Thoughts on multiplayer (so far)

[Bastard Children]

I think this game has a lot of potential for multiplayer. The thing is, it needs to be heavly regulated so people dont spawn 300000 ships, planes, whatever. One server I joined, had the workbench locked up so you could not get into it unless you waited in a line. Pretty smart. I think if people made missions and hosted servers with those missions, multiplayer would be pretty fun. In the mission maker (which I have not used yet so I could be completely wrong) you should be able to assign people roles and what they can and cant do. Maybe allow admins the ability to fly and teleport anywhere on the map. kick and ban people ofc. Also with the mission maker, you should be able to assign spawn locations, so not everyone spawns at the same hanger. You could make them spawn on an island and wait for a transport ship. There is a lot of things that should be added to the mission maker to allow multiplayer to be smoother and more thought out, rather than spawning and running for the workbench while 5 other people spawn vehicles on top of eachother.

I'm also thinking about clans. If some people could get together and make clans, that would be amazing. People make missions, some people make the vehicles for those missions and they all work together to make cool stuff. After they make everything they play test it. Vehicles already spawned outside the hanger and they assign missions. Go save this guy, put out this fire.. oh no there is a storm coming everyone circle back to base and land... etc. Whatever you can come up with. I think clans, guild, groups, whatever you wanna call it could make multiplayer pretty fun. Everyone working together for a common goal.

To be honest I think the servers run pretty smooth for what this game is. Its a lot of physics and players running around. Its pretty hard to run servers that can handle this kind of load. What they have so far is actually pretty good.

So main points

Spawn at different locations around the map.
Limit ONE vehicle per person
CAP on how big or complex the vehicle can be
ADMIN powers, like flying
People make some groups, clans, etc
More powerful mission maker for multiplayer missions.

[Ra-Ra-Rasputin]

To be fair one vehicle restriction can easily be circumvented by spawning multiple vehicles with one spawn, such as a large ship with a pre-placed helicopter and a snubcraft in place. It would help definitely, but it would necessarily not stop someone spawning a load of vehicles in one go.

To the game this looks like nothing more than separate geometry, so it's functionally impossible to control.

Complexity is also very difficult to define. I can make a few microcontrollers that will absolutely murder any server, but this will never look as a complex or a big vehicle. If that doesn't work, i could always make a boat made of nothing but lights, or interconnected physics gubbins because it's "cool". If someone wants to circumvent those system, there's always a way.

[KILLEDMAN2]

so far it runs terribly.

[Ra-Ra-Rasputin]

Originally posted by KILLEDMAN2:

so far it runs terribly.

Not for me or my friends. Had some crashes here and there, but none since 10.8 i think.