Multiplayer in KSP 1.8

[popos1]

Hi,

I hope that squad will finally add multiplayer in the next update, like they very long time ago said.

Regards

Changelog:

- [21.04.19] changed version to 1.8
- [25.12.18] changed version to 1.7
- [16.10.18] changed version to 1.6
- [09.03.18] changed version to 1.5

Edited April 21, 2019 by popos1
new version

[qzgy]

This has been asked to death. From what I remember, the main problem is a working timewarp system. For example, I timewarp to go to Eve for instance. That takes a while, more than a day. But you are on Kerbin flying a jet plane or something. So what do you do? 

 

And besides, it's arguable that other areas of the game need to be addressed, such as the lack of a reason to go to other planets.

[razark]

No matter how it is implemented, about 80% of players will disagree with how it was done.

 

But @SQUAD should just answer the damn question already of whether or not it's still planned, post it somewhere visible, and then we can stop arguing over it already.

[Joseph Kerman]

How about for real-time planetary combat (in-SOI)? That would spruce things up while negating the timewarp problem.

[HafCoJoe]

No

[AlamoVampire]

15 hours ago, popos1 said:

Hi,

I hope that squad will finally add multiplayer in the next update, like they very long time ago said.

Regards

Nope. Not going to happen. Not any time soon, if ever really.

Why?

Its complicated. BUT, I will share again, my views as to why this is not going to happen, and it has some newly updated reasoning behind it.

1. Mod Compatibility. I run certain mods. You run other mods that I do not run. KSP has a history of obliterating ships in orbit that have missing or outdated parts as a result of missing or outdated mods. Will the fact my space station is constructed mainly of Planetary Base parts conflict with you? If yes, and you get into my session, BAM there goes my station. Hours of work gone. OR if not that, and it doesnt kill my station from me, what if you launch something and it then plows through me because YOUR game didnt load my station, but MINE did? Same result, but you sit there wondering if its a kraken attack.

2. Trolls. Lets say we are running totally stock, no mods. I put a station up. You put a station up. I decide to walk off for lunch but keep my system logged into KSP as Im only going to my fridge to grab a sandwich and a drink. In that time, some punk decides this is the perfect time to trash my station either by going full Space Cowboys <the scene where the over eager astronaut ignores Eastwoods character and connects to the missiles and it nearly kills him> OR go full on Gravity and send debris on a retrograde orbit on MY orbital plane and it obliterates me OR they just go Asteroid Redirect and drive my station into a decaying orbit I cant fix. OR any number of OTHER troll behaviors I am not mentioning because of brevity or I cant think of them. What then?

3. Part Counts. My station is 90 parts atm with more getting ready to come up. I can comfortably run around 200 parts in physics range at any given time. Lets face it, I think Im running on a potato. You however are on a Bugatti Veyron powerful machine and 5000 part ships are NOTHING to you. You get 60 FPS even with 5000 part ships. You come into physics range on me and suddenly I go from my 30FPS to 1 FRAME PER MILLION YEARS. No real decent way to handle that. Some have suggested making your parts physics less on my side and vice versa, well, if thats the case how do we dock to each other? Because the INSTANT my ship docks to that 5000 part station, its now part of MY ship and BAM no frame rates, just a picture.

4. Lets take a moment to explore mods becoming stock, or taking the idea from a mod and making a stock extrapolation. In stock, fairings are needed now with the "new" aerodynamics. SO, Squad made fairings. Neat idea, but, the execution of this idea was atrocious. I remember when they first came out. It took me 45 minutes of scaring my cat to DEATH before I learned: Click, drag, Click to place THAT level, Click again, drag some more, Click to place THAT level and so on. THEN, I spent another 45 to 90 minutes scaring that poor cat AGAIN as I had NO CLUE I needed the tiniest amount of space to grab the fairing in the first place. SO, here we are about 2.5 HOURS into the new fairings, and then I fly my mission only to discover a critical failure in the stock fairings. They confettied. UGLY as sin, but, my mission was still going, and then my mission itself failed because in my frustration with these abominations I forgot RCS, RCS fuel, Batteries and solar panels. SO, revert to VAB. To my horror <at the time, I was a Procedural Fairings Veteran>, I expected the stock fairings even with the confetti/potato chipping ugliness to behave for alterations like PF. They didnt. They still do not to my knowledge. I had to REBUILD the fairing to allow for the redesigned payload. Not ONCE was any of this explained in game about the stock fairings. We have a mod out there, Procedural Fairings that is super simple to use, even easier to understand because the instructions are laid out in an easy to understand format. Need to fix your payload, simply remove the shell, alter the payload and reattach to the node on the base of the fairing and the mod does the rest, pending proper symmetry of course. They had the PERFECT blueprint to follow and made a horrific mess. The mod for multiplayer Dark Multiplayer I think its called, from my understanding is a glitchy mess that does do multiplayer with some massaging. I have absolutely zero faith given the fiasco with the fairings that they will do any better with multi player. <personal opinion and outlook here>

