Brainstorming for a MultiUser OXP

[hiran]

Somehow when flying in my own, self-hosted Ooniverse it feels a bit lonely.
So I am hammering my head how to make Oolite a multiplayer game while not neglecting the limitations identified in Oolite Multiplayer? Please read. So let's stay with the fact that Oolite 3D space encounters will stay single-player as they are today. And still I would like to connect all these different Ooniverses together.

Somehow I am mulling about whether we could come up with a plot that impacts at least one galaxy for all pilots the same way? A common threat that we all fight, a common need that we all suffer from and that requires us to help each other? Something like Thargoids attacking in waves, and the need for food/machinery/medical supplies required in some areas and allowing for missions and dogfights? Or some Indiana Jones like plot where players stumble over artifacts, eventually gathering knowledge about 'the Ancients' or 'the Creator' and learn what to do with these artifacts?

As we need the players to interact we would probably need an OXP that connects to a central server. This central server could define the Ooniverse state (is there an attack wave?, how far is it?, have artifacts been collected already?) while also helping on the interaction between pilots (presence/location protocol, message exchange, goods exchange).

So in general the OXP would more or less communicate user events to the server and bring central status into the local Oolite. The plot itself could be managed by server-side plugins, allowing for different stories to be run, maybe even in parallel. Pilots could then choose whether they want to perform the usual trade/piracy/military/scientific missions but now in relation to other players.

* Does this sound like total and utter gibberish or could this idea have a future?
* How can we ensure some stable funding for the central server if Oolite is meant to be free? Could we charge for using the OXP (which means a membership on that server)?
* If so many pilots come and play together, cheating would probably destruct the idea. We would probably have to ensure a given set of OXPs is active, not modified and so are the savegames.

[Redspear]

Hi hiran.

Firstly, I should probably point out that this interests me from a theoretcal point of view rather than as a player so any 'solutions' I present may well fail the 'fun test' for those desiring this kind of thing.

Something like Thargoids attacking in waves, and the need for food/machinery/medical supplies required in some areas and allowing for missions and dogfights? Or some Indiana Jones like plot where players stumble over artifacts, eventually gathering knowledge about 'the Ancients' or 'the Creator' and learn what to do with these artifacts?

OK, so for a theoretical example I'm going to use the idea of Thargoid attacks necessitating emergency deliveries to affected stations. To begin with I'm going to list the (likely) important elements for a single-player oxp:

• Mission format
• Increased Thargoid encounter rate
• Scarcity of relevant trade goods/supplies
• 'Score' or some measure of success
• Reward or acknowledgementof some kind

As we need the players to interact we would probably need an OXP that connects to a central server. This central server could define the Ooniverse state (is there an attack wave?, how far is it?, have artifacts been collected already?) while also helping on the interaction between pilots (presence/location protocol, message exchange, goods exchange).

Well, it depends what you mean by interact. If you mean fly around together in the same system then I'll likely have little to offer in the way of help but if you mean to have a 'share' in a 'score' towards a collective goal then I might be able to help.

This may not sound very promising but are you familiar with play by mail?
The sending back and forth of data enables each 'turn' and therefore the progression of the game. Problem is that it's slow but advantage is that the delay can facilitate more players.

One week to save the sytem from Thargoids might sound like plenty but when one fellow enthusiast is on holiday, another unwell and yet another half-hearted just how much 'work' are you going to have to do and to what extent will you feel rewarded. So my point here is that a 'turn' structure might actually suit low player numbers.

Imagine a month was set aside for a mission,

This August's community challenge is to save Tionisle from Thargoid takeover. Ship relevant raw materials to Tionisle station in as large a quanity as you can manage (for cargo based ship score) and take down as many Thargoids as you can within the system (combat based ship score) before it's too late! (September)

Then each week within that month would be a turn. We then need a way for the oxp to adapt to a collective score. So this score must be accessible to the oxp and affect the ingame environment each turn. Access to your score would not be a problem (already on hard drive) but how to get access to the score of others thereby gauging community involvent effort and success?

