Player Hosting

[UthervL]

I know this is not an online game nor do I want it to be.

I'm not the kind of guy who likes to hang with the masses.

That being said, this game would truly shine if we could host our game and a few friends could join.

IMO this would make this game truly be alive.

You guys are really on to something here and it would be great fun to share it with friends.

[Matthias_N]

Nah, don't turn it into a Fallout 76 like failure.

[Greysa]

I actually agree. A player hosted server with a pop limit of like 10, would be amazing, and would really liven the game up.

[UltimateGrr]

My friend and I were actually lamenting about this exact thing earlier today. We'd love to have an option to run an MP session, even if it required us to both be online to run it.

[Liath]

The problem is, as has been hashed out a hundred times over, that it is not feasible to implement multiplayer due to the sheer amount of data that would have to be transferred.
The technology barely exists (maybe?) to do so, but it is prohibitively expensive.

[CaptObvious]

The problem is, as has been hashed out a hundred times over, that it is not feasible to implement multiplayer due to the sheer amount of data that would have to be transferred.
The technology barely exists (maybe?) to do so, but it is prohibitively expensive.

As a software developer, this is bull. The game would just have to be written in such a way that the randomness is deterministic and comes from a particular seed. Share the seed and the time index and you get the same "random" result. The same game could be simulated on multiple computers at the same time with the same outcome (minus any bit-flipping from solar radiation - yes, that's a thing unless you run ECC RAM), the only thing that would need to be transferred is each player's actions.

Deterministic randomness is how a LOT of games work. Take No Man's Sky for example - procedurally generated universe. Do you think they generated that entire universe and stuck it in the steam download so everyone had to download it? Of course not, it'd be terabytes big. They tuned their universe generating algorithm to how they wanted it, chose a nice seed for the random number generator and sent those to people instead. The universe is then calculated from those two things on your computer.

Of course, that's if you want the clients to be doing the simulation. If you want the server to be doing the simulation it's even easier - run the simulation on the server and send the clients what they need to know. They open the trade list on an Argon Equipment Dock? Send them the list of what's available. There's actually very little information in X4 in terms of bandwidth, ESPECIALLY if you do any sort of culling of the data (i.e. the server doesn't send the location of ships for the map view if the player doesn't have a ship/satellite/station within 40km).

The big issue is that the game would need to be designed to be multiplayer from the ground up and they haven't done that. Such a game, this game would truly shine if you could throw up a small 5 slot dedicated server and play with your friends.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and SETA would have to go away. You can't have clients running at different time rates. This isn't much of an issue for X4 though, I haven't built the SETA device yet and I don't miss it at all. Travel mode is a great replacement.

[nerdtron]

The problem is, as has been hashed out a hundred times over, that it is not feasible to implement multiplayer due to the sheer amount of data that would have to be transferred.
The technology barely exists (maybe?) to do so, but it is prohibitively expensive.

As a software developer, this is bull. The game would just have to be written in such a way that the randomness is deterministic and comes from a particular seed. Share the seed and the time index and you get the same "random" result. The same game could be simulated on multiple computers at the same time with the same outcome (minus any bit-flipping from solar radiation - yes, that's a thing unless you run ECC RAM), the only thing that would need to be transferred is each player's actions.

Deterministic randomness is how a LOT of games work. Take No Man's Sky for example - procedurally generated universe. Do you think they generated that entire universe and stuck it in the steam download so everyone had to download it? Of course not, it'd be terabytes big. They tuned their universe generating algorithm to how they wanted it, chose a nice seed for the random number generator and sent those to people instead. The universe is then calculated from those two things on your computer.

Of course, that's if you want the clients to be doing the simulation. If you want the server to be doing the simulation it's even easier - run the simulation on the server and send the clients what they need to know. They open the trade list on an Argon Equipment Dock? Send them the list of what's available. There's actually very little information in X4 in terms of bandwidth, ESPECIALLY if you do any sort of culling of the data (i.e. the server doesn't send the location of ships for the map view if the player doesn't have a ship/satellite/station within 40km).

The big issue is that the game would need to be designed to be multiplayer from the ground up and they haven't done that. Such a game, this game would truly shine if you could throw up a small 5 slot dedicated server and play with your friends.

I get what you're saying and generally I think you're correct. Two machines running the same deterministic simulation with the same starting seed and at the same time index should have exactly the same state. The issue is that this isn't a full description of what would be happening. You'd have a player on one machine in one part of the universe that does something which impacts the world and ripples through this deterministic system (butterfly effect). If people on different machines are doing things like this and injecting their own variations to the system, then all those have to be communicated and I think this is what the other poster may have been referring to?

[Axeface]

No.
There are much more important things that need to be done before anything like this should even hit the drawning board. And if it changed the games design, which is almost always the case, i'de be gone.
There is still scope for single player games. Everything doesnt need to be multiplayer.

[Imari]

Hopefully we get a coop feature in X5.
X4 after a few patches and dlc they'd prolly nailed down the genre, coop will be a good next step together with FPS and planetary landing component, if they are up for it.