Multiplayer
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ThorWarriorX
- Miner
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Wed Mar 22, 2006 5:10 am
That explained quite a bit, but not enough. If there was a 2 player mode for not-online playing, there wouldn't really need to rebalance all the game, because the players would know what the other is doing, etc. It would only make the game easier, but the only problem I see is using gates. Is there any real poblem except this?
Sentrettenian Empire
You're right -- that is one of the main issues in the way of making just a simple two-player version of Transcendence. One principle of Transcendence is that the system stops when the player isn't in there. So one would either have to make it so that the players always gate at the same time, or you would have to extend the processing framework to be capable of running several systems at once.
Two players on one computer wouldn't be too hard to add (such as adding a turret capability where you can have another player control a turret for your ship).
Then adding the capability to do that multiplayer turret thing over TCP/IP on a network would be a fair bit of work, but still certainly doable.
The next big jump is having two player ships going on at once. All the sudden, all of the AI code has to be revamped to handle choosing between multiple available targets, the quest code has to be considered, the alignment code (one person ticked off this commonwealth station and so can't land, does that mean the other one can't land either?), all of the code that specifically addressed the player's ship now has to be able to handle multiple ships, and be able to deal with bad data received over the network (because packets occasionally arrive out of sync -- you have to be able to reject old data, or interpolate when you're missing data), etc etc.
Like I said, it's not impossible, but as you progress along the way, there aren't many (if any) parts of the program that go un-touched by the change to make it a multiplayer game. It's a similar thing with trying to make a VW into a submarine. Well, what if you just want to make it drivable through a foot of water? Just seal up the bottoms of the doors, adjust the exhaust, maybe waterproof a couple other things, and you're good to continue. Then to make it a boat? Well, add some floats, seal up some more stuff, add some more safety measures, but still quite doable. And then you still can make it a submersible, but by the time you start planning it out, you've done some re-engineering of just about every part of the game, and it really is easier to just start over from scratch with designing a car/sub from the get-go.
I hope I'm not discouraging anyone from trying to make their own multiplayer Transcendence game -- it certainly is doable and would likely be a very fun and enjoyable game. I'm just trying to explain (as a developer myself) some of the reasons why he very likely doesn't want to head down the slipperly slope of adding a fundamental change this late in the game.
Cheers!
--clint
Two players on one computer wouldn't be too hard to add (such as adding a turret capability where you can have another player control a turret for your ship).
Then adding the capability to do that multiplayer turret thing over TCP/IP on a network would be a fair bit of work, but still certainly doable.
The next big jump is having two player ships going on at once. All the sudden, all of the AI code has to be revamped to handle choosing between multiple available targets, the quest code has to be considered, the alignment code (one person ticked off this commonwealth station and so can't land, does that mean the other one can't land either?), all of the code that specifically addressed the player's ship now has to be able to handle multiple ships, and be able to deal with bad data received over the network (because packets occasionally arrive out of sync -- you have to be able to reject old data, or interpolate when you're missing data), etc etc.
Like I said, it's not impossible, but as you progress along the way, there aren't many (if any) parts of the program that go un-touched by the change to make it a multiplayer game. It's a similar thing with trying to make a VW into a submarine. Well, what if you just want to make it drivable through a foot of water? Just seal up the bottoms of the doors, adjust the exhaust, maybe waterproof a couple other things, and you're good to continue. Then to make it a boat? Well, add some floats, seal up some more stuff, add some more safety measures, but still quite doable. And then you still can make it a submersible, but by the time you start planning it out, you've done some re-engineering of just about every part of the game, and it really is easier to just start over from scratch with designing a car/sub from the get-go.
I hope I'm not discouraging anyone from trying to make their own multiplayer Transcendence game -- it certainly is doable and would likely be a very fun and enjoyable game. I'm just trying to explain (as a developer myself) some of the reasons why he very likely doesn't want to head down the slipperly slope of adding a fundamental change this late in the game.
Cheers!
--clint
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ThorWarriorX
- Miner
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Wed Mar 22, 2006 5:10 am
Well, I'll say what I said earlier: first full game development, then multiplayer. In my opinion, of course.
Sentrettenian Empire
Once the game is done, it will be far too late to make it multiplayer because as Han mentioned, Transcendence was designed from the ground up as being a single-player-only game. As such, all of the game logic, variables and controls are made to allow for only one player. It would most likely be easier to create a new game from scratch and simply import graphics and data over from Transcendence. Maybe this will happen in the future, but at this time, George has made it clear he has no plans to do so.ThorWarriorX wrote:Well, I'll say what I said earlier: first full game development, then multiplayer. In my opinion, of course.
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Fossaman
- Militia Captain
- Posts: 556
- Joined: Tue Mar 07, 2006 12:56 am
- Location: Traveling to the galactic core
While I don't especially want to see a full blown multiplayer version of the game, I'm curious about how coding such a thing would work. Would you have to run the transcendence software on the server itself? How hard would it be to split the player and playership values (or whatever they are...I've never quite figured it out) so that there were two of each?
Pointless curiousity aside, how difficult would it be to create a multiplayer battle arena? Head to head just by itself would be loads of fun.
Pointless curiousity aside, how difficult would it be to create a multiplayer battle arena? Head to head just by itself would be loads of fun.
X-ray laser! Pew, pew pew!
> = = = = ۞
> = = = = ۞
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Guest
It seems to me that head-to-head combat, or a co-operative long continuous battle with increasingly difficult ship/combinations of ships would be the first step towards multiplayer. I think multiplayer would be more likely to happen if someone made a sample program and then gave it to George.
Something would have to be set up in the coding of the game itself. I see two likely methods.
1. You have a separate program that operates as a server that may or may not be running on one of the gaming systems that co-ordinates interactions between systems running the game.
2. One of the systems running the game establishes itself as the master (server) either automatically or via player (one player starts a server session) and other players join in.
1. You have a separate program that operates as a server that may or may not be running on one of the gaming systems that co-ordinates interactions between systems running the game.
2. One of the systems running the game establishes itself as the master (server) either automatically or via player (one player starts a server session) and other players join in.