FAQ: Why is Planetoid Pioneers Online a separate game on Steam from Planetoid Pioneers?

[data010]

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out Planetoid Pioneers Online! It's a project ten years in the making (no joke - we started working on the underlying engine in August 2009), so we're glad to finally have you and your friends able to play it as we had envisioned for so long!

Some of you may be here having played Planetoid Pioneers before, and some might be entirely new to all of this! We figured both of you might find it confusing that there's two separate games with such similar names (Planetoid Pioneers, which I'll refer to as PP, and Planetoid Pioneers Online, which I'll call PPO from now on), and why they still seem kindof connected. And what's up with that Planetoid Pioneers Contributor Edition?! (you guessed it: PPCE)

Well, I'm here to clear all of this up. The simple answer is that PP and PPO are quite different games:

• PP is a slow-paced metroidvania ("physicsvania" heh) adventure, includes all the crazy powerful editors we used to make the game, and with some bonus local-only multiplayer modes sprinkled on top.
  
• PPO on the other hand, has no adventure mode, no editors (more on why, below) - however, it has twelve game modes made for online multiplayer that are fast, pick-up-and-play, action-oriented, quite diverse, and much more polished than PP's local multiplayer modes. We also host servers worldwide for free for it, along with a system for simple and quick matchmaking that we hope will hold up on launch!

Here they are, for reference:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/300260/Planetoid_Pioneers/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013040/Planetoid_Pioneers_Online/

I can't overstate how much effort went into making online multiplayer possible for such a physics-driven engine shared by both PP and PPO, where all the little fragments and destruction can affect gameplay - it took us over a year of dedicated work after PP's launch to get PPO to where it is today, even after a decade of building their Crush2D engine from the start with eventual networking in mind.

This is one big reason why PPO isn't simply an update to PP: it's really a very different game - but the even bigger reason is that there would be technical issues around having editors in PPO and still have the "deterministic" network multiplayer work (ie no game data can be changed on the different players' computers at all, or things will desync immediately).

The upside with the determinism way of doing things is that our servers can be very lightweight (no need to simulate anything there), and it pretty much eliminates the possibility for cheating (!). Every single frame, we mathematically check that the scene on all players' computers match *exactly*, and as soon as we detect that there has been any desynchronization at all, we immediately abort the game. This is mega hard to achieve, but after many months of testing and iterating, we now run our test games for long periods across country borders without any desyncs - yay!

So, how does the more expensive Planetoid Pioneers Contributor Edition fit into this? Simple: it gives you access to some perks in our Discord community - but more substantially, it gives you a free copy of Planetoid Pioneers Online included! Also, we're in the process of tying together the workshops of PPCE and PPO, so that it will still be possible to both edit and create whole new game modes in PPCE's editors, and then immediately play them with your internet friends in PPO. This is a pretty big deal, since it allows anyone with a game idea, or a desire to tweak/tune any of the existing ones, to make it happen and have people worldwide play it. We'll be announcing more on this exciting Workshop action soon.

Finally, you might still wonder why PPO doesn't include a long adventure mode like PP does? The main reasons revolve around the challenges around syncing and restoring save states that are necessary in longer games. We might tackle this later, but for now we have put it off and focused on the dozen fast and furious modes now included on launch.

So, there you have it - hope that cleared things up, and that you all enjoy either/both PP and PPO for what they are and offer!

- D