5. Time warp. I have a TINY launch window for Duna, and you have a mission to Eve, that has a launch window just ahead of mine <not sure if a real possibility, but, Im running with it!>. I am in the VAB putting the finishing touches to my mission, and you hit your window. You launch and choose to time warp your way to Eve. Well, that just trashed my window by making it go away. Time warp is an absolute MUST if you wish to go beyond LKO and not do this in real time. I see no real way to get around this one.

Look, please, PLEASE do not get me wrong, I LOVE multiplayer, I am nearly a rank 80 in Battlefield 1, I am a level 70 Samurai in Final Fantasy XIV, Stormblood. When a game is designed to BE or HAVE multiplayer at the start, its a beautiful thing, but, to frankenstein it into a game that was designed so so long ago to be single player cannot work out well. It would be wonderful for KSP 2: KSP ONLINE <free name to Squad > where it can be designed from code character 1, code line 1. Not now. Not 5+  years after KSP first came to this world.

op 23:32:30

[razark]

10 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

When a game is designed to BE or HAVE multiplayer at the start, its a beautiful thing...

It would be wonderful for KSP 2: KSP ONLINE <free name to Squad > where it can be designed from code character 1, code line 1.

But, how does that address your points 1-5* listed right above it?  If those are a problem in multiplayer, they're a problem in multiplayer whether it's built in from the beginning or added later.

Aside from that, these points* have all been addressed previously.

 

 

 

*Except point 4.  That's just a rant about how you don't like the fairings, and has nothing to do with multiplayer.

[qzgy]

2 hours ago, Joseph Kerman said:

How about for real-time planetary combat (in-SOI)? That would spruce things up while negating the timewarp problem.

And for things not that? Like interplanetary travel for instance?

[Joseph Kerman]

1 hour ago, AlamoVampire said:

4. Lets take a moment to explore mods becoming stock, or taking the idea from a mod and making a stock extrapolation. In stock, fairings are needed now with the "new" aerodynamics. SO, Squad made fairings. Neat idea, but, the execution of this idea was atrocious. I remember when they first came out. It took me 45 minutes of scaring my cat to DEATH before I learned: Click, drag, Click to place THAT level, Click again, drag some more, Click to place THAT level and so on. THEN, I spent another 45 to 90 minutes scaring that poor cat AGAIN as I had NO CLUE I needed the tiniest amount of space to grab the fairing in the first place. SO, here we are about 2.5 HOURS into the new fairings, and then I fly my mission only to discover a critical failure in the stock fairings. They confettied. UGLY as sin, but, my mission was still going, and then my mission itself failed because in my frustration with these abominations I forgot RCS, RCS fuel, Batteries and solar panels. SO, revert to VAB. To my horror <at the time, I was a Procedural Fairings Veteran>, I expected the stock fairings even with the confetti/potato chipping ugliness to behave for alterations like PF. They didnt. They still do not to my knowledge. I had to REBUILD the fairing to allow for the redesigned payload. Not ONCE was any of this explained in game about the stock fairings. We have a mod out there, Procedural Fairings that is super simple to use, even easier to understand because the instructions are laid out in an easy to understand format. Need to fix your payload, simply remove the shell, alter the payload and reattach to the node on the base of the fairing and the mod does the rest, pending proper symmetry of course. They had the PERFECT blueprint to follow and made a horrific mess. The mod for multiplayer Dark Multiplayer I think its called, from my understanding is a glitchy mess that does do multiplayer with some massaging. I have absolutely zero faith given the fiasco with the fairings that they will do any better with multi player. <personal opinion and outlook here>

Huh? Because I understood how to use the stock fairings after like, 5 tries. 

