Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

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SandJ
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by SandJ »

Greyth wrote:
it's possible to fly a Cobra solo but it's also soul destroying, years plying the tradelanes and many hours spent in isolation
You're describing the Real World™ existence for many people. I make my money in IT contracting; many of my colleagues live away from home during the week from 5 a.m. Monday to Friday evening, all the time the children are growing up. It's what you have to do to pay the bills. It's what the merchant navy does, it is what tinkers did, as it was, as it will ever be. The brood mare stays planet-bound raising the sproglings while the alpha male keeps them fed.
Greyth wrote:
playing kreigsspiel against the AI whilst the ship traverses the interstellar void that seperates the circles of firelight that we call worlds. That's why there is a chair for the copilot/navigator. It should not be left empty?
Look at all those long-distance truck drivers - when they have someone in the passenger seat it is because the company says it must be driven non-stop and has provided a 2nd driver to work shifts - the passenger isn't company. Otherwise, the passenger seat in the truck will be empty because the insurance company says so.

Just like cruise ships, the captain is not supposed to be distracted by having some dolly bird in the cabin with him to make sure he doesn't do something stupid like sail too close to the planet's rocky bits.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Siberian »

Disembodied wrote:
I think you have to separate "possible" from "worthwhile". A great deal is possible, but in game terms I doubt if it's worthwhile. The only changes which should be made to a game are those which increase the amount of fun experienced by the player...
What I understand under "worthwhile" is the situation when amount of work required to implement certain features is comparable with players' desire to see these features in the game. (Still It could be "worthwhile" and at the same time wouldn't force developers to actually change anything)
Disembodied wrote:
Again, it's a question of scale. Oolite is not a galaxy-simulator: it's a first-person dogfighting game with a bit of trading thrown in to give the player a reason to go anywhere.
That "bit of trading" is what gives me a feeling of "a fly in the ointment". I would be happy to see that "bit of trading" to have more important role in the game and be more challenging than it is now. See next comment.
Disembodied wrote:
What we need is a bit of a race – so there's opportunity, but it's time-limited – and a bit of danger – so there might be more pirates, or someone might get very angry with you if you fail to make your urgent delivery, or you might lose a pile of cash. That's enough, I think.
The problem here (for me at least), that it will not put my brain to work harder to achieve better results. With the approach you described that would be again just pure luck (to be at the right place at the right time) and training of reflexes in space combats. I would like to see the proportional challenge to my intellect not only to my reaction to be able to advance in the game, and that can be done if there's some logic (and better to be complex enough to provide enough interest) behind economical changes, not just pure randomization.
But if community's position (for whatever reason) that Oolite is only a "first-person dogfighting game with a bit of trading" that this is not going to change and everybody except me is happy with it, then let it be. I'm not about to argue with it, I just wanted to express my thoughts and see if there's anybody who shares them.

(And multiplayer option was proposed only because I thought that this would make implementation of such interesting and challenging economic model less complex).
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Disembodied »

Siberian wrote:
The problem here (for me at least), that it will not put my brain to work harder to achieve better results. With the approach you described that would be again just pure luck (to be at the right place at the right time) and training of reflexes in space combats. I would like to see the proportional challenge to my intellect not only to my reaction to be able to advance in the game, and that can be done if there's some logic (and better to be complex enough to provide enough interest) behind economical changes, not just pure randomization.
I am definitely for making trading more interesting, don't get me wrong. There has to be an element of randomness, of luck, though, because that's fundamental to risk-taking. It's the calculation of risk versus reward that requires the brains. I wasn't clear enough, I think, in my previous post. When I was talking about time-limited opportunities, I didn't mean that the player would get a message telling them that if they got to system X before time Y then they could buy Z cheap or sell Z dear: what would happen would be that the player would get a message telling them that prices for Z have crashed/soared on system X. Why knows how long the opportunity would last? The player could then look at the chart, see how far they were from X, and choose to gamble – or not – on making a profit on the deal. This wouldn't work very well with the standard trade goods, because they can be bought and sold anywhere: however there are developments afoot in the field of OXP-generated special cargo items, which can be unique to a single planet (Laveian Tree Grubs, say), which might cost a lot of money to buy and which might, if you take a calculated gamble and it pays off, make you a big chunk of money – or you might end up stuck with a hold full of stuff you paid a small fortune for and which you can barely even give away.

Combine something like this with, say, an auction system – which makes the buying more interesting too, especially if there are several types of auction to try to learn – and trading could get a lot more interesting, and start to require a lot more forethought.

I think this would work fine with a bit of random events – not purely random, of course: certain types of events would be weighted towards certain types of systems. We don't need to try to simulate an interactive galaxy to give the single player caught inside it the impression of an interactive galaxy.

However: Oolite will always remain, at heart, a first-person dogfighting game. That's just the way of things. Games which try to do everything, to let players truly do whatever they want, fail. They become neither one thing nor the other, just some lukewarm mixture. Trading can be made more challenging and enjoyable, but it's never going to become the central element. It's always just going to be the excuse as to why we're flying starships around and zapping bad guys with lasers. It's still worth working on, mind you!
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by jadenrayn »

:( ai it is
Last edited by jadenrayn on Sun Feb 12, 2012 7:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Greyth »

Thanks SandJ for your observations on my thoughts. What I'm really trying to say is that a multiplayer 'element' could likely be introduced without ripping the backside out of the existing code.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Smivs »

Don't forget if you want to interact with other Commanders in real-time, there's always the Oolite Chatroom :)
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Cmdr James »

Greyth wrote:
Thanks SandJ for your observations on my thoughts. What I'm really trying to say is that a multiplayer 'element' could likely be introduced without ripping the backside out of the existing code.
Completely and totally wrong.

