Oolite Bulletins

What I'm looking for is something like Cube2/Sauerbraten but in space.

Sauerbraten is a free and open source, multiplatform, old school, dead simple FPS. It's dead simple because there's no RPG elements, no power-ups, no customisations, no-nothing except two flags and two teams with riffles. If you're hit once you're dead - but you respawn in 10 seconds. You can enter and live a game anytime, there's no lobby or logging queue.
This game got a lot of things right; from the fact that you're always on blue team, to the riffle recoil that can be used either to jump higher or to go faster (with some risks). The most surprising perhaps is that "ragers" are rare in this game. People don't even seem to care about winning: it's not uncommon that players switch teams in order to balance the game (when the server doesn't autobalance teams).

I googled for something like that yesterday but to my surprise, I couldn't find something like that. I found multiplayer space combat with either RPG elements, or RTS elements, or ship customisation, etc. But nothing like just two teams fighting with ships and lazors in an asteroid field.

This old pirate would pay to play that ...

Astrobe wrote:

But nothing like just two teams fighting with ships and lazors in an asteroid field.

UT2004 had one game mode sorta like that.. and there are still a surprising number of UT2004 servers active.. but none of them running the space-combat maps, that I'm aware of..

Thinking about how hard it could be to implement, it occurred to me that Oolite has perhaps 90% of it.

The way I see it, the game would be like a space soccer with ships and lasers.

It would take place in an asteroid field of about 1 minute diameter (with a standard Cobra III, full speed). The asteroids are there to provide cover to the players (add some shipwrecks for good measure). On opposite sides of the arena, may three or four rock hermit stations that serve as spawn points for players. Players spawn with a Cobra III with light equipment: forward pulse laser, no energy bank, injectors but very little fuel. The shields don't regenerate or extremely slowly. Pulse laser could be have buffed damage so that it would need maybe 3 hits to take down an enemy.
Between spawn points, on each side, are large rings. these are the goals for our soccer game. The ball itself spawns in the middle of the asteroid field. Players have to pick it up and pass through the opponents' goal ring to score a point for the team. If the carrier of the ball is destroyed, the ball is immediately released. A player that have been taken down respawns after 10 seconds.
Ships have scanners with two range settings (one for dogfight, one for tactical play which covers the whole field). The ball and the ball carrier have a distinct colour on the scanner; opponents are marked as red. Opponents at full stop cannot shoot their lasers and cannot be seen on the scanner.

It seems to me that this requires moderate patching to Oollite, which would be nice because the game would benefit from improvements in Oolite. I guess the main addition is the networking code. Maybe it could be implemented in an external program: Oolite and the multiplayer interface program could communicate simply through a socket or pipe. Clients would exchange peer-to-peer (in order to avoid the overhead of a central server) a timestamp, position and attitude (orientation). A client should keep a short history of these messages in order to interpolate the future position of ships in case of lag. Additional messages for hit confirmation/registration, leave/join, chat, etc.

But the real issue is to find multiple players to play this multiplayer game. How many commanders would be interested in playing it?

If you're not going to ask me to write code or model anything, sure. I am willing and able to be a warm body at one of the computers. Only thing is the players would need some amount of energy in their capacitors or else they won't be able to shoot.

edit: or exist, since you die if your ship reaches zero energy (or at least if you are hit with insufficient energy,) if we were to undock with zero energy we might spontaneously explode or otherwise have buggy behavior.

I'm reminded of a fun 2D game on the Amiga called Blastaball. You fly a little spaceship-like thing in an arena and run into or shoot at a giant puck (or your opponent to knock him off his line), trying to move it into a goal. I loved that game.

Freespace 2 has multiplayer as I recall. You can set up for simple one off vs combat scenarios. Not sure how many players it supported though.