Multiplayer

Started by Zknar, September 25, 2013, 02:37:29 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Anduin1357

Welcome to Rimworld!
Kudos on the story teller vs. colonist mode.

"I mean, I guess with the time control buttons it would cause problems."

We probably don't need time control then.

DaGirrafeMan

But the purpose of this game is the fact that it's a game with which the pause button is the most reliable feature. It allows you to relocate strategies and it allows you to take a break if things get too hectic! If you couldn't pause it, then what is the use of fast forwarding as well? With that being said, it would change from a colony story sim to being an RTS?

killer117

But what if u use a system like europia unerversailis (probably spelling that wrong) what happend is it pause the game, and for 30 seconds it will stay like that and no other player can press play. After that it lets anyone modify the time speed back. This would work really well in a multiplayer rimworld, and its not like theres gonna be huge servers. Itll most likely be 2-3 people playing together, probably in the same room, so not many people are gonna need to worry bout trolls
Whats Rimworld without a little cannabilism/ murder/ maniacs/ crazy tribes/ nasty pirates/ nutcase animals/ genocidal robots etc.

Rafe009

GOD NO PLEASE...


Multiplayer is a TREMENDOUS developmental time sink for developers. It retards all other feature development. Please Tynan never make Rimworld Multiplayer, keep adding cool content that makes the game interesting. There are thousands of great multiplayer games, Rimworld distinguishes itself from the market in having gameplay centered around spontaneous events, great strategic combat and base building and procedural storytelling. We don't need one more multiplayer game. I would rather more rimworld.

b0rsuk

mAKE IT A MMMO!

The first player manages the colony. Each next player gets to play a single pawn. Players 2nd, 3rd and 4th control a colonist each. 5th player plays a mufallo. And so on.

As a consequence, there's no "mad animal" event anymore. It happens naturally. Griefers are a part of the game, you see.

Players playing predator animals compete for best prey, and try not to bite more than they can chew. Watch out for tortoise infections!

Players controlling herbivores play a PAC-MAN/survival game hybrid. Try to eat as many plants as you can! Devilstrand counts triple. Avoid bears! Run away from colonists! Bonus points for causing colonist friendly fire.

Whenever there's an escape pod, that's a new player. Naturally, he gets access to global chat.

When there's a raid, players from the raider faction compete for best colonist loot.

The largest number of new players connect when manhunters come.  You must have a working microphone to be admitted.

Anduin1357

Quote from: Rafe009 on May 07, 2016, 01:53:18 AM
Multiplayer is a TREMENDOUS developmental time sink for developers.
All we need is Tynan outsourcing multiplayer to the modding community to work on because everyone knows how much players of all walks would benefit from a multi-player experience.

Quote from: b0rsuk on May 07, 2016, 05:28:17 AM
MAKE IT A MMO!
Desyncs are a huge problem for deterministic games. If things become server based, we need a server build and require players to have lots of bandwidth.
Having 10s or 100s of players in one map would be a huge bandwidth and cpu time sink.

MMO would require more depth to Rimworld than current versions. It's not worth making an MMO out of Rimworld to compete against WoW. Keep it to standard, Rimworld games.
Quote from: DaGirrafeMan on May 07, 2016, 12:47:21 AM
But the purpose of this game is the fact that it's a game with which the pause button is the most reliable feature.
Wait what?
Rimworld in multiplayer, especially when it is competitive or is dependent on taking people by surprise, cannot allow players to pause the game so that they can observe every detail and spoil the game for their opponent.
With co-op games you may have multiple players managing the same colony, allowing more actions to be taken than with one player. What wrong would it be to give players ample reason to have a few friends help out or risk being overwhelmed with tasks?

blub01

Quote from: Tynan on September 25, 2013, 06:12:32 PM
I suppose there's no real need to even set a goal on it. After all, we don't do that in SP either. Just put several groups in the map and let them do as they please. If they're friends on Ventrilo they'll probably cooperate. Or maybe not.

Not that multiplayer is planned or anything.

