The Science Behind a Multiplayer Version

[NeuralKernel]

Bones files would be awesome!! I can't remember if I already posted the idea myself... wouldn't be surprised to hear someone else has already raised the idea, "The Simpsons already did it" ;)What if persistent multiplayer servers only covered a single solar system? Remove FTL for multiplayer and disable time compression, a multiple star system with lots of planets and moons is a plenty big enough playground for a few hundred players... it would be a different game, but not a very drastic change from the current setup.

[Brianetta]

Disable time compression? You're prepared to spend days flying to the next planet?

[Loki999]

Disable time compression? You're prepared to spend days flying to the next planet?Or even months... damn those binary/triple/quad systems...

[shadmar]

Maybe have a synced timecompression in a co-op mode, if one uses it the rest will have forced timecompression. Or be "desynced" and have an option to time sync later with the group.Or maybe just allow engines to have 10x power.I can see alot of issues either way.

[NeuralKernel]

Yes, it SHOULD take days to fly to the next planet in multiplayer (or have a voter based time compression scheme, instead of being limited by proximity to a planet, it's limited by consensus among the players)... you want to hang out with other players you can either set up a meeting place in deep space WELL in advance or stay close to planetary bodies. Witjh a nmetworked interface you could leave the game running at home and just check in with a smartphone or web interface through the day if you need to...I'd guess you would probably need to either track down procedural systems that have planets with LOTs of moons, or build custom systems specially for multiplayer.Just my two cents... and they're Canadian cents at that

[Marcel]

I think that if you simply changed the time compression into a 'warp-drive', and made hyperspace jumps take only the actual few seconds perceived by the player you could make it work without changing gameplay too much.

[DerrickMoore]

Argh! Time is relative, duh... I honestly wouldn't worry about "local time" at all. Sure it'd mean that someone you wanted to kill, could fast-zoom-accelerate away from you in multi=player combat, but it's a nessecary consequence of not having a "C" speed limit and the time dilation that comes with that. what would be nice, though is a beacon that my ship could drop, or someway to name those planets out there, so that my favorite planet could be called "Murder" or "Cremetoria" maybe some sort of voting system, so there wouldn't be 1000 planets named "butt-munch". That way people could share with others fine stuff they've found. But the passengers on 2 different spaceships traveling at ultra-high speeds will not be observed to have the same local time.

[Brianetta]

Marcel, that would change the game quite radically. When you speed up time, planets also get sped up, as do other ships. Making the player's ship able to achieve high speeds relative to all the other stuff is, in and of itself, a big change in gameplay. It would turn Pioneer into I-War. I-War was a good game, but it wasn't nearly the same as Pioneer is.

[fluffyfreak]

I agree that it would change the character of Pioneer a lot but I'm tempted to hack something in and provide an exe for people to suck-it-and-see.Some things would get easier, some things would actually get harder. I'm not convinced that it would be as big a change as people are expecting.

[Marcel]

I've never played I-War but I found it on gog.com for $2.99. I bought two other games for the same price and got several others for free! Clicking on their ad probably gave Space Sim Central a farthing or two too, so I gave them a plug.

[DerrickMoore]

When you speed up time, planets also get sped up, as do other ships. Oh, I hadn't even thought about that at all. Hmmm.... I agree though, that Pioneer needs community, but I dont think Pioneer needs multiplayer combat. But i wish players could interact a bit. perhaps through the in-game Bullitin Board?

[Marcel]

Yes but if you turned the star-dreamer into a warp drive, the planets and other ships would continue running at normal time. So would the player. The warp drive just multiplies the effect of the engines making the player go faster. Would gameplay be affected? Sure, but I think it could work. Just to be clear, I'm not sure if I really want a multiplayer Pioneer either, but it's fun to speculate about it!

[funkybibimap]

I think a warp drive would be quite detrimental to pirates. It's very difficult to destroy a ship in a few seconds, especially the big ones with lots of shields which are favoured for sensitive transport missions. You'd need a very large ship to pack enough firepower, but then you'd never be able to catch up on the target. That's why pirates need small ships. But then with a low firepower, it can take a long fight to shoot down a big ship. Warp drives annihilate any chance of a long fight. Also, police ships would be undoubtedly equipped with warp drives, and able to intervene very (too) quickly anywhere in a system.

[Marcel]

Those are good points. I suppose that's why in ELITE you'd be 'mass locked' when near another ship. If that happened in Pioneer then yes, the police might be able to intervene too quickly. A balance would have to be struck allowing the player to move through a system quickly, but not so quick that you'd get there instantaneously. I'm envisioning battles that would be much like they are now, but you'd be maneuvering over much larger distances with greater fuel penalties. Actually hitting a target at warp speed may be too difficult to make this work.

[fluffyfreak]

My thinking on using something like a warp-drive, or whatever the drives from I-War / Starglider2 were called, would be that it would require several things to be true before working.For example it should be easy to drop a ship out of warp and to keep it out of warp. The ship might need to be travelling over a certain velocity before it would work, perhaps dependent on the mass of the ship. Or far enough away from a planet/object that it's gravity doesn't interfere. We make up the physics as it is remember  So ship-to-ship combat wouldn't need to change, it could offer other options too. For example you could ambush ships in warp if you knew where they were coming from, or escape from ships by dropping some kind of disrupting device and warping away before it activates. The police shouldn't be a problem, jam the communications and your victim can't call for help, besides, travel wouldn't be instant, it would just be quicker. Rather than just being subjectively quicker as it is with the star dreamer.

[Brianetta]

The ship might need to be travelling over a certain velocity before it would workStatements like this require a change to the physics engine. You don't have a velocity in space, unless you measure it relative to something, and there are a lot of somethings against which to measure. Remember, Earth (as well as anything landed on it) is belting along at nearly 30km/s, which is not slow at all. By having rules that depend on absolute speeds, you introduce inconsistencies. Fixing these inconsistencies would give you a game that looks and feels a lot like Oolite.Oolite is, in fact, an excellent candidate for multiplayer. There, you only have to overcome the resistance of the people involved. Here, you have to overcome the resistance of the people involved *and* change the nature of physics.

[Cody]

Oolite is, in fact, an excellent candidate for multiplayer. <chokes on his coffee> We had to have a stickied thread about multi-player Oolite.It was a question we were getting far too often (still do get occasionly).

[Brianetta]

Yeah, I'm aware of the situation. (-:Thing is, both the dev teams seem to have a similar attitude to multiplayer. Technically, a completely multiplayer Oolite with no differences in gameplay (aside from the obvious) is achievable, because there's no issue with accelerated time and so forth. Politically, of course, it's a different matter.

[Cody]

<nods sagely>

[fluffyfreak]

Statements like this require a change to the physics engine. You don't have a velocity in space, unless you measure it relative to something, and there are a lot of somethings against which to measure. Remember, Earth (as well as anything landed on it) is belting along at nearly 30km/s, which is not slow at all. By having rules that depend on absolute speeds, you introduce inconsistencies. Fixing these inconsistencies would give you a game that looks and feels a lot like Oolite.Oolite is, in fact, an excellent candidate for multiplayer. There, you only have to overcome the resistance of the people involved. Here, you have to overcome the resistance of the people involved *and* change the nature of physics.You might not have a velocity in "space" but you certainly do in Pioneer and an absolute velocity relative to the star could always be calculated trivially. Besides that's really nitpicking over one of the possible options that I mentioned, perhaps it's valid but it's not relevant to the point I was making that there are numerous ways around all of the things that people have listed as making it unworkable or some kind of sacrilegious change which would "ruin everything". It might be a "different game" from Pioneer but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.