Oolite Multiplayer? Please read

[CMDR_JohnJameson]

I don't know if anyone said it yet (I don't have time to look at 14 pages of posts) but how about LAN multiplayer? I think is should be easier to make, one player can be the server and the other the client, coding coding, blah blah blah, Done! LAN network game!

[Cholmondely]

I don't know if anyone said it yet (I don't have time to look at 14 pages of posts) but how about LAN multiplayer? I think is should be easier to make, one player can be the server and the other the client, coding coding, blah blah blah, Done! LAN network game!

Aah... but all you really need to do is read the very first post, and follow two or three of the links.

The big problem is people. Those of us involved helping out volunteer our free time to do so. That's true for Another_Commander who put much of Oolite v.1.90 together on his tod, it's true for Cody who guards the gate here (keeping spam at bay), and its true for tsoj who is busy creating new spaceships, montana05 who is resurrecting old favourites and blowing off the cobwebs and phkb who keeps a lot of the oxp's ticking over while Redspear is fiendishly trying to come up with ideas for new ones! And there are others too.

If somebody came along and paid all these people, they could do it. But it would take a lot of money (the same way that Elite Dangerous needed a lot of money - £1.25 million before they could start creating E:D). But without the money... well people have wives and children that they need to earn money to feed, bills that they need to pay, and even other things that they sometimes want to do!

But have a look at the first post and the links. If you can work out from those why it is not easy to make, then you may well be on your way to learning C++ and doing wonderful things with it!

[phkb]

I think is should be easier to make, one player can be the server and the other the client, coding coding, blah blah blah, Done! LAN network game!

Your enthusiasm is laudable, but I can say, as a developer of both Oolite and in my day job, that turning a single player experience into a multi-player one, is not simply a case of "coding coding, blah blah blah" (I did have a chuckle at that idea though! If only my RL projects could be completed so simply...) Even the full-time game developers, using modern game engines, find this a potentially insurmountable goal: see this post from the developers of Subnautica as an example.

Now, back to my day job.
*coding coding, wand-wave wand-wave, compile - no errors! yay!*

[tsoj]

*coding coding, wand-wave wand-wave, compile - no errors! yay!*

I've been doing it wrong all along!

[Cmdr James]

I don't know if anyone said it yet (I don't have time to look at 14 pages of posts) but how about LAN multiplayer? I think is should be easier to make, one player can be the server and the other the client, coding coding, blah blah blah, Done! LAN network game!

I think the easiest would be to somehow cludge piloting of an AI (npc, whatever you want to call them) ship in the same system to be somehow controlled by a second player.

But even that quite apart from the fact it totally breaks the game (no interstellar flight) would be a nightmare to do. Things like communicating the state of the game over a lan (udp broadcast?) is going to be horrible, we are talking hundreds of hours of work.

So lets say you are adding a second playable ship to the same computer. You work out a way to open a second window on another screen, do some magic with usb controller mappings that let you both have control... I guess for an expert objective c developer a simple dogfighting game in a single system might be doable without a ludicrous amount of work. But it makes no sense, its still a lot of work and the result is an oddball version of oolite with most of the functionality taken out. Think top gun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdGNCxkYHfk

Either making it networked or multi system is essentially a rewrite of the whole game and both are required for it to be a halfway meaningful oolite experience.

[hiran]

I have read the entry post, then skipped some of the many more pages. And finally I see the comment asking for a LAN multiplayer.
It seems there are different grades of what multiplayer means and how it could be accomplished.

One of the biggest issues a game with real distances and sizes would have is that there would be too much empty room. People would never meet.
Well, today at least you can meet some AI but it is still a single player game. So I am thinking of something that might be of little impact to the existing (and fine) game:

How about creating an extension that would influence what you perceive in stations? The equipment/ships that are being offered, the missions for cargo, parcels and passengers etc? But unlike existing addons, this one addon could talk to a central server to decide what to offer. And due to the central server a mission could be gone - just because some other player picked it before.

So most of the gameplay would work as today. But all of a sudden the storyboard would get interactive and you could get the feeling 'you are not alone with some AI' but there is someone in the background. Would that be feasible?

[Cholmondely]

I have read the entry post, then skipped some of the many more pages. And finally I see the comment asking for a LAN multiplayer.
It seems there are different grades of what multiplayer means and how it could be accomplished.