[AlamoVampire]

1 hour ago, razark said:

But, how does that address your points 1-5* listed right above it?  If those are a problem in multiplayer, they're a problem in multiplayer whether it's built in from the beginning or added later.

Aside from that, these points* have all been addressed previously.

 

 

 

*Except point 4.  That's just a rant about how you don't like the fairings, and has nothing to do with multiplayer.

@razark With all respects, I see no way in KSP as it is now, a game that was by its designers own admission designed to be single player would be able to be retrofitted in a meaningful way to make multiplayer workable this far down the road from where this game came from. Have the points of trolls, mods, part counts been addressed? Yes. BUT, how do you fix those issues in a way that works, and works in a way that does NOT harm the game? More over, as the most common suggestion to say trolls as an example, is to use smaller or private servers. Ok, I will bite, even Battlefield 1 has rented servers that can be done. BUT, they have time scales for the lease, something like 30, 60, 90, 180 days for increasing amounts of money. This is fine on BF1 if the entire squad <read here as the unit of players who represent the same guild for want of a better description at 00:42 am lol> are willing to share the costs. Seeing as, in all bluntness, this isnt Squad's property but Take Two's property now, I seriously, seriously do not see this game following BF1's path of private servers. I see it, if it happens at all for THIS KSP that is, following more along the lines of Grand Theft Auto V's  GTA Online, where you get something like 27-32ish players on a sessions, which, being a GTAO player, knowing that player base, makes Trolls a more than certainty.

Lets look at time warp. Has THIS been addressed? Yes. But, not one, as far as I can tell, not one suggestion has been a viable one that does not inadvertently screw something up for one or more players. Some suggest it being a sync'd thing, well, what happens when if YOU time warp, but, i choose not to, and then who's session is the game/server is the dominant one when it comes to where each planet, each moon, each asteroid, each vessel in ALL players game are being drawn from? Mine? Yours? Some one elses? How does it cope with that many variables that doesnt make connections alone a night mare? Right now as I type this, I ran a ookla speed test, with the following results for my connection: 19ms ping, 235.20 MBPS UPLOAD, 23.48 MBPS DOWNLOAD, how do these numbers compare to you? To another player? 

Lets look at part count, I just did this: 

As this was in flight, it was showing my mission clock as YELLOW. Once those external boosters were dumped, I was still at 170 parts, STILL yellow. Sure my FPS were fine, but, double that part count? Triple it? What about 10 times that part count? When I finished that mission, the station it went to went from 90 to 107 parts, mission timer was green after departure and the cargo vessel in that picture was gone beyond physics range, and this is just on MY machine with 1 player, me. What now happens when I join you? Lets say your mission clock goes yellow at 300 parts, red at oh 700 as a random guess. Ok, so, you say YOUR parts are non physics calculated parts, ok, I can run with that, its a painting to me. What about when I dock to that nice station of yours? That thing suddenly is part of me and I am now apart of IT, and NOW, everything is physics calculated. I suddenly went from able to move easy to a fly stuck on fly paper. How do you handle this? I have not seen a workable suggestion to this.

Now, onto point 4. You are 50% correct in that I hate stock fairings. However you missed the point I was making. Possibly because I may not have elucidated it well enough. Let me do so now:

This game thanks to FAR had need the need of fairings, which Procedural Fairings and its creator were more than happy to provide us with. He/She gave a handy guide to how they work. The fairings in PF are simple to use, easy to replicate and simple to understand. They are the gold standard. I am not even getting into the inter stage apolo-esque fairings that serve as fuselage here, just basic: protect the payload from wind aspect only.

