Multiplayer Trans

[TranscendentGeek]

I vote no and hell no!!! Not every dang game on the planet needs to be frackin social multi-player! It is being done to death. I don't want to play with someone else. Some games are simply better on your own. The lone pilgrim fighting his way to the core is the very essence of the game. To even consider changing that is madness. EA/Maxis tried to force multiplayer down people's throats with SimCity and it was a royal mess. We need single player games out there with the scope of T for those of us who get sick of playing with others all the time. Sometimes you just need to do your own things without worrying about what Joe Bob farmer is doing half a world away.

[whaleduck]

I was hoping people would assume that multiplayer would be an ASPECT of the game, not full-blown multiplayer, sort of like Minecraft. If this thread is confusing, here is everything as of this post:

Making multiplayer is hard on George because

1. The engine, as mentioned earlier. This also moves on to the stuff that's coded INTO the engine as well, as an engine change would require everything to be rewritten.
2. Balance & AI.
3. Content (is there actually enough for multiple people? I'd argue you'd need an entirely new campaign for multiplayer to work in, so as not to mess with the Pilgrim's story)
4. Money + George working on everything else. Who knows, maybe this will go away some day...but the amount of time needed for an engine rewrite is considerable.
5. The single-player isn't finished yet and we have a pretty small fanbase from which to find multiple players.
6. Mods + multiplayer = Fun. Although it's probably possible to set a campaign to not allow mods, you'd still need anti-cheat checks and a compatibility system so people can match up mods.
7. Everything else that's ever been brought up since 2003 or so.

(recommended to George) It will be an aspect of the game, like when you start up there is a button saying "play multiplayer"

[digdug]

ah, multiplayer, this has been discussed so much since 2006

Transcendence is a roguelike game, and as such, it should remain singleplayer. (note that there are multiplayer roguelikes like TomeNET, but those play quite differently from standard nethack-style games)

as mentioned before, to make a multiplayer transcendence you need:
- rewrite the engine,
- rebalance the game (what happens to a system that has been ravaged by a player ? does it respawn after some time ? is it dynamically rebuilt ? can player build stations to repopulate a system ? can you PVP everywhere or only in arenas ? and so on...),
- have the entire topology on a server (could be persistent like World of Warcraft, or periodically refreshed like Star Sonata),
- installation of anti-cheating measures
- lots and lots of time and resources.

Many veteran players would probably agree with me saying that we would like to see those resources put towards the development of singleplayer. (Part 2 will be insanely amazing !)

Bear in mind that I would love to play a multiplayer version of Transcendence, but not in these terms. For example, let's take the iconic Transcendence tribute game: Star Control 2. In star control 2 there is a multiplayer mode. It's a hotseat playerVSplayer or playerVSCPU space battle. Choose your ship and fight away. Not very dissimilar to Transcendence Intro Screen
Now, playing that, with some sort of ship upgrade system using credits would be awesome. It would be like Multiplayer Battlezone (play the mod on Xelerus).

Regarding Minecraft, well, I can't talk bad about a game that had such a tremendous success. But the multiplayer system of Minecraft is one of the worst I ever seen in any social online game. It promotes housing promiscuity, thief and destruction instead of allowing players to have simple stuff like shared chests, buying lands and teams. Not counting the horrible fighting mechanics. Nearly nobody plays Minecraft multiplayer vanilla, because it's not fun. Instead you have to rely onto a heavy use of unofficial and unsupported mods that will balance the things out and make a working online social system. All minecraft mods are totally unofficial, and modders (and players) are still waiting for the Modding API.
BTW, I've been playing it since InfDev.

[whaleduck]

Now that I think about it, multiplayer really shouldn't become part of the game for now. Transcendence is more or less unfinished,
From personal experience, Transcendence has a bug here and there. It's also unfinished because of the absence of Part II and III(which annoys me).

the best path for Transcendence is to grow the popularity of the game by enhancing the current (single-player) engine, creating interesting new content, and encouraging fun and innovative mods.

Thus, IF George decides to implement multiplayer, it probably won't be until some time after Part III, if George isn't busy then, and everybody in the transcendence multiverse forgot what a 'bugtester' was.

[Ttech]

Now that it is open source, we use the source we have on Github to make a nice multiplayer version, sadly time escapes.

[whaleduck]

Now that it is open source, we use the source we have on Github to make a nice multiplayer version, sadly time escapes.

Say what? On the loading screen of Transcendence is still says "Copyright 2003-2013 Kronosaur Productions".

[FourFire]

Now that it is open source, we use the source we have on Github to make a nice multiplayer version, sadly time escapes.

Say what? On the loading screen of Transcendence is still says "Copyright 2003-2013 Kronosaur Productions".

Well yeah, George probably still doesn't want anyone else but him to make money off his own work, but that doesn't mean the game can't be open source.

[Song]

From what I've seen of previous open-source games, this means that the game content is under copyright, but the engine itself is open-source. Of course, this is harder to seperate since a lot of Transcendence game stuff is built into the engine rather than into the game-part of it.