Suppose at the end of the week the oxp recorded your score within your savefile and even posted it in a mission screen. Then a day or two later it asks for the 'community score' in order to progress. For this to work it would be the player that would need to know the score in order to relay it to the oxp.

Suppose a relevant mission thread on the boards where participants could post their scores. You could then averqge the scores (to account for less or more players) and then have your number to type into the game when prompted. Clunky but functional and with no additional architecture just the oxp construction.

Big disadvantages include that it would be registered forum users only and some might feel embarressed by posting a low score. The latter might be an easy fix however with a bit of creative mathematics. e.g. Community score = average of five highest scores + (total of remaining scores /100)
That way, every little heps yet a few 'main players' have considerable influence with or without the others who could easily drop in or out. Yes, the maths is bit of a pain but only one person has to do it and post the results.

Big advantages include that we essentially have all the tools in place and further that it might be a way to gauge interest before considering anything more ambitious. You'd only need say 3-5 'dedicated' players to form a core community, someone to write the oxp and start a thread and you're ready for your test run.

If that sounds like too much hassle then I would ask how much do people actually want this?
If it sounds too dull then what do people realistically want/expect from multiplayer besides PvP?

Congratulations Commander

After a concerted effort by a dedicated and courageous few, Tionisle has been saved from the Thargoid menace.
Your name will go down in the annals of their history.

You shipped x
You destroyed x

Average final score x
Your final score x

[hiran]

Firstly, I should probably point out that this interests me from a theoretcal point of view rather than as a player so any 'solutions' I present may well fail the 'fun test' for those desiring this kind of thing.

I am happy to get any kind of feedback.

OK, so for a theoretical example I'm going to use the idea of Thargoid attacks necessitating emergency deliveries to affected stations. To begin with I'm going to list the (likely) important elements for a single-player oxp:

• Mission format
• Increased Thargoid encounter rate
• Scarcity of relevant trade goods/supplies
• 'Score' or some measure of success
• Reward or acknowledgementof some kind

Each of the items need to be expanded if we were to do an actual implementation. For single player I agree these are topics to be dealt with.

As we need the players to interact we would probably need an OXP that connects to a central server. This central server could define the Ooniverse state (is there an attack wave?, how far is it?, have artifacts been collected already?) while also helping on the interaction between pilots (presence/location protocol, message exchange, goods exchange).

Well, it depends what you mean by interact. If you mean fly around together in the same system then I'll likely have little to offer in the way of help but if you mean to have a 'share' in a 'score' towards a collective goal then I might be able to help.

Flying together in the same system is what is discussed at length in the pinned multiplayer thread. So I am talking of the latter, in which case you are helping.

This may not sound very promising but are you familiar with play by mail?
The sending back and forth of data enables each 'turn' and therefore the progression of the game. Problem is that it's slow but advantage is that the delay can facilitate more players.

To some degree I am. Once tried to play chess via letter exchange with someone in India. The base idea was to encourage regular letter writing. The delay of about 10 days for the letter one way was just frustrating, and other topics became more important. Later I found turn based strategy games rather boring, however real time strategy is more of my taste.

Coming back to your thoughts: if we shorten the turns enough it may well look like a real time strategy. Of course this also requires that no player can bring the game to a halt. It means the turns can expire or need to be counted differently. But these are details.

One week to save the sytem from Thargoids might sound like plenty but when one fellow enthusiast is on holiday, another unwell and yet another half-hearted just how much 'work' are you going to have to do and to what extent will you feel rewarded. So my point here is that a 'turn' structure might actually suit low player numbers.

Imagine a month was set aside for a mission,

This August's community challenge is to save Tionisle from Thargoid takeover. Ship relevant raw materials to Tionisle station in as large a quanity as you can manage (for cargo based ship score) and take down as many Thargoids as you can within the system (combat based ship score) before it's too late! (September)

Then each week within that month would be a turn. We then need a way for the oxp to adapt to a collective score. So this score must be accessible to the oxp and affect the ingame environment each turn. Access to your score would not be a problem (already on hard drive) but how to get access to the score of others thereby gauging community involvent effort and success?

