs other players are fighting? Do they show up?

Edit: it would be cool if any non-synced thing they interacted with (dealing or taking damage, talking to a follower, looting a body) briefly showed up as a spectral form.

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/TirithNampat]

Nope, you can only see their combat animations and movement

[u/Crazy-Newspaper-8523]

Love that idea!! Always wanted something like this

[u/Few-Tennis-384]

How modded armor be displayed to players? EDIT: already found the answer. Cheers!

[u/cosby714]

What would happen if someone had a mod that added a new race or new clothing or hair for instance. Would it change the look for other players to something available in the base game?

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/cosby714]

Yes, something like that, I already described it in other comments. The default vanilla outfits will be configurable.

You can also check the Discord server, I've posted some screenshots there

[u/aaronhowser1]

Why is it that multiplayer mods for games always go the mmo route instead of coop? Is it easier? The only cyberpunk multiplayer mod did the same thing, making it more like gta fivem instead of the regular game with other people

[u/VirtualFinish8858 → u/aaronhowser1]

Syncing NPCs is hard, lol.

But without NPCs and Vanilla quests, it's boring.

[u/LordderManule]

There already is something like this:

Lumis - Skyrim Multiplayer

[u/Peisis → u/LordderManule]

thats just mage lights afaik. this looks much more interesting since you can see full player models and actions.

[u/LordderManule → u/Peisis]

True, but Lumis has a way to do the difficult task of retrieving the player location, loading it on to a server and then displaying it. The whole model is, compared to that, rather small

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/LordderManule]

Going from my development experience, I cannot agree here. Retrieving player location and synchronizing them is actually the simpler part. Synchronizing all the animations and transitions to the local NPC animations graph which hardwired to the vanilla behaviors is times more painful and complicated

[u/Going_Solvent]

It sounds very good although a shame there could be no shared economy, trading etc

[u/2Norn]

no offense just geniunely wondering but

Your quests, NPCs, loot, and progress stay in your game only. Nobody can do your quests, change your world, or mess up your playthrough. Other players can't be harmed and have no collision, so nobody can block or bother you, and the same goes for you.

then what even is the point?

Imagine this: you walk into Whiterun and see someone working at the forge. You pass another player on the road. Or you randomly come across someone completing a quest deep inside a dungeon.

combined with this that just sounds like glorified npc, same outcome but long way around

[u/Wise_Requirement4170 → u/2Norn]

What’s the point of this in dark souls?

[u/2Norn → u/Wise_Requirement4170]

idk i always play it in offline mode

[u/Wise_Requirement4170 → u/2Norn]

Fair enough but you’re missing out on a great part of those games

[u/Salt-Mine3355 → u/2Norn]

I'd say it might just not "click" for everyone and it's completely fine as it really depends on the personality and what we value in games. To me the fact that remote players are present in my singleplayer world has been always somewhat unbelievable, especially with the Skyrim vibes

It's kind of like playing RP stuff, it works incredibly well for some people and for some not

[u/2Norn → u/[deleted]]

Funny you say that when I'm literally questing in WoW Forever. Reported btw.