Multiplayer would it be possable

[shanrak]

Not really, most people use SETA to get from point A to B faster, just implement it like how they did it in freelancer (basically giving you a super speed boost, but you can't shoot while in it and being shot at kicks you out of it).

Being able to dogfight other players would be interesting though

Eh? SETA's a time accelerator, not a booster. If you used it, how would your game predict what I'm going to do in advance?

I'm just saying, make it a booster instead, forget the time part, everything else always happens in real time.

Multiplayer X-universe wouldn't be that interesting, except perhaps 1 possible aspect.

Just have 1 sector, big and empty (about 150km across), give 2 players a certain amount of credits (decided at the beginning of the current game), and 1 shipyard (home base) each that has all possible ship/equipment/software in the game (except, perhaps m7ms, or make their missiles limited to 40 flails 20 hammer torps each, and limit m8s to 50 tomahawks each). The base can also sell things like lasertowers, squash mines, and satellites (for recon).

Each side also gets 2 medium weapons platforms for base defense.

The player who gets their home base destroyed first loses.

Versus mode x3 with fleets, would be fun as hell

[maphys]

I'm just saying, make it a booster instead, forget the time part, everything else always happens in real time.

Then rebalance missiles, bullet speed and so on. As mentioned above. SETA->Booster is a large gameplay change. Especially in combat. SETA when fighting = dead ship. Boost in fighting = You escape.

M

[shanrak]

I'm just saying, make it a booster instead, forget the time part, everything else always happens in real time.

Then rebalance missiles, bullet speed and so on. As mentioned above. SETA->Booster is a large gameplay change. Especially in combat. SETA when fighting = dead ship. Boost in fighting = You escape.

M

umm.. did you read my previous post? You can't boost while fighting, just not possible. In fact if you were shot at while in boost you'd be kicked out of it. If you want to escape, use the jumpdrive.

[maphys]

umm.. did you read my previous post? You can't boost while fighting, just not possible. In fact if you were shot at while in boost you'd be kicked out of it

Sorry, just spotted that on a reread. Do missiles count as being shot at? I.e one Flail ties down the whole sector (well, 50km of it) because otherwise the reacquire the target thing is less useful (everyone just flees the area, one ship dies and the rest are safe). In fact all swarm missiles would have to lock down every ship in range.

It'd also have to be if you COULD be shot at - otherwise if someone fires a shot at the point where you would be at boosting speed then it kicks you out of boost - instant miss. That may not be a fighter issue but if it is half your laser energy (charged PPC) then it is a problem. So autoaim must change. What about colliding? Does colliding at boost speed do more damage? As it stands it would, making a sneaky ram the best large ship tactic out there.

I am just trying to highlight the fact that the game mechanics are more complex than is obvious at first glance. They would have to be changed and by the time you have done this - almost a new game. And as has been said repeatedly - there is no cheap way to do this and the revenue from the MP version would not pay for its development. So it probably won't happen, no matter how much we want it to.

M

[shanrak]

umm.. did you read my previous post? You can't boost while fighting, just not possible. In fact if you were shot at while in boost you'd be kicked out of it

Sorry, just spotted that on a reread. Do missiles count as being shot at? I.e one Flail ties down the whole sector (well, 50km of it) because otherwise the reacquire the target thing is less useful (everyone just flees the area, one ship dies and the rest are safe). In fact all swarm missiles would have to lock down every ship in range.

It'd also have to be if you COULD be shot at - otherwise if someone fires a shot at the point where you would be at boosting speed then it kicks you out of boost - instant miss. That may not be a fighter issue but if it is half your laser energy (charged PPC) then it is a problem. So autoaim must change. What about colliding? Does colliding at boost speed do more damage? As it stands it would, making a sneaky ram the best large ship tactic out there.

I am just trying to highlight the fact that the game mechanics are more complex than is obvious at first glance. They would have to be changed and by the time you have done this - almost a new game. And as has been said repeatedly - there is no cheap way to do this and the revenue from the MP version would not pay for its development. So it probably won't happen, no matter how much we want it to.