Squad decided much to the joy of lets say most players, decided it was time to update the aerodynamic model to something a little more.... realistic. This was/is basically FAR lite, the fun of aerodynamics that are realistic with out them being SO real that it drives players away. They then said: Well, with the new aerodynamics we need fairings. For what ever reason <I am not privy to why PF was not folded in, they never, as far as I know, explicitly said why it wasnt> they chose to ignore the gold standard blueprint on how to do the following:

1. Make them understandable.

2. Make them easy to use.

3. Make them easy to duplicate.

4. Make them function on mission in a realistic way.

   4A. They eventually, kinda, sorta did by adding in a toggle that MUST BE CLICKED EACH TIME you use the things, that make them do what Procedural Fairings do on deploy: Clam Shell.

If they <opinion on quality here> could not make a stock fairing that was at LEAST as easy and friendly to use and understand fairing when again, the gold standard was there as the prime example <and truth be told here, nothing in this world is wholly original any more, regardless of what it is, we see something that has been done, and go: I can do that, and emulate it and then add our touch, fairings here, should have been no different> to go by, they gave us something that was instead, beyond unintuitive, absurdly difficult to reproduce should a major edit to the payload be needed, and beyond unrealistic <even given the artistic license this game takes on realism> default <now at least, no matter how often you tell it to stop potato chipping> potato chip deployment. It beggars you to believe that, with only DMP as a multiplayer blueprint, that even by those who use it admissions is not the best method of achieving multiplayer in this game that, again, this far along in this games life be able to achieve a decent multiplayer. 

This game as we know, and as I have said is now owned by TT, and frankly, given what I see on GTAO that scares me for what KSP multiplayer could be.

@Joseph Kerman Question for you: Before using the stock, did you spend significant time using Procedural? I started using them for aesthetic reasons back around KSP 0.22 or so, and by time the stocks came out, the expectation, the understanding of what fairings are for KSP was set. When you spend years using what amounts to near perfection, the slap to the face of stock is jarring to say the least, and to be kind about it. The lack of explanations in the game on how the stock work are just one in a litany of reasons.

op 01:12:30

[razark]

31 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

Have the points of trolls, mods, part counts been addressed? Yes. BUT, how do you fix those issues in a way that works, and works in a way that does NOT harm the game?

The italicized part?  That's kind of what it means that these have been addressed.  You've been given resolutions to these parts.  That you refuse to open your eyes and read the book reflects that you are simply opposed to multiplayer, not interested in a solution.

 

But, hell, let's run down this path again.

A. First: before all else-
KSP will never be a massive online thing.  That's out of the question.  Don't ever again think of KSP multiplayer as "something like 27-32ish players".  I'd say the maximum would be 4 or 5 players.  With that established, try driving these facts into your mind.

I already own a computer.  I run KSP on it, my friends connect to it.  We play.  No money involved.  This is a private server.

If they troll, they get booted by the admin.  If the admin is a troll, no one plays with him.  Trolls dealt with.

Small groups of people can make timewarp work.  Yes, it's always going to be a case of paradox or wait, but such is the nature of the beast.  If you don't have a bunch of people, it's tolerable, unless people are just fecal elimination orifices.  My preferred method is everyone warps at the same time, limited by whoever sets the lowest warp.  Point is, it's doable.

Part count is always going to be a problem.  My computer bogs down above a certain level.  Therefore, no one should be allowed to use that many parts, ever.  (Or, maybe I just shouldn't play on a server that has ships with a bunch of parts?)

No, I didn't miss the point you were making about fairing.  You just did a very poor job at it.  Your equivalence between Procedural Fairings->Stock Fairings compared to DMP->Stock MP is a false one.  Further, you ranted for a paragraph about fairings, before making the false comparison about MP in the last two sentences.  (Although, I have to admit, you did better than your second post, where you, again, complain about the fairings before barely mentioning MP.  Except you whine about it for several paragraphs and only mention MP in one sentence, this time.)  For the record, I haven't even bothered to use Procedural Fairings for a while.  The stock ones work just fine for me, and I hated them when they first came out.

 

 

And none of this explains why making it MP from the start changes anything.  You assert that, but never provide any evidence.

[AlamoVampire]

@razark First of all, if you are talking a limit of 4-5 players max, you STILL have some problems. 

