Oolite Bulletins

I know people have suggested this been made before, but it still is something I think I should post about.
Oolite could be made multiplayer, yes, but a common concern is servers...
Now that Giles is no longer working on Oolite
I think that it would be easier for people to make modifications.
Like making it playable over LAN. It wouldn't need servers, and it could be between as few as 2 people.

I've always wanted to see Elite (or indeed Oolite) as a persistent Massively-multiplayer game but having done an MSc in Defence Simulation and Modelling part-time recently and seen the bandwidth that some of the model entities pass between them in not-massively-complicated military-type-simulations you basically haven't got a hope in hell - dead-reckoning would have the ships leaping about all over space making fighting practically impossible and anything else would swamp even a very good server for more than about 15 people playing at any one time.

If I win millions on the lottery then I'll buy 255 servers (one for each planet so that your data is piped to the next server when you Hyperspace) and pay for one years hosting - wonder how many people would actually be playing at the end of that free year and more importantly how many would pay a regular amount to sustain it...

A smaller LAN type thing might work - Oolite Arena - where you could meet and go head to head with say up to 8 players as long as atleast 1 PC is acting as a dedicated server - fill it full of Asteroids and killer NPCs to make it challenging - and you could bring your arms-race-super-uber-uber-uber-Mk3 and vaporise instantly anybody else who hasn't built at least a pretty-good-uber-uber-mk2...

Just my tuppence's worth...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

If I win millions on the lottery then I'll buy 255 servers (one for each planet so that your data is piped to the next server when you Hyperspace) and pay for one years hosting - wonder how many people would actually be playing at the end of that free year and more importantly how many would pay a regular amount to sustain it...

What's more improbable, winning millions on the lottery or MummyHoggy killing you for suggesting buying 255 servers with the money?

Captain Hesperus
"Hell hath no fury like a woman denied her spending money."

I was thinking of an "open world" LAN, where people can go about in the galaxy as they please, and meet as they wish. So player A could go escort Player B using a Fer-de-Lance, while player B carried goods.
It could even be drop-in, drop-out gameplay. It wouldn't eat much bandwidth at all. It would be oh-so-wonderful. OXPs would be 'shared', such that any discrepencies are copied over into the other player's AddOns folder before gameplay, so that both players have those OXPs.