Dogfight style multiplayer Oolite would be relatively simple, and not something we'd be interested in doing. Most multiplayer flight/space sims always seem to degenerate into flying in circles around each other. We want to keep the depth of the current gameplay, this may mean slight variations to the timing system, especially for things like passanger runs and witchspace jumps. I don't think trivialising things like new ships and upgrades will make too much difference to game balance, and I'm pretty sure a few ships trading goods wouldn't effect the entire economy of a world. The key emphasis would be gameplay, canonical arguments will no doubt arise but provided we keep things consistent and realtime I think we can reach a workable solution to most problems.
All lot of the persistence processes we would lift from MAngband and our other currently in development project. Things like all player saves would exist server side only, saves only happen in stations and automatically. The server would generate systems on player entry (these would be stored in a universe savefile) and destroyed upon the last players exit from that system. Exiting players would exist for a period after their quitting, and if in space would continue on their last speed and course.... before self destructing.
I'm not saying this is going to be quick or easy, but we think it's very do-able. Just don't ask about time frames yet
I understand the ObjC 'desire' but we already have "endian problem free" netcode. I suppose we could use it as a learning experience and convert it to Objc... I'll see what the chaps think.
The most tricky bit will probably be the netcode, since if you're to have any hope of playing it over the Internet you have to take lag into account. I do have a decently-connected server in London if you need somewhere to run it.
Odd, that's the bit we're most comfortable with
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
Since it would be for a small number of concurrent players 16 maybe 32, we're pretty sure we could run the game engine at 25fps (again we think this should be sufficient) across a T1 line to ISDN/ADSL clients without too much trouble. Compared to entire 80x24 arrays of plain text being sent to each client 50 times a second (MAngband) positional data and delta's for the players current system seems triffling (an over simplification, but you get my point).
We won't lay down a line of code until we've completely dismantled the current Oolite build and diseminated all of the data structures, functions and flow. This will take us a little while... and then we'll start working wrapping simple network broadcasts around things. By which time any major changes to Oolite can be assessed and merged.