Suppose at the end of the week the oxp recorded your score within your savefile and even posted it in a mission screen. Then a day or two later it asks for the 'community score' in order to progress. For this to work it would be the player that would need to know the score in order to relay it to the oxp.

Suppose a relevant mission thread on the boards where participants could post their scores. You could then averqge the scores (to account for less or more players) and then have your number to type into the game when prompted. Clunky but functional and with no additional architecture just the oxp construction.

Not completely my taste, but it could be a start.
The maths behind a group score can be calculated by someone, and I'd say that is exactly the central server to manage all this.

Big disadvantages include that it would be registered forum users only and some might feel embarressed by posting a low score. The latter might be an easy fix however with a bit of creative mathematics. e.g. Community score = average of five highest scores + (total of remaining scores /100)
That way, every little heps yet a few 'main players' have considerable influence with or without the others who could easily drop in or out. Yes, the maths is bit of a pain but only one person has to do it and post the results.

Big advantages include that we essentially have all the tools in place and further that it might be a way to gauge interest before considering anything more ambitious. You'd only need say 3-5 'dedicated' players to form a core community, someone to write the oxp and start a thread and you're ready for your test run.

If that sounds like too much hassle then I would ask how much do people actually want this?
If it sounds too dull then what do people realistically want/expect from multiplayer besides PvP?

I also believe we have most of the tools at hand. How to do such stuff (including the communication) via a forum thread is strange to me. I'd probably more expect clients talking http/json to a dedicated application, which stores Ooniverse state in a database of some kind (currently not even decided whether we should go for SQL or nonSQL. But as we are looking into parallel write access for sure we need transactions).

Congratulations Commander

After a concerted effort by a dedicated and courageous few, Tionisle has been saved from the Thargoid menace.
Your name will go down in the annals of their history.

You shipped x
You destroyed x

Average final score x
Your final score x

Would we really display such messages? While we could, I would probably not go for a debriefing/mission end.
When entering a station, some news get displayed. So here we could show messages that the targoid sightings have reduced. Noone knows that their wave is over. But the next news broadcast switches to

GalCop was able to investigate the salvaged targoid ships and found ..., which indicates their atoms/lifeform/technology/culture seems older than our universe. This raises the question what was there before the big bang, or whether the universe was created by someone - if yes by whom.

For further investigations, GalCop is searching for volunteers to execute missions...

Just as in real life, another topic becomes more important than another. It does not even rule out that we will see another attack wave.

[Redspear]

Would we really display such messages? While we could, I would probably not go for a debriefing/mission end.
When entering a station, some news get displayed. So here we could show messages that the targoid sightings have reduced. Noone knows that their wave is over. But the next news broadcast switches to...

Nothing you suggested was particularly challenging I think, at least until you consider the 'workforce'.
Who's going to write the oxp(s)?
How much support will there be (how many contributers)?
More turns means more chapters, more 'twists', more uploads/downloads/postings/programming/commitment, right?

Sorry for the 'parade rainwater' but I think it's a lot of work to get this thing operational and so a bit of clarity around the minimal desired outcome might be very important. Any roadmap or plan must then meet something approximating those requirements.

So how exactly it could/would be done will become very important but before that what are your minimum expectations from the new gameplay this project would generate?

[hiran]

Nothing you suggested was particularly challenging I think, at least until you consider the 'workforce'.

Sounds good. The technology is not the limiting factor.

Who's going to write the oxp(s)?
How much support will there be (how many contributers)?
More turns means more chapters, more 'twists', more uploads/downloads/postings/programming/commitment, right?

Sorry for the 'parade rainwater' but I think it's a lot of work to get this thing operational and so a bit of clarity around the minimal desired outcome might be very important. Any roadmap or plan must then meet something approximating those requirements.