M

Yes, I know, I don't want multiplayer x3 like I said, I just want a versus mode

As for the whole seta/boost thing I've (obviously) thought about it a lot. You'll have a 'aggression' timer, if someone does something aggressive at you while they have you under their target, your timer will be reset and start counting down again, lets say from 30 seconds. If the timer reaches 0, you can boost. Any missile currently locked on to you constantly resets your timer (maybe rework this to missiles within 15 km locked on to you (AND are faster than you) resetting your timer). If they shoot a shot while you are their target (assuming they are within a reasonable range, like 15km), your timer will be reset.

Yes, a shot aimed at you while you are boosting would miss, but it would cause your boost to stop, then they can engage you normally.

Add the additional stipulation of you can't boost if there's a hostile unit within ~10km of your ship and it'll work out just fine.

You can rework disrupter missiles to disable boost/jump drives for 1 minute, won't that be fun

As for the whole ramming thing, same way freelancer does it. If you aren't 'hostile' with each other, ramming each other simply moves the ships at no damage. If you are, then you and the target will take damage, but you won't be able to boost since you'll have a hostile target within 10 KM of you.

[maphys]

I was not trying to say that there was a way around everything - just highlighting that even 1 vs 1 requires a lot of changes to the game. Aggression timers? Damage free collisions? Boosters? Already a lot of changes. It is not a simple thing at all but you are kind of making it sound like it is.

And the swarm missile thing would still be an issue. I fire a flail at an M5 I expect to take out several M5s - not have the ones not targeted boost away.

M

[shanrak]

nah, for 1v1 you wouldn't need boost and all that. The whole boost idea is just me being tired at people brining up seta as the main reason why multiplayer wouldn't work. There's a lot more problems than just seta.

1v1 should be very close to vanilla, only change required is a new shipyard that sells all the ships linked to a equipment dock (somewhere far away we don't know where) that sells all the equipment.

Tell me that tossing 2 players into a sector with 500 mill each to come up with a fleet and dukeing it out wouldn't be fun

They can chose to go with 3-4 M2s, a dozen m7s, or a swarm of fighters, a mix of everything, etc etc.

Or they can just settle on doing 1v1 ship fights till money runs out.

[maphys]

Tell me that tossing 2 players into a sector with 500 mill each to come up with a fleet and dukeing it out wouldn't be fun

OK - I don't think I would enjoy it that much! The fight mechanics of X3 are not really why I play it. I'd rather play a game more optimised for an arcade style of fighting if that is the main point of it. I recognise that there are a lot of people out there that would disagree.

The main reason, AFAIK, has been and always will be economic. SETA is only really ever used in these threads, AIUI, as an example of how the gameplay is set up for single player. I don't think many people on here think it is the main reason there is no MMO!

My largest peeve with these threads is the way people assume that the good coders at Ego couldn't have come up with all these ideas themselves and then discarded them for very good reasons. They are smart people who know the game inside out and belong to a company that has produced (IMO) some of the best PC games out there for some time now. If there is no PvP or MP then there are good reasons for it and no matter how many threads appear on the forums these reasons will not change.


M

[mad_axeman]

Tell me that tossing 2 players into a sector with 500 mill each to come up with a fleet and dukeing it out wouldn't be fun

That would not be fun. Seriously. No. I'd hate it. In fact I do hate things like that. It's shallow and smacks of not being able to think of anything interesting to implement.

[(/\)arped]

Tell me that tossing 2 players into a sector with 500 mill each to come up with a fleet and dukeing it out wouldn't be fun

To be honest, all this boils down to is using the script editor to create a bunch of ships and then watching the autopillock 'duke it out'. With a calculator and a price list for each ship, you could easily just do this on your own, using the script editor. Hell, invite a friend round now and do it, it's that simple. Okay, it's not 1v1 in the sense that you don't have a screen each, and won't be directly piloting any ships, but let's face it, 500mill each, the vast majority of ships in the fray would be AI controlled anyway.

tl;dr: It would be watching the AI fight. Which while can be impressive, does not make good multiplayer.