What I think would be relatively easy to implement would be some kind of trading mechanic - basically, while each colony runs on its own on different computers, players can trade, the way you can with trade ships, just that instead of automatically balancing the items against silver, both players would have to agree to the trade.
Quote from: Zobaken on September 02, 2015, 12:37:37 AM
1. Please make people unable to move through deep waters. I don't like raiders cosplaying Jesus.

Anduin1357

Quote from: Tynan on September 25, 2013, 06:12:32 PM
I suppose there's no real need to even set a goal on it. After all, we don't do that in SP either. Just put several groups in the map and let them do as they please. If they're friends on Ventrilo they'll probably cooperate. Or maybe not.

Not that multiplayer is planned or anything.

Agreed with Tynan except it's Discord now. :D
Quote from: blub01 on May 09, 2016, 08:18:11 AM
What I think would be relatively easy to implement would be some kind of trading mechanic - basically, while each colony runs on its own on different computers, players can trade, the way you can with trade ships, just that instead of automatically balancing the items against silver, both players would have to agree to the trade.
Then you need to balance the frequency of how many of such trades can happen because there isn't a thing like on-demand trading.

blub01

Quote from: Anduin1357 on May 09, 2016, 08:26:23 AM
Quote from: Tynan on September 25, 2013, 06:12:32 PM
I suppose there's no real need to even set a goal on it. After all, we don't do that in SP either. Just put several groups in the map and let them do as they please. If they're friends on Ventrilo they'll probably cooperate. Or maybe not.

Not that multiplayer is planned or anything.

Agreed with Tynan except it's Discord now. :D
Quote from: blub01 on May 09, 2016, 08:18:11 AM
What I think would be relatively easy to implement would be some kind of trading mechanic - basically, while each colony runs on its own on different computers, players can trade, the way you can with trade ships, just that instead of automatically balancing the items against silver, both players would have to agree to the trade.
Then you need to balance the frequency of how many of such trades can happen because there isn't a thing like on-demand trading.

well, you obviously can't get anything the person you're trading with doesn't have, I figured this should be limited in the amount of players that can trade with each other, and ideally they should be at around the same progression level. so you can help your friend out if they need it, but you can't boost them from just having landed into the endgame (which you would need a lot of kind of rare neurotrainers for, anyway). a possible option (maybe you could even make this toggleable) is to infer a cost to it - basically, you have to make a kind of shuttle/drop pod hybrid for every so many resources traded.
Quote from: Zobaken on September 02, 2015, 12:37:37 AM
1. Please make people unable to move through deep waters. I don't like raiders cosplaying Jesus.

Nikitteh

Ok so I'm not sure if anyone mentioned this or not probably have but just to put my mind at ease I'm going to post this. So I was talking with my husband on how my mom and I played Animal Crossing together on our DS's and how I could connect to her world and visit and harvest fruits, and veggies that I didn't have in my world and take them back with me and having foreign items would sell more on the market to passing merchants. I think that this would be a cool concept, and have a LAN connection so people with or without internet can still interact with eachother. Lets say my husband is being attacked by aliens, he can send a request and I can send a limit of 3 colonists to aid in defending. This would open up a new level of hard mode on aliens and open another can of worms of monsters and possibilities. There would be pros and cons to this LAN connection, example: I visit his colony and one of his colonists has the flu or a contagious virus one of my colonists can catch it and bring it back to my colony after I return from my visit. Or even raiding another players colony?! Then selling them to slavers lol. Also maybe have a system like the Coms Console to send players mail.... you know you want to send a raging manhunting Thrumbo to your ally just for giggles. But first one must research a teleporter on BOTH accounts or ALL accounts wishing to have a LAN connection , and having the risk of alien invasion increase when using these teleporters since you open a wormhole in space in witch to travel through  ;D eh?! sounds cool right? Maybe? No? Idk I'm just all over the place with this I would be extremely excited if this was available. So many things to do if you added this. But it wouldn't be a global connection it would have to be local just like how we play AoW (Age of Wonders Shadow magic) we play in the same room on a lan line that my husband creates and we can have 8 people connected its pretty cool ... sadly no one plays AoW :'( :'( :'( but any who you get the concept of what I'm saying this would be fantastic to have and make a game that is already fun even more funner :).

blub01

all nice ideas, but I think anything that complicated will go far down the development pipeline. if you want to see multiplayer in the game, make it simple to implement.
Quote from: Zobaken on September 02, 2015, 12:37:37 AM
1. Please make people unable to move through deep waters. I don't like raiders cosplaying Jesus.

