Namttep wrote:I know its not gonna happen, but you know it would be nice......
That's trolling, and you know it.
Smivs wrote:Maybe, but I can't see it. If it was a faithful recreation of exactly how Oolite is in terms of gameplay and the Ooniverse you play in, then the chances of meeting another 'real' person would be close to zero, so honestly you wouldn't notice any difference between the Oolite you know and this mythical multiplayer version. So, nice in theory maybe, but pointless in practice.
Let's give it a go. v1.76 downloads on Berlios = 11,418. Assume none are duplicates (invalid; I have downloaded it many times). Assume every one is shared with someone else "in the playground". = 22,816. Each player has a sibling or spouse who also plays it = 45,000 users.
Assume popularity goes up tenfold because it is multi-user = 450,000 users.
Each players plays for 2 hours every day of the week. At any given moment, about 37,500 are playing per timezone. But since populations are clumped around timezones, let's call it 75,000 people concurrently.
Since new players start at Lave (I think), a disproportionate number of them would be there which suggests new players should start at a random system.
There are 2,048 systems. There will be 36 players per system.
A typical jump is, say, 4.4 light years which takes about 20 hours. Flying to the station, with fights, takes about 15 minutes. So 79/80ths of your time is in hyperspace, so of those 36 players, chances are they are all in hyperspace.
So, you would have about a 50/50 chance of there being another player somewhere in the same system as you at the same time as you, and that is assuming 11,000 downloads = half a million active users who play for two hours every day! And you probably won't meet them. Not much of a "multiplayer" game.
Alternatively,
1,706 ids have been used to post on this forum. I'd be surprised if there are 1,000 active (i.e. play at least once per month) Oolite players. If spread across 10 different time zones, and playing for 2 hours per day, there may only be a peak of 200 concurrent Oolite players worldwide, spread across 2048 systems and spending almost all of their Oolite time in hyperspace. Equals: you won't meet another player.
Multi-player Oolite cannot be done without it ceasing to be Oolite.
What could be done would be a small Universe with a handful of systems where hyperspace travel is instant. That would give a multi-player
combat game, and not a trading game, so it would not be Elite.