[shanrak]

*shakes head*

all you crazy people (j/k )

vs mode wouldn't be all about duking it out when you can actively give commands to your ships, fighter attack this, etc etc. Maybe I'm thinking too much into the RTS aspect here, in my current game I'm having a lot of fun treating it like an RTS, using only commands to do battles (thanks to 2.0 now that my owned ships actually count for kills now).

The AI is not, and will never be on the same level as facing another player who's doing the manipulation. Maybe most people here just don't feel like they want that kind of challenge and enjoy bashing braindead AI ships all day long. I wish the AI was better, but since its not, I'd enjoy having a thinking human in control of my enemies.

And it won't be completely AI controled, there's nothing stopping players from jumping from ship to ship to perform detailed actions like strafing or missile barrage, or even just simple as keeping your M1/M7M away from the battle, which the AI is too stupid to do.

I know the devs are all busy with their own thing, but to assume they've thought of everything and there's nothing worth discussing is a rather arrogant view of things, heck look at all the great mods people have done that they've added to the game, I bet some of them they haven't thought of yet while others they just didn't have time for.

[mrbadger]

*shakes head*

all you crazy people (j/k )

vs mode wouldn't be all about duking it out when you can actively give commands to your ships, fighter attack this, etc etc. Maybe I'm thinking too much into the RTS aspect here, in my current game I'm having a lot of fun treating it like an RTS, using only commands to do battles (thanks to 2.0 now that my owned ships actually count for kills now).

The AI is not, and will never be on the same level as facing another player who's doing the manipulation. Maybe most people here just don't feel like they want that kind of challenge and enjoy bashing braindead AI ships all day long. I wish the AI was better, but since its not, I'd enjoy having a thinking human in control of my enemies.

And it won't be completely AI controled, there's nothing stopping players from jumping from ship to ship to perform detailed actions like strafing or missile barrage, or even just simple as keeping your M1/M7M away from the battle, which the AI is too stupid to do.

I know the devs are all busy with their own thing, but to assume they've thought of everything and there's nothing worth discussing is a rather arrogant view of things, heck look at all the great mods people have done that they've added to the game, I bet some of them they haven't thought of yet while others they just didn't have time for.

A mod cannot change the fundamental nature of the game, which is that it is a single player sandbox game with elements that could not be replicated in a multiplayer environment. Not to mention that putting in the networking stack required would mean effectivelly starting from scratch, and be largely pointless since enough people already like it as it is.

Take one major aspect of the game, station building. How could you do that and expect your stations to persist while you were offline if the X'verse existed in the same way it does now? Solving that one would cause two problems. One the game would change so much that original players might not like it (no mmorpeger is assured of success), and the other is there is already a mmorpeger space game out there, so their new game would be competing against one with a mature codebase.

Speaking an avid X series player, I don't want anyone else in my X'verse. Its mine to do with as I wish from the moment I start the game. Nor would I want it to be possible that some other player could steal/destroy my stuff in game.

Lets look at another game, already multiplayer, which was moved to a mmorpeger, Warcraft. That was a very succesful RTS game, on I still play (even warcraft 2, love that game). When they moved it to Mmorpeger territory they left behind much of the original game, keping only the lore, and characters. It changed fundamentally, leaving vestiges of warcraft 2 and 3 around, but it is otherwise a completelly different game. And that one *started* as a multi player game.

[shanrak]

sigh, how many times do I have to say it?

I DO NOT WANT A MULTIPLAYER PERSISTANT X3 UNIVERSE
No station building, no missions, no seta crazyness, none of that stuff. If you enjoy your own x-universe, kudos to you, you can still enjoy it with no outside influence.

Please read before replying. I'm just dreaming of 1v1 connectivity where we can control opposing fleets for fighting purposes. Some people think its stupid, we disagree, nothing wrong with that.

