Oolite Bulletins

I'm new to Oolite, and love it. But one thing I think would be great for the game would be Multiplayer, with the ability to chat and trade with other players, as well as shoot them down in certain systems (corrupt ones, mainly). I know that this would be hard to implement, but just something to consider

galvinator wrote:

I'm new to Oolite, and love it. But one thing I think would be great for the game would be Multiplayer, with the ability to chat and trade with other players, as well as shoot them down in certain systems (corrupt ones, mainly). I know that this would be hard to implement, but just something to consider

Hi Galvinator, and welcome to the 'Friendliest board this side of Riedquat'.
You won't be surprised to learn that you're not the first person to mention this...see here , and the sad news is, it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Still, it's a great game, and as you'll find a really friendly community as well.
It's great to have you on board.

Ahh, I see. Well, thanks anyway, and it's great to be playing

It wouldn't really be the same thing, but an interesting illusion of Oolite not being a single player game might be gotten if something like teamspeak or similar could be managed. Probably not enough people in most star systems to make it workable, but maybe if each galaxy had a different channel, there might be enough radio "chatter" going on to make it interesting.

IRC txt would be another possibility, but invariably the only time anyone would hail you to pass the time of day would be when you were in the middle of a dogfight. LOL

There's a discontinuity every time you dock/launch or hyperspace. Your time gets out of synchronization with the rest of the universe. Even the distance you jump, be it 0.1 LY or 7.0 LY has a huge effect on how much time supposedly passes for everyone else.

Finding each other in a sector if separated could be a nightmare without a location indicator for everyone...and that would soon get nasty if there's more than a handful of players.

A crude multiplayer option COULD be written as an OXP. It would only work with convoys, though, and only work with any degree of reliability on a LAN.

The idea would be that the AI for the escorting ships would be replaced with a network connection. So every ship in the convoy is running as a "fake" AI on all but one instance.

In order to be efficient, the network connection would need to be multicast. In other words, when you send a keyboard or joystick command, one packet is sent out, but it is sent out to everyone joined to that multicast group. Likewise, any change in shields, energy, etc, other than the natural regeneration would need to be sent out.

In order to handle discrepencies due to packet loss, each instance would be the definitive instance for any given actual ship and would need to send reference frames every so often to make sure that everything was properly synchronized.

If a user shoots at an NPC ship, that user's machine would be responsible for sending out the NPC's damage. If a user shoots at a PC ship, the PC ship's machine would need to be responsible for the management.

A more cheat-proof solution would be to have all ships be AI via the network on each client, and have the user's commands go to a central server. The central server would do all of the above gaming internally on different instances and would then send out to each client the updates as above.