Part count is still a massive issue. If you set it as a server rule that no one can go above X parts on a single vessel, you run into a few problems. Even 5 ships at say a max of 30 parts is still 150 parts, and take my mission in the picture a few posts up. That thing once it cut the external boosters off was STILL 170 parts to lift a truss for a station, that truss was 17 parts. The station its on is now 107 parts. If you set a part limit cap for the player with the weakest machine, you limit the ability to do much of anything beyond LKO. I personally cannot seem to get beyond kerbin SOI with less than 100 parts w/out unlimited fuels. Is this a function of bad design, idk, but, i know, a decent mission with enough dV to go to, do stuff come back = part counts above a reasonably small number maximum for multiple users to not hit the playability on the weakest link.

The example I keep using with the so called rant is valid. Pure and simple. Why? Simple. They had the blueprint on how it can be done properly, they went 180 degrees away from that. To me, and this is where my example matters, as with what this is, its a matter of OPINION using facts as we see them, that in my opinion they did a horrificly BAD job making fairings, and considering the horrific job, again in MY opinion, I see no hope for them to pull this off in a good way.

Now, lets look at YOUR example, of how you and your friends do MP. If you are using a local area network, which from your description that is precisely what you are using, that works for you, and thats awesome. However, why should Squad put money into something, you are doing free of charge via LAN or what the mod DMP also does free of charge? BUT, lets say for giggles they choose to invest time in it. Lets say they make it work some how. WHO will be financially responsible for the upkeep of the new hardware making this possible? You? Me? Take Two? Squad? Who? See, I may not be an IT guy, but, I know enough to know, it takes hardware to make something work. For multiplayer to work, and lets just go big picture and forget individual sessions with X players in it. Lets assume that there are THOUSANDS of players who want to play KSP in a multiplayer environment. How many server blades will be needed to handle it? Will they be dedicated to ONLY that? Will they also be responsible for holding and handling transactions with the store? How will that affect those servers? Will they then charge us a 1 time fee? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? How much? Will I as a steam user be able to connect with my friend who bought KSP via the website? Will HE have to pay a fee to use multiplayer, but as a steam user I get it free? Other way around? what about GoG users? What about console users who may want to play with PC users? How will they make it cross platform compatible? That isnt easy far as I know. What about those who had this game gifted to them from any of the sources? What about me? I will NEVER use this multiplayer, will I be forced to pay for a service I will never use? What then? Im not being panicy or conspiratorial here, these are valid concerns that cannot be dismissed as easily as one would with any of my other points. Financial concerns such as these are a HUGE bear hiding in the shadows.  Now, lets say, they say, they wont charge a fee. How exactly will they pay the bills to keep this going? Someone, somewhere will need to foot the bill for the electricity to run the servers, the cooling of said servers and so on. 

Sure its fun to dream big, I do it all the time with my lego's, even right now, across the room from me in my chair, my lego saturn v is to the left of my tv screen and a lego UCS sandcrawler is to my tv's right, and I dream the adventures they inspire all the time, but, one must also see the troubles ahead, dont let the dream cloud the reality. op 02:51:30

Edit: brass tacks bottom line: I have said all that I have to say on this. I think for KSP 1, mp is a bad idea. You do not. Fair enough. But I now withdraw from this thread, as we will most likely not agree which is ok, I wish you the best. edit time 03:40:30

Edited August 27, 2017 by AlamoVampire

[razark]

On 8/27/2017 at 2:51 AM, AlamoVampire said:

First of all... you STILL have some problems.

Yes, MP will always have problems.  Never said it wouldn't.  Just the the problems can be tolerable.

 

On 8/27/2017 at 2:51 AM, AlamoVampire said:

However, why should Squad put money into something, you are doing free of charge via LAN or what the mod DMP also does free of charge?

Been done many times, over and over.  FSX has multiplayer for free (even though it's not with the original company), so did Doom in the nineties.  But those are just small projects, not highly known games.

 

On 8/27/2017 at 2:51 AM, AlamoVampire said:

WHO will be financially responsible for the upkeep of the new hardware making this possible?

What new hardware?  As I said, each person uses their own computer, one of them acts as the host with ultimate control.

 

On 8/27/2017 at 2:51 AM, AlamoVampire said:

lets just go big picture and forget individual sessions with X players in it. Lets assume that there are THOUSANDS of players who want to play KSP in a multiplayer environment.