Just don't bring your holier than thou multiplayer wont work blah blah blah arguments, I already agree, ok? Enough about that.

[mrbadger]

sigh, how many times do I have to say it?

I DO NOT WANT A MULTIPLAYER PERSISTANT X3 UNIVERSE
No station building, no missions, none of that stuff.

Please read before replying. I'm just dreaming of 1v1 connectivity where we can control opposing fleets for fighting purposes. Some people think its stupid, we disagree, nothing wrong with that.

Which still requires the addition of netwok support to the engine, an extremely complex and costly exercise. What would be the point of 1v1 fighting in X ships? The whole point of fighting in the game is to acheive one of three things

1: profit
2: defence
3: reputation

Take away that and all you have left is a samey flying fight game, which doesn't seem worth the effort to me.

[shanrak]

Take away that and all you have left is a samey flying fight game, which doesn't seem worth the effort to me.

And that's where we disagree, that's fine. You think its not worth the effort, I think it'll be fun, not saying it'll be easy (I have never said this would be easy since I'm not a game developer and I didn't work on this game so I don't know how the data is being passed around, etc etc).

If you want to fight to advance in your own game for money/rep whatever, more power to you, but I think scrimmages are more fun (IMO).

Note I'm not screaming at developers to implement anything, just dreaming of the possibility. Apparently even talking about that brings down the lynch squad with their "NO!" bats.

I'd be glad to see if such implementation is possible or even work on it for fun in my spare time, but I think I'd have a better chance of winning the lottery than seeing the source code to this game

[mrbadger]

Oh I like fighting, but you perhaps underestimate the cost of such an addition. Given that most fans would be happy with the series continuing as it currently is, improving in its current form without a multi player aspect, I don't see how any such thing could happen.

[perkint]

Hi,

The problem with this is that (as has been metioned) most of the changes are behind the scenes and having nothing to do with the game issues that seem to form the majority of the discussions in these threads (such as SETA).

The developers are undoubtedly clever people. But, I doubt they have thought of all the suggestions that appear in these threads (a lot of the forum members are clever people as well!). They know the code very well, but that leads you to tend to think of methods that "fit" with the code. And, let's face it - you don't need to fix every problem. Who would claim X3 is without any issues? But, it don't make no difference! The developers have expressed an interest in multiplayer. If they could get funding from a publisher (who, let's face it, know a hell of a lot more about market demands and return for investment than probably everyone who posts on here) I'm sure they would have done it.

It's not actually multi player that is the issue. It has everything to do with the extensive changes that would be required to accept control from a remote point. Even if I wanted to be able to control it, entirely through the sector map, from my laptop whilst my desktop PC runs the main game (no issues with graphics, SETA or anything else) the coding changes that would be needed are long, require extensive testing and represent a big development requirement and therefore cost. The only reliable way to get this cost back is to head for MMO as you can recoup costs through the monthly sibscription charges.

And that doesn't seem to be of that much interest to too many people round here.

I would love there to be a multi player aspect to it. Not MMO - haven't got enough time to compete so not really interested. But, to be able to open my game to have another player (players?) join me on a mission and fly some of my ships (no problems with economy, SETA, station builds or anything else, since they are just visitors to my universe) would be great. But it still represents (just about) as much of a development problem as any other form of multi player.

Personally I suspect multiplayer will happen. Eventually. But, it is damned unlikely to happen in any form of X3. Maybe the next development. Maybe X-Online will happen. Maybe it'll be the development after next. Don't care

I like the game as is, will undoubtedly get Ego's next release. After that? If I could predict the future that well, I wouldn't need to buy lottery tickets...

Tim

[fOSSil]

Shanrak, it will (with p=0.99) stay a dream of yours (and a few others btw). Please realise, that its not going to happen even if X3 was open source.

The game mechanics as they are, are not suited for multiplayer very much. You would have to tweak them to such a degree, that all you may be left with is the graphics engine.