Oolite cannot be any more multiplayer than it is now without a huge amount of effort, and effort that noone is willing to do (step forward volunteers and prove me wrong).
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Greyth »

How is my statement completely and totally wrong CDR James? Have you jumped out the wrong side of the cockpit this evening?
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Gimbal Locke »

I'm one of those wild-eyed multiplayer elite dreamers - I want multiplayer because I want to play with and against other players.

Allow me to be bold: I hope to prove Cmdr. James wrong, but I do not intend to build on Oolite. (I might come back to ask permission to use some awesome models & textures the Oolite community has produced if I get to a point where stuff works).

I have nothing to show yet (I'm now studying Erlang & Stackless Python - not decided yet which I will use for the server but I know I want co-routines), I understand one's reputation here is based on what one can show - so nothing yet.

I think that if there is one gaming community which could be able to get a distributed server game up and running (I wouldn't mind to make a couple of servers available, and I guess there are more people around here who could do the same) it would be the Elite fans - I guess most folks around here are into computers since the 1980s.

(edit: minor corrections)
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Cmdr James »

Good luck. Sounds like a fun project. But I dont see why you think building a multi player game not using the oolite code will somehow prove my assertion wrong. All I have said is that building multi player on oolite is too much work, and it would be much better to start from scratch. You seem to agree.

Honestly, ask the guys who have worked on oolite what they think. A multiplayer game similar to elite/oolite is no doubt possible, but there will be big differences. And it will not be based on oolite sourcecode.

EDIT: Maybe I come across as some kind of Luddite who just doesnt get it. Please read the very first post in this thread which sets out clearly, from one of the leading dev team members why this isnt happening with the oolite codebase any time soon (ever).

Contributions are welcome. Lots of people would love to see a multiplayer version. If anyone out there can make it work, you will be a hero to many of the people here.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Greyth »

That's not all you said CDR James... you quoted me and then said completely and totally wrong... however I suspect that you've not read previous posts concerning the idea to introduce an element of multiplayer to Oolite. For your convenience I suggested that there could be navigations, tactical and gunnery consoles for the same ship - the idea being that people work as a team to fly the it.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Gimbal Locke »

Cmdr James wrote:
Good luck. Sounds like a fun project. But I dont see why you think building a multi player game not using the oolite code will somehow prove my assertion wrong. All I have said is that building multi player on oolite is too much work, and it would be much better to start from scratch. You seem to agree.
You are right, I agree.

I certainly do not think you're a Luddite, networking is not something you can just add to existing code, it has to be in the design from the start.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by DaddyHoggy »

Greyth wrote:
How is my statement completely and totally wrong CDR James? Have you jumped out the wrong side of the cockpit this evening?
Cmdr James is on the Dev team - he knows how the code works - he knows how it is constructed and knows there is no way the code can be modified to make it work in any practical way in "multi-player mode". You could of course build a complete different code that will deal with the fundamentally different data structures that handle multiple player entities existing in a single consistent Ooniverse, code that prevents cheating, deals with networking issues, lag, etc...

And that's only the stuff I can think of off the top of my head.

What you'd end up with a code that visually may look like Oolite, but it would not be the Oolite code as we currently know it.

So I think Cdr James is factually correct and is in a position to defend it.

(I'm sure Cdr James can speak for himself - but I've seen this question come up time and again - but no multi-player wisher has ever stepped up to the coding plate, just offered some vague insinuations that it should be do-able, or that the current dev team or somehow wimping out on not taking it on).

[For those of us who play Oolite and who have also played on-line multiplayer games and have watched flame wars rage for months across the forums related to online events - it's awful and I don't want it - most of us don't - we're happy that you do - but you're going to have to take the source code and the OXPs and rewrite it yourself...]
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Disembodied »

Greyth wrote:
there could be navigations, tactical and gunnery consoles for the same ship - the idea being that people work as a team to fly the it.
But one person can do all that now. The guns (gunnery) are aimed by steering the ship (navigation and tactical). Without a major rewrite of the code, the gunner is just going to be pushing the fire button for the pilot, and tactical is going to be maybe pressing "e" when a missile gets fired at them.

A team game sounds like a really interesting idea, although you'd need to be pretty good friends to do it I think ... it would be like Traveller. But unless everyone has an interesting job – unless there are several interesting and entertaining games in one – it would be really hard to persuade people to play.
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Re: Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

Post by Cmdr James »

Greyth wrote:
That's not all you said CDR James... you quoted me and then said completely and totally wrong... however I suspect that you've not read previous posts concerning the idea to introduce an element of multiplayer to Oolite. For your convenience I suggested that there could be navigations, tactical and gunnery consoles for the same ship - the idea being that people work as a team to fly the it.
Yes, I did read it. And I stand by what I said. It is simply wrong. I understand that you might think Im being rude or not understanding properly. You are probably right.

But me being rude doesnt make me wrong. It is not as simple as you think. There are at least two distinct and serious problems:

1. Technically it is a hard thing to do
2. The game is intended for one player, hence, as others have said "gunnery" is currently pointless, as is navigation. We would need to completely change the game to make the roles meaningful.
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