Well, I admit this would take a core team of programmers. At least per technology:
* JavaScript for OXP development
* Objective C in case something needs to be tweaked in Oolite itself.
* whatever technology we decide to use for the central server side (Node.js may be best suitable as server-side JavaScript framework. It would mean we use JavaScript on both sides, allowing developers to jump back and forth).

A roadmap with features and a minimum viable product should get defined. Willing to assess this through discussions here.

So how exactly it could/would be done will become very important but before that what are your minimum expectations from the new gameplay this project would generate?

I do not have a full plan. I do not make money from it. It is just that, when traversing the Ooniverse today I know that I am alone and all encounters are at most AI ships. So my goal is to bring commanders together so they can join a common mission and thus strengthen the community as well as the future of the game itself. The sheer existence of interaction between players would be enough of a feature to get some headlines in the press or on other websites and raise attention. Not to talk about me no longer feeling alone in Ooniverse

So what could be the MVP?
We need to proove that communication and interaction between players via a central server is a rewarding path:
* The beginning could be a quite simple server that can track when a commander arrives at a station or leaves a station. Inside a station, commanders would be able to check their mailbox for incoming messages and send their own messages to other commanders.
* A next version could allow to deposit money or goods tagged with another player's name.
* We might want to discuss whether messages and/or goods are travelling to the recipients star system, the path and time they take. Or we could say goods and messages are stored in hyperspace and thus are accessible from every station. Or we could say the goods have to be picked up by the recipient docking the station where the goods were deposited.

This should be fairly easy to construct and should then show off the interaction between players. If we feel this is good, we can then move on and try an umbrella plot like the targoid waves, maybe primitive enough to control chances of enounters. And if this still looks good, change the framework so the targoid waves are encapsulated and can be exchanged/complemented.

Project wise I would aim for an agile project going in iterations with a shippable product after every iteration. The high-level draft roadmap would get reffined as we go, considering the feedback we get from early releases.
But more or less from day one we'd need a location to deploy the central server, with a stable URL so the OXPs have a location to sync status with.

[Redspear]

Would that anwer your question?

Well, ish...

A proof of concept is no bad thing and you appear to have a clear vision of that but I wonder how much interest there might be pproportional to the work required.

Ignoring for a moment the resource cost (hosting, programming and maintenance), how many people do you think will be playing along at any given time?
100? 10? 2?
We could perhaps use forum activity to estimate. How many are online now as you read this? Maybe not as many as are playing, right?
I don't think the multiplayer thread is a good indicator however as although it may be a recurring request, neither is it strictly what your plan appears to be offering nor does it necessarily represent players who love oolite (but rather more those still trying it out and thinking 'What? No multiplatyer?')

So of the players here for example (arguably the most enthusiastic), how many are attracted to your idea?

You're end goal is still a vague to my mind and although I spoke about it not being too challenging that was with the caveat of assuming adequate work hours. This factor I think would be easy to underestimate in terms of either workload or enthusiam (willing participants).

To be fair, you've titled this a brainstorming thread so you weren't deluded enough to think you had it all worked out...

I would suggest that you need a more communicable plan (which may already exist in your head) and also a skilled team.
Who's going to do what and how realistic might that be?

Remember, this multiplayer thing really isn't my bag so I'm not going likely to be great at envisioning your idea's potential when 'full' multiplayer is something I tend to avoid in games.

[hiran]

A proof of concept is no bad thing and you appear to have a clear vision of that but I wonder how much interest there might be pproportional to the work required.

Ignoring for a moment the resource cost (hosting, programming and maintenance), how many people do you think will be playing along at any given time?
100? 10? 2?
We could perhaps use forum activity to estimate. How many are online now as you read this? Maybe not as many as are playing, right?

Taken from the forum entry page:
In total there are 22 users online
I have seen this many times now and it rarely changes. Registered users seemed to be no more than 5.

Actually I thought of finding out the number of players. On Github we can see Oolite 1.90 has been downloaded about 6000 times.
With the first functionality in the OXP to report docking and leaving events to a central server we could even collect hard metrics - considering that only a fraction of the Oolite users would actually install this OXP.