Ok, sure. Let's change the parameters to something I already agreed won't work so you can win.  If you're not going to fairly discus this, then what's the point?

 

On 8/27/2017 at 2:51 AM, AlamoVampire said:

...these are valid concerns that cannot be dismissed as easily as one would with any of my other points.

Bullcrap, and you've been told why already.

 

On 8/27/2017 at 2:51 AM, AlamoVampire said:

...one must also see the troubles ahead, dont let the dream cloud the reality.

One must also not allow one's preconceptions and personal feeling to cloud the reality.

 

Brass tacks time:
Learn to make valid arguments, and to absorb new information into your worldview.  Don't keep squawking the same refuted ones like a parrot.

[Jas0n]

At this point, the issue of adding multiplayer to the stock game has been discussed so much that it almost can't be done anymore.

If Squad had added it relatively soon after saying that they are planning on adding it, it might have worked. but now after all the discussion about it and the different ways it can be implemented, it is almost impossible that Squad can add it in a way that satisfies 100% of players. 

In my opinion, the main issues with implementing multiplayer is time warp and part count.

Time warp is necessary in KSP if you want to go anywhere out of LKO in less than a week, and this creates the problem of one player potentially being years ahead of everyone else in the timeline. There also the problem of two players docking to the same docking port, one doing so earlier in real life, but later in game time due to more time warping. I know that there are many ideas people on the forums have had about the issue of time warp, but Squad can't choose one option and risk making a whole ton of players mad.

Part count is another issue because one player might have a computer that can run KSP with about 100 parts, while another can run KSP with about 1000 parts. If the first player tries to load a station, their game will crash. which is what happened to me the first time I tried DMP. 

The other issues people have mentioned such as trolls and mods can be circumvented if the multiplayer is done in a way where a few player can create a collab game, instead of large public servers. 

I don't know enough about servers and hosting to comment on it, so I'm not going to, but I know that is also an issue.

[ruairiau]

This has been discussed to death in other places, but here's my 2 cents. I'd go for the simplest approach. Focus multiplayer on groups that know each other, not randoms online. Then you don't need to worry about machines handling huge part counts, what mods are being used, dealing with trolling etc. Let the players figure that out between themselves.

As for time warp; everyone follows the host by confirming. You need to be at an 'on rails' location e.g. in orbit or landed somewhere. The host presses timewarp, everyone else confirms. Anyone can cancel time warp at any time. Maneuver nodes for any player would automatically stop any timewarp.

Each player should have their own launch area; this will allow for career mode to be at different stages for each player.

 

[p1t1o]

When was the last time Squad mentioned multiplayer, in any way?

Because if they only mentioned it briefly and a long time ago, havnt said anything about it since, and nothing has been implemented...its a bit silly to still be having conversations about "When will they put it in?"

[SupperRobin6394]

Heck yeah, would be great.

I understand the problems, but they can be tackled pretty easy if you make multiplayer a private-self-hosted-server thingy like DMP.

[razark]

But but but, guuuuUUUUUuuuuys!  The fairings!

[linuxgurugamer]

8 hours ago, SupperRobin6394 said:

Heck yeah, would be great.

I understand the problems, but they can be tackled pretty easy if you make multiplayer a private-self-hosted-server thingy like DMP.

If I had a nickle everytime some said this, I would be rich.

It is NOT pretty simple, if it was, then DMP would work well.  But there are soo many thing that can go wrong and be corrected for, it turns out to be oretty difficult.

[Greenfire32]

DMP is a great proof-of-concept. We've seen that KSP multiplayer CAN work and it can work reasonably good.

However,

IF multiplayer were to come to KSP, I would want it to be in an expansion or maybe even just a standalone game that is built specifically for multiplayer, because let's face it, KSP as it is now does not handle multiplayer very well at all. Even DMP has more moments where it doesn't work versus moments where it does. And considering Squad just restructured the entire game's code to better fit the language localization...I don't think they're wanting to rebuild the game...again...

Best hope for multiplayer is honestly either paid dlc with dedicated multiplayer development and support or, dare I say it, "Kerbal Space Program 2: The Kerbaling" directed by M. Knight Shamaliens.

