Oolite Bulletins

Apologies if my high-horse rant seems patronising or a rejection. It is a reaction to years of working on projects where some senior manager walks in toward the end and says "I think that you should make it do this" and we get ordered to make it happen and in so doing work 60-80 hours a week for months to avoid producing a piece of crap, then get told off for running over budget and being late. Meanwhile said senior manager has cleared off to another employer.

Design has to be done early and stuff like "Which platform", "stand-alone or server hosted", "internet enabled", "high performance or shared experience" need to be answered right at the start.

Greyth wrote:

Regrettably, if anyone is to amend the code to include any kind of multi-player aspect it cannot be me as I am rendered unfit for that purpose although I dearly wish it could be otherwise.

If you are referring to some form of physical disability making it impossible for you to program a computer, either do a little more research with your support resources into what is available, or send me a private message about what the problem is and I'll do it for you. There are many small companies and charities doing a lot of very clever things with technology, some of them remarkably cheaply. And there's always the fan-fiction that can be added to.

(If it is because your wife won't let you, then I can't help - I don't think any man can!)

I suppose I was a bit irked from what seemed initially like rejection but with hindsight I think I got off lightly, phew! I read the thread and thought there might be a stone unturned. Often what seems a plausible idea from a perspective of technical poverty is easily seen to be unworkable from higher vantage points and I guess this was at best one of those. I'm content that the notion has insufficient merit and that better ideas are already being progressed such as is possible.

No need to apologise for anything SandJ, I used to hate walk in's and comments like 'That'll be easy if you use an array' and if I had a pound for every time someone said something daft like I'd have enough to buy lunch.

Greyth wrote:

I had a pound for every time someone said something daft like I'd have enough to buy Botswana.

Corrected.

Selezen wrote:

Greyth wrote:

I had a pound for every time someone said something daft like I'd have enough to buy Botswana.

Corrected.

Hm. Given that Botswana is rich in diamonds you'd need quite a lot of people saying something daft to achieve that.

You could probably afford most of the Eurozone countries

Smivs wrote:

You could probably afford most of the Eurozone countries

I guess you could do that for anything daft said about the Eurozone countries alone.

What was this thread supposed to be about again?

Well I've just read the entire thread. Some interesting comments by all. For the record I'm not a fan of the modern MUG's. But then again I'm not really a fan of modern games full stop. What little gaming time I have I play Oolite because of the game play.
Oddly I do remember playing a MUG that also had a similar sense of game play called Snipes.

A also attempted an early version of a MUG for Colossal Cave Adventure in BBCBasic on a Torch Unicorn network, with some success. Both the the 'Map' and the 'Current Locations' were actually random access text files, and actually quite small.

I know its not gonna happen, but you know it would be nice......

Namttep wrote:

I know its not gonna happen, but you know it would be nice......

Maybe, but I can't see it. If it was a faithfull 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.

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.

Offtopic as it is not about Oolite, but take a look at the iOS game Unknown. Multiplayer there is limited to 4 players and only makes sense if you arrange with some friends/fellow players to play together at a certain time.

SandJ wrote:

v1.76 downloads on Berlios = 11,418.

Those stats are not 'very' accurate: since BerliOS started piggybacking on sourceforge, the sf downloads are not counted in those statisics. I believe there's another 10k separate downloads from there. Using the same calculations as you, we can get to almost 1 million players!

Woo-hoo!

Kaks wrote:

we can get to almost 1 million players!

Roughly the population of Zanzibar (which brings to mind the SF novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner for some strange reason).

El Viejo wrote:

Kaks wrote:

we can get to almost 1 million players!

Roughly the population of Zanzibar.

However, if I were in Zanzibar, I wouldn't mainly think of playing Oolite. (It's a beautiful place, I've been there a couple of times.)