But as that would be the first thing for me to implement I would get access to such data very quickly.

I don't think the multiplayer thread is a good indicator however as although it may be a recurring request, neither is it strictly what your plan appears to be offering nor does it necessarily represent players who love oolite (but rather more those still trying it out and thinking 'What? No multiplatyer?')

So of the players here for example (arguably the most enthusiastic), how many are attracted to your idea?

We probably have to sit and wait, allowing for some others to comment.
After our message exchange at least it should be clear that the challenge is to get the participants for the project - neither the functionality nor the technology.

You're end goal is still a vague to my mind and although I spoke about it not being too challenging that was with the caveat of assuming adequate work hours. This factor I think would be easy to underestimate in terms of either workload or enthusiam (willing participants).

To be fair, you've titled this a brainstorming thread so you weren't deluded enough to think you had it all worked out...

I would suggest that you need a more communicable plan (which may already exist in your head) and also a skilled team.
Who's going to do what and how realistic might that be?

Sounds like I might write down the vision. We would have to wait for participants to pickup that idea, and eventually we could start implementing.

Remember, this multiplayer thing really isn't my bag so I'm not going likely to be great at envisioning your idea's potential when 'full' multiplayer is something I tend to avoid in games.

Fair enough. There will be different roles required anyway, and not all of them should involve programming. If your contribution could be as consultant and ambassador, so be it.

[thecoredump]

Don't know about the work needed for a such OXP, but I love the idea a lot!

[Cody]

In total there are 22 users online

At any one time, most of them will be search engine bots.

[hiran]

In total there are 22 users online

At any one time, most of them will be search engine bots.

I was assuming this is the case.

[hiran]

Don't know about the work needed for a such OXP, but I love the idea a lot!

Sounds good! At least someone is interested.
Proove you are not a bot. Please...

[thecoredump]

A first step could be to create an OXP updating the galaxy (increase pirate activity, increase need of a commodity, etc) through the use of simple config file.
I don't think there is a need to bring back players results to a "server". I think the main goal of such OXP is to brings the community together, living the same events!

[hiran]

A first step could be to create an OXP updating the galaxy (increase pirate activity, increase need of a commodity, etc) through the use of simple config file.
I don't think there is a need to bring back players results to a "server". I think the main goal of such OXP is to brings the community together, living the same events!

But then how would you ensure everybody has the same copy of the file?
Oh, we would place that on a central server but in the beginning it is not interactive?

That means we could focus on the OXP first. Good thought...

Do you by chance have some experience with OXP development?

[thecoredump]

Do you by chance have some experience with OXP development?

Only in basic HUD OXP... I have made an AWESOME (for me at least ) cockpit/station OXP that mimic Elite Dangerous using screenshots and musics from ED... alas too many copyrighted materials and incompatibilities to share
I have also altered the galaxy 1 in order to mimic ED empty systems in the bubble.
But I haven't yet tried mission scripts, for example in order to add salvage/blackbox missions, discovery scanner in order to add unidentified signal sources, but it is on my todo list if i have enough motivation (which could be the case when I see where FDev is going )

I making all of this because I've chosen to give up my gaming computer for a simple laptop in order to reduce my energy consumption... yeah don't ask
And so Oolite is the perfect replacement, and that's why I'm interested in those "Community Events"

[Cholmondely]

Taken from the forum entry page:
In total there are 22 users online
I have seen this many times now and it rarely changes. Registered users seemed to be no more than 5.

Actually I thought of finding out the number of players. On Github we can see Oolite 1.90 has been downloaded about 6000 times.

Two points.

Not everybody who is registered will necessarily do so on "checking in" so to speak. And a number of people who were not checked in and reading the BB did so eventually a couple of years later when they had an issue needing help.

I downloaded Oolite 2 years ago and did virtually nothing with it. With lockdown, and a new computer, I downloaded a second time, and graduated to trying to drive everybody else gaga. Thinking about lockdown, I may well have drifted elsewhere ...