You would probably be better off starting a new project from scratch and designing it for multiplayer proper.

Again, please dream on if you wish, but did you check out the multiplayer space games that *are* already available?

Cheers,
fOSSil

[firefly28]

At one time I would have disagreed with the majority and said "X Multiplayer HEll yeah!" but then I just look at what MMOS have done to the market and I think if egosoft went with x online they would use the MMO model fo most profit and it would mess the game up bad

I do understand what the OP is hoping for and having thought like the OP at one point I no longer do and I think that if X went MP then instead of getting great patches with free content (None of this DLC CRAPPP!) we would have trivial bug fixes and nerf after nerf after nerf because people cant handle it when a portion of harrdcore players take them to the cleaners.(This would stop any additional content getting made, just look at other mp games, also for as much as I was moaning about the whole aldrin side of things being bugged well make know mistake I am still happy that extra content has been included and that egosoft are thinking about their longtem players who know all the tricks, it just all adds up to superior replay value which we wouldnt have if all they had time for was dealing with irate people cursing about people being overpowered, all time devoted to the trvial)

Then you would probably have micosoft approaching egosoft with money so they make it xbox live exclusive, ok thats great for them but its rubbish for gamers as it all becomes this corporate rubbish mentality of breaking a game into hundreds of crappy segments , i.e "The Franchise"

I have lurked these forums for a few years now and have watched egosoft improve upon there game and provide more after sales free content only than any other game I know and knowing the great way the egosoft system currently works well the fact is in this greedy market they are one of a kind

Then you had the xtended mod, total awesome piece of work, the only mod I know of thats like a whole new game and I just worry like hell that some new kid comes on the block at egosofts HQ , thinks he/she is being insightful and trys to modernise it all, making it in fact lose its uniqueness

I could go on about this so much but I wont

Ow and fossil yeah I agree with you, I dunno if I could be so bold to say maybe we are all a bit cynical but again like you say , just look at the disasterous genre that is MP space games, big ideas poorly immplemented and also in respect to standard mp games they never add content like what has been done with X . (It was the fact egosoft are constantly updating X that got me to keep revisiting it throughout the years and then I started loving it)

[Nadrek]

I will chime in here briefly.

First, if we all take the time to understand that different aspects of X3 are important or completely uninportant for different people, and that multiplayer has a different meaning for different people, and use more precise language, discussions might be more meaningful.

Major play styles for X3 that are relevant to at least one form of multiplayer play:
A) Directly controlling a ship (i.e. the playership), or not.
A1) Utilizing "player only" capabilities, or not (strafe drive, docking computer, etc.)
B) Updating the commands and settings of nonplayerships in realtime (like going to the resource list, selecting a ship, and setting its turret scripts, weapons load, ejecting some Lasertowers, and telling it to go dock at the nearby SPP), or not
C) Using SETA, or not (for any reason)
D) In Sector combat, or not
E) Out of Sector combat, or not
F) Station building, or not
G) Ability to save a game and then continue it later, or not (persistence)
G1) With the universe continuing to operate while the player isn't there, or not
H) The ability to own multiple ships, or not
I) In sector movement (collisions, etc.), or not
J) AI traders, or not
K) AI combat, or not
L) AI economy, or not


Major differences in what "multiplayer" might comprise:
1) The ability to add players into a game session after the session has started, or not
2) The ability to play on a LAN or other very fast, low-latency network, or not
3) The ability to play on the internet or other slower, higher-latency network, or not
4) How many humans playing per universe session
4a) 2
4b) small numbers (say, 2-32; skirmish numbers)
4c) large numbers (say, 33-thousands; MMORPG numbers)


We can clearly see that A,C,D,G,I,1,4c would be exceedingly difficult and expensive.

We can also clearly see that E,F,G,H,J,K,L,2,4a is technically currently feasable by the mod community if someone writes a script for "hot-seat" mode, or writes an interface like the Web interface where players are allowed to send commands to OOS ships one at a time, where those ships always operate OOS.