One of the biggest issues a game with real distances and sizes would have is that there would be too much empty room. People would never meet.
Well, today at least you can meet some AI but it is still a single player game. So I am thinking of something that might be of little impact to the existing (and fine) game:

How about creating an extension that would influence what you perceive in stations? The equipment/ships that are being offered, the missions for cargo, parcels and passengers etc? But unlike existing addons, this one addon could talk to a central server to decide what to offer. And due to the central server a mission could be gone - just because some other player picked it before.

So most of the gameplay would work as today. But all of a sudden the storyboard would get interactive and you could get the feeling 'you are not alone with some AI' but there is someone in the background. Would that be feasible?

I've a similar issue with the unchanging amounts on the markets, if I suddenly whizz over to a Rock Hermit (especially one a bit further afield) and then return to the main orbital station.

But surely all this can be handled by the OXPs, rather than needing a multi-player element?

[Cmdr James]

It would, I think, be relatively easy to have each world gradually replenish its export goods and have the level drop semi randomly when a ship launches, perhaps even assigning the npc the cargo it just bought.

Maybe even tie this in with shuttles bringing the goods up from the surface.

I dont see how this relates to multi player though.

[hiran]

It would, I think, be relatively easy to have each world gradually replenish its export goods and have the level drop semi randomly when a ship launches, perhaps even assigning the npc the cargo it just bought.

Maybe even tie this in with shuttles bringing the goods up from the surface.

I dont see how this relates to multi player though.

Sure enough, making the economy more realistic is not at all connected to multiplayer.
However I'd find it more interesting if one milky way (or milk run route) would cease away if used by too many players, while others might open and then discussions might open where it is most lucrative at the time of the game.

Given my earlier comment I reached something and am thinking about some better integration. On the other side, and before digging into too much of it I'd rather evaluate how many players would actually install and use such features. With that background and the fact that some basic functionality exists I am now more working on easing usability before spreading that thing too much. If it gets off the ground there would be a plethora of things to be improved.

[hiran]

As much as I love the idea of multiplayer, I've just about hated all the MMOGs I've ever played, from the early MUDs to the current crop of WoWabees. The presence of other live players should make the world more alive, but usually it ends up breaking immersion instead. People just don't roleplay, neither in speech nor gameplay style, and I've yet to find any MMO with a world that feels anywhere near as interesting as the best single-player games.

I'm exaggerating, a bit, but it is true that trying to encourage humans to play "properly" is one of the biggest challenges that every online game deals with.

Hence I still find it odd we haven't seen more attempts at a limited or pseudo-online element, that would allow for much greater control but also is infinitely simpler to code. Demon's Souls comes to mind, but also the bones files and high scores in nethack, or the classic door game LORD, for example. The whole aim is to make a single-player computer-generated universe feel more alive and unpredictable with the least possible effort, not to turn it into a multiplayer universe.

So just to toss up some ideas, some probably trivial to code, others less so, but none anywhere near as major as a complete rewrite:
- bones files: when you die, your wreck and a final mayday message or SOS beacon are uploaded to the internet. During play, your game will occasionally/randomly download some of these and add them into your universe for you to stumble upon. Maybe finding said player's corpse and delivering it to a proper funeral home earns some money. It could be a whole new profession
- auction/trader: selling items to a special dealer in stations will put it up for sale or auction online. This should be limited and apply perhaps only to rare artifacts, to avoid upsetting balance.
- message/news boards at stations. maybe not a full discussion forum, no point in that imho, but perhaps notable events or major deeds would be logged and advertised to all, perhaps allow the player a one-line comment or something just for flavor.
- when you enter a specific area, "register" that online (like foursquare ), and if others are there as well, the game could say "Joe is in the area" and spawn a copy of that remote user's ship into the system (just another AI ship, but same name, ship, and equipment). Allow a simple in-game chat or even just simple greet/give/offer/request functions.
- replicate major universe actions to other players. the more we'd implement and define such major actions, the more possibilities it opens. for example destroying a space station would cause it to disappear for others as well(replaced by an apologetic message from the govt and 'under construction' graphic for a period of time), or destroying a mining operation would cause a spike in prices at the local stations with a corresponding news entry, or killing enough pirates/cops would result in an excess of the opposite (and again a corresponding news entry), etc. This could go on and on, e.g. allow a user to set up a pirate base and it would affect that area of the universe (more pirates, economic effect, etc) in every player's game, and correspondingly bring in income to the owner of the pirate base. The more player go out and destroy the base (thus removing it from their game), the more the owner of the base sees it as increased govt presence and decreases in pirate income, until eventually if enough players do it, the base is actually destroyed in the owner's universe as well.
- all sorts of rankings and top scores could be posted at stations.