Jin Hai

#191
The simplest multiplayer between 3+ players:

-Friend 1 hosts a server. This is as vanilla as the game can possibly be. Makes a world, chooses a spot, loads up everything to the colonists crash landing, and plays the game like you normally do.

-Friend 2 joins the server. Picks his colonists like normal and chooses an area to drop down on that is not the same area as Friend 1. He starts another Colony, and Friend 1 gets a notification of another Faction on the planet. With a Comms console each, they can start sending supplies, prisoners, animals, etc to each other. Maybe they could send AI traders with exchange rates/items and a muffalo for hauling (little more complex than desired, but a fun idea).

-Friend 3 joins the server. Picks his colonists like normal and chooses an area to drop down on that is not the same area as Friend 1 or Friend 2. He starts another Colony, and Friend 1 and 2 get notifications of another Faction on the planet. On the opposite spectrum, they send raiding parties at Friend 1 that are AI controlled and given one of three potential raid types with equivalent resource costs (Assaults/Sieges/Sappers).

-Friend 1 requests aid from Friend 2 to send over colonists to help defend/work at the Colony. Either AI controlled or temporarily controlled by the receiving player until time expires or the threat is gone, like NPC faction allies.

Careful what you send when aiding/raiding though; if they die they do not return to the Colony. This makes sending colonists a bit more of a high-risk high-reward than just always sending out help/raids.
The AI controlled benefit is primarily being able to send it out at any time, and arrive a day or two in-game for the recipient. That way players don't need to be 100% in sync for multiplayer to work, and it could be more like sending out a mission than personally doing the job.
If a friend goes offline, their Colony is treated as Offline and is not interact-able purely for simplicity's sake. A friend whose Colony is destroyed or has not played for a long time is treated as "Lost Contact".
Faction-based coop is infinitely easier than same-screen Co-op, and has most of the same benefits. The only real downside is that it's a little distant to call it real "co-op", but it's the simplest possible implementation I think.

Also, note that this is literally just barebones multiplayer. There's no point in talking about balance or anything unless it were implemented for competitive use.

blub01

Quote from: Jin Hai on May 15, 2016, 03:35:19 PM
The simplest multiplayer between 3+ players:

-Friend 1 hosts a server. This is as vanilla as the game can possibly be. Makes a world, chooses a spot, loads up everything to the colonists crash landing, and plays the game like you normally do.

-Friend 2 joins the server. Picks his colonists like normal and chooses an area to drop down on that is not the same area as Friend 1. He starts another Colony, and Friend 1 gets a notification of another Faction on the planet. With a Comms console each, they can start sending supplies, prisoners, animals, etc to each other. Maybe they could send AI traders with exchange rates/items and a muffalo for hauling (little more complex than desired, but a fun idea).

-Friend 3 joins the server. Picks his colonists like normal and chooses an area to drop down on that is not the same area as Friend 1 or Friend 2. He starts another Colony, and Friend 1 and 2 get notifications of another Faction on the planet. On the opposite spectrum, they send raiding parties at Friend 1 that are AI controlled and given one of three potential raid types with equivalent resource costs (Assaults/Sieges/Sappers).

-Friend 1 requests aid from Friend 2 to send over colonists to help defend/work at the Colony. Either AI controlled or temporarily controlled by the receiving player until time expires or the threat is gone, like NPC faction allies.

Careful what you send when aiding/raiding though; if they die they do not return to the Colony. This makes sending colonists a bit more of a high-risk high-reward than just always sending out help/raids.
The AI controlled benefit is primarily being able to send it out at any time, and arrive a day or two in-game for the recipient. That way players don't need to be 100% in sync for multiplayer to work, and it could be more like sending out a mission than personally doing the job.
If a friend goes offline, their Colony is treated as Offline and is not interact-able purely for simplicity's sake. A friend whose Colony is destroyed or has not played for a long time is treated as "Lost Contact".
Faction-based coop is infinitely easier than same-screen Co-op, and has most of the same benefits. The only real downside is that it's a little distant to call it real "co-op", but it's the simplest possible implementation I think.