--------
And to anyone that thinks the core problem of KSP multiplayer is "but timewarp tho," DMP solved that issue a loooooong time ago. Each player has their own "universe" and if you want to enter someone else's, you merely "sync" up to them. Then as long as neither of you time warp, you remain together. Friends and I have built entire space colonies together like this. The problem is the game not knowing where you are physically in relation to everything else, and thus you get the jumpy physics that can do some...real bad things....

Edited August 29, 2017 by Greenfire32

[UbuntuLinuxKing]

On 8/29/2017 at 2:08 AM, ruairiau said:

This has been discussed to death in other places, but here's my 2 cents. I'd go for the simplest approach. Focus multiplayer on groups that know each other, not randoms online. Then you don't need to worry about machines handling huge part counts, what mods are being used, dealing with trolling etc. Let the players figure that out between themselves.

As for time warp; everyone follows the host by confirming. You need to be at an 'on rails' location e.g. in orbit or landed somewhere. The host presses timewarp, everyone else confirms. Anyone can cancel time warp at any time. Maneuver nodes for any player would automatically stop any timewarp.

Each player should have their own launch area; this will allow for career mode to be at different stages for each player.

 

What if the host isn't online but they keep the server up? Could anyone request timewarp if this were the case?

[mattinoz]

On 8/29/2017 at 3:10 PM, Jas0n said:

Time warp is necessary in KSP if you want to go anywhere out of LKO in less than a week, and this creates the problem of one player potentially being years ahead of everyone else in the timeline. There also the problem of two players docking to the same docking port, one doing so earlier in real life, but later in game time due to more time warping. I know that there are many ideas people on the forums have had about the issue of time warp, but Squad can't choose one option and risk making a whole ton of players mad.

Why would people be mad?*

It's a game. If new rules make the game more fun,  challenging, interesting and social then why be mad. You still get more replay value in an engine that can handle multiplayer and could well then be moddable to suit the rules you want.  I mean the great joy of KSP is it's moddable so the stock game doesn't need to go over the top they can stop at a basic workable position and leave scope.

As for Paradox well surely if KSP wants** to be space agency game then paradox is just a fact of life. I mean there are people wondering around NASA thinking about all sorts of contradictory futures right now and that works.  Do you they hold off launching an ISS resupply mission because another mission is pre-scheduled for next year and something might go wrong with the docking port?

As for 1.4

*some people just like being mad!?

**I realise given the state of the game this goal has probably been redefined these days.

[Jas0n]

8 minutes ago, mattinoz said:

Why would people be mad?*

It's a game. If new rules make the game more fun,  challenging, interesting and social then why be mad. You still get more replay value in an engine that can handle multiplayer and could well then be moddable to suit the rules you want.  I mean the great joy of KSP is it's moddable so the stock game doesn't need to go over the top they can stop at a basic workable position and leave scope.

As for Paradox well surely if KSP wants** to be space agency game then paradox is just a fact of life. I mean there are people wondering around NASA thinking about all sorts of contradictory futures right now and that works.  Do you they hold off launching an ISS resupply mission because another mission is pre-scheduled for next year and something might go wrong with the docking port?

As for 1.4

*some people just like being mad!?

**I realise given the state of the game this goal has probably been redefined these days.

Just look in this subforum, there's a thread on the topic of multiplayer on pretty much every page, and in every single one of them time warp is an issue that people have mentioned. Personally if we can get multiplayer I would be happy, regardless of how the timewarp works, but there are people out there that will get mad, maybe because they just like being mad, maybe not.

[Azimech]

Simple: let the server decide if timewarp is possible and how.

There are scenario's/styles of gaming where you don't need or don't want timewarp.

My suggestion would be: make sure it works without timewarp first. Not everybody wants to go to space; some like to go to space but dislike the idea of interplanetary travel.

If you look at successful MP games, the majority is focused on fast-paced action. People usually don't have a lot of time.

[NSEP]

Multiplayer in KSP is like the development of Fusion Reactors. Its not the tomorrow of yesterday, it was the tommorow of last year.

If it never happended in the previous updates even though it was (and still is) under high demand, so you can assume its not going to happend soon.