Basically there are many ways we can create fake links between individual single-player games, without much coding effort. It's all faked and static (none of this has to happen in realtime, but could just be loaded in during startup, or during save/load operations), but in my opinion can add a huge amount of immersion and fun to the game.

But I think it's just me, cause almost no games do anything like this. It's either online or offline, period.

As I am investigating in history, this post seems to elaborate a lot of my thoughts as well.
I have not yet thought about the role-play part and the fact that humans do not talk/enact the role as it would be nice to have. On the other hand the low interactivity or the transfer of just major events is what I also see as possibility. And I share some of the vision tentacle described.

When it comes to message exchange, maybe we could do it in some strange way or other....
AI characters usually have a limited set of expressions they can choose from when acting on a prescribed script. For human players we should not have the script but limited, preformulated sentences could 'align' humen players' actions in a way into AI gameplay. The phrases they use could be matched with their race or origin.

I somehow remember having played Starflight, in which it was possible to encounter alien ships and eventually get a conversation. And maybe, if you did it right they would reveal some crucial information that would be worth investigating. So now I am thinking what might happen is that encounter is not with an AI player but a real human being behind, and whether the player would have to notice at all...

[hiran]

This is the first pinned thread under discussions - maybe it is the first/oldest one worth pinning.
From so many comments and developer responses I get the feeling multiplayer is a much wanted feature in Oolite that never made it to implementation - for various reasons given in the thread.

Now that some first delicate attempt to trod that path is available we should see high interest and feedback in this thread. But nothing is happening so far?

Have all who were interested once upon a time moved on?

[Cody]

Have all who were interested once upon a time moved on?

There is very little traffic/interest across many topics, hiran. That is the way of it, I'm afraid.
The game itself is mature, and very stable - and the forum/community is old and tired.

[tsoj]

This is the first pinned thread under discussions - maybe it is the first/oldest one worth pinning.
From so many comments and developer responses, I get the feeling multiplayer is a much wanted feature in Oolite that never made it to implementation - for various reasons given in the thread.

Now that some first delicate attempt to trod that path is available, we should see high interest and feedback in this thread. But nothing is happening so far?

Have all who were interested once upon a time moved on?

I am definitely interested in this . However, I have a lot to do currently, so I can't really play Oolite without the constant feeling that I should be doing that thing that I still have to do
Maybe in a week or two, I think I'll have time. Then I can try this out

(I think I am starting to get a hang on how to use smilies )

[Cholmondely]

This is the first pinned thread under discussions - maybe it is the first/oldest one worth pinning.
From so many comments and developer responses, I get the feeling multiplayer is a much wanted feature in Oolite that never made it to implementation - for various reasons given in the thread.

Now that some first delicate attempt to trod that path is available, we should see high interest and feedback in this thread. But nothing is happening so far?

Have all who were interested once upon a time moved on?

I am definitely interested in this . However, I have a lot to do currently, so I can't really play Oolite without the constant feeling that I should be doing that thing that I still have to do
Maybe in a week or two, I think I'll have time. Then I can try this out

(I think I am starting to get a hang on how to use smilies )

Having been the one guinea pig so far, I must confess that there was not that much to it. Poor old Hiran spent more time explaining to me how to do this XMPP business than we eventually spent "connecting". Maybe 15 minutes? Not an involved business.

[hiran]

Having been the one guinea pig so far, I must confess that there was not that much to it. Poor old Hiran spent more time explaining to me how to do this XMPP business than we eventually spent "connecting". Maybe 15 minutes? Not an involved business.

At that time there was not that much to test. After all we could connect, and we could see where which ship is flying. Then we could verify that text messages get passed back and forth - which does not make too much sense while we are connected in a screen sharing session.

Meanwhile you can send fuel, money and commodities. With that, noone should get lost between stars. And trading may get extremely efficient with a partner. We do not yet have common missions, hence I'd still call it a POC.