Also, note that this is literally just barebones multiplayer. There's no point in talking about balance or anything unless it were implemented for competitive use.

as a minor addition I would suggest being able to see what is going on in another player's colony, and possibly calculating the overall resource output of a colony when a colonist goes offline, and using that to predict the state of the colony when they come back (or simply only allow palying when all players are present). also, what do you mean with raids?
Quote from: Zobaken on September 02, 2015, 12:37:37 AM
1. Please make people unable to move through deep waters. I don't like raiders cosplaying Jesus.

Nikitteh

Quote from: blub01 on May 16, 2016, 05:32:42 AM
Quote from: Jin Hai on May 15, 2016, 03:35:19 PM
The simplest multiplayer between 3+ players:

-Friend 1 hosts a server. This is as vanilla as the game can possibly be. Makes a world, chooses a spot, loads up everything to the colonists crash landing, and plays the game like you normally do.

-Friend 2 joins the server. Picks his colonists like normal and chooses an area to drop down on that is not the same area as Friend 1. He starts another Colony, and Friend 1 gets a notification of another Faction on the planet. With a Comms console each, they can start sending supplies, prisoners, animals, etc to each other. Maybe they could send AI traders with exchange rates/items and a muffalo for hauling (little more complex than desired, but a fun idea).

-Friend 3 joins the server. Picks his colonists like normal and chooses an area to drop down on that is not the same area as Friend 1 or Friend 2. He starts another Colony, and Friend 1 and 2 get notifications of another Faction on the planet. On the opposite spectrum, they send raiding parties at Friend 1 that are AI controlled and given one of three potential raid types with equivalent resource costs (Assaults/Sieges/Sappers).

-Friend 1 requests aid from Friend 2 to send over colonists to help defend/work at the Colony. Either AI controlled or temporarily controlled by the receiving player until time expires or the threat is gone, like NPC faction allies.

Careful what you send when aiding/raiding though; if they die they do not return to the Colony. This makes sending colonists a bit more of a high-risk high-reward than just always sending out help/raids.
The AI controlled benefit is primarily being able to send it out at any time, and arrive a day or two in-game for the recipient. That way players don't need to be 100% in sync for multiplayer to work, and it could be more like sending out a mission than personally doing the job.
If a friend goes offline, their Colony is treated as Offline and is not interact-able purely for simplicity's sake. A friend whose Colony is destroyed or has not played for a long time is treated as "Lost Contact".
Faction-based coop is infinitely easier than same-screen Co-op, and has most of the same benefits. The only real downside is that it's a little distant to call it real "co-op", but it's the simplest possible implementation I think.

Also, note that this is literally just barebones multiplayer. There's no point in talking about balance or anything unless it were implemented for competitive use.

as a minor addition I would suggest being able to see what is going on in another player's colony, and possibly calculating the overall resource output of a colony when a colonist goes offline, and using that to predict the state of the colony when they come back (or simply only allow palying when all players are present). also, what do you mean with raids?

Have a research for "Scout drone" so its not an instant given to see what other colonists are doing, and make them destructable so you will risk losing those resources used to build it.

Jin Hai

Quote from: blub01 on May 16, 2016, 05:32:42 AM
as a minor addition I would suggest being able to see what is going on in another player's colony, and possibly calculating the overall resource output of a colony when a colonist goes offline, and using that to predict the state of the colony when they come back (or simply only allow palying when all players are present). also, what do you mean with raids?

Raids as in they send their own colonists to harass and reap player Colonies for weapons, items, anything of relatively high value that could be set by the raiding player. Clearly you'd need a pretty high population to do it frequently/effectively, but considering other Factions do it all the time this seems like it would kind of be a necessity for multiplayer. Clearly would be very hard to do effectively, but not impossible.

Also, in regards to the resource output thing, I sort of understood it as "when the player goes offline, his base is effectively paused where it was". Unrealistic, but as simple as it could be.