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KSP 2 Multiplayer Discussion Thread


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8 hours ago, Rutabaga22 said:

Do you really think KSP1 was supposed to be an MMO?

The word MMO has a bad rep, I don't think of it like the template a fantasy RPG MMO uses.

I think it was supposed to allow a lot of players to participate in space races, fly and drive together, collaborate on building stations and also buying and selling designs and crafts through custom contracts.

I believe we were not supposed to play alone in an empty solar system and only / always switch between kerbals. I believe kerbals were supposed to be multiplayer avatars. We were supposed to discover flags planted by other players and read plaques only when we got close to them.

But the dream was too grand and the team did what they could to make a great science-based rocket / orbital physics lego game.

I don't know, ask the original and the current devs. KSP is a totally different game in my imagination and I don't understand sometimes how other people don't see it. It's the space metaverse for me.

Edited by Vl3d
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11 hours ago, t_v said:

The second thing is that while temporal separation is similar to spatial separation, why have two forms of separation instead of one? Going back to the minmus base example, if the players were only separated by space, they would see each other doing their activities even if they couldn’t reach each other, whereas if they were also separated by time, one player might not even see that the other is active in the area. Given that several systems only have multiplayer as visual interaction, and that even the subspace bubble solution goes to some lengths to give the appearance of other players doing things, even if it is just a recording, you probably also know that seeing other players doing their things is an important part of the experience. So, why would you choose to watch a recording that you can’t interact with, when you could watch real-time actions that you can’t interact with? Also remember that once you close the spatial gap, you then have to take the extra step of closing the time gap, which I would prefer not doing if it means all my craft in transit overshoot their destinations. I personally would be stuck always looking at recordings of players, even when we are driving around on the same square kilometer. 

These are a really good set of questions, and the reasons I'm so conflicted between the two approaches. I think they're worth breaking down consecutively.

1) Can you see where (and when) a player is active? The answer under both paradigms is yes, mostly. If I'm in the subspace paradigm I can zoom out in map mode and potentially see where a player's active flight is, but only if they're in a stable orbit. All transits will be either visible nonsense, traveling to planets that aren't where I think they are, or more probably just not visible. If I'm in the leapfrog paradigm Im going to see vessels as they are in my own time. So if someone's vessel is en-route to Jool I'll see it as it was when I am, not as it is when another player who's a few hundred days ahead of me sees it. However, we'll both see the same orbital path and have a coherent and consistent idea how we would intercept it if we wished. 

2) Why would you choose to watch a recording that you can’t interact with, when you could watch real-time actions that you can’t interact with? The simplest answer is most probably you don't actually want to interact simultaneously except under very specific, probably rare circumstances like rover racing. Most of the time--intercepting a station or vessel or landing basically anywhere--you don't want to try to be hitting a target whose position might arbitrarily change during the encounter. That is unless you're racing or fighting you almost certainly would prefer other players were not changing vessels' courses in real time. If you're trying to build together or trade anything then there should be some kind of way for players to communicate permissions, agree on quantities, etc, but that's a real-time interface that's separate from the in-engine, map mode, trajectory-tracking view. You almost certainly want to establish those parameters up front with anyone you might interact with. 

Now, this is just a hunch, but my guess is in the sense of local, temporally consistent reality the timing between interactions between vessels wouldn't most often be off by more than a hundred days or so. The reason for this is transfer windows. With groups of 3 or even 12 players you're going to get these waves of launches right around windows that all arrive with more-or-less similar trajectories at Duna, Eve, Jool , etc. all around the same time. You might be off by 20 or even 50 days but most of these things are arriving pretty close. If you were to skip a window to any given planet no sweat, you're just coming down the pike several hundred days later, which is fine, because you're still ahead of the last-edit date of everything that arrived earlier. Later in the game with things like Duna-to-Jool windows and crazy torch engines things might get a bit weirder,  but even to get to that point one thing is certain--a great deal of time has passed. You're watching a recording of where things were the last time other players left them, but you can still interact with them because you're coming in after they did.  

3) You then have to take the extra step of closing the time gap, which I would prefer not doing if it means all my craft in transit overshoot their destinations. You don't though, again, because by the nature of traversing time and space you're already going to be ahead of the things you're encountering most of the time. They're no longer greyed out because by the act of transit you've leapfrogged them. The only trick would be if you want to dogfight or race rovers around Laythe together and some players are hundreds of days behind others. In that case you have two choices: Prep your vessels and colonies for a long warp to catch up, or more probably--just start a new sandbox group session outside of your coop-build where you can do anything without screwing things up, because as far as I can imagine none of things that you would do in-synch  has anything to do with progression. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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18 hours ago, Vl3d said:

I think

 

18 hours ago, Vl3d said:

I believe

 

18 hours ago, Vl3d said:

in my imagination

There it is.   This is what we've been asking of you.   If a statement is your opinion, you must make that clear.   To do otherwise leads to confusion, disagreements, and damages your credibility to where everybody just ignores you.  

 

18 hours ago, Vl3d said:

I don't know, ask the original and the current devs.

We have.   The two brothers who came up with the game, HarvesteR and Moach used to be very active here.   The devs come around from time to time, and I have chatted with them on a number of topics.    The game was never supposed to be any of the things you are saying.   It was only supposed to be what it is, maybe a bit less.  

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On 10/14/2022 at 1:01 PM, Pthigrivi said:

What are those activities? Besides rover racing Im hard pressed to come up with many? 

I think the important things isn't the variety of activities, but more that many people want to play while being frequently synchronized (at least relatively synchronized). Still, I think there's a good amount of variety:

On 10/13/2022 at 8:06 PM, darthgently said:

I simply won't focus as much on big personal projects in MP games, but instead probably do more cooperative base building, rover racing, various challenges that involve everyone mostly in the same scene kind of thing.  I imagine a lot of dares and challenges, "let's race around Mun as close to the surface as possible, the first to land on the arch wins". 

On 10/14/2022 at 4:29 AM, Rudolf Meier said:

Use Multiplayer only for short periods of time during flights. One player is the "Master" and he controls the game, while others are just joining the game during flights and controlling Kerbals assigned to them. This would allow you to do EVAs in Multiplayer mode

On 10/14/2022 at 4:29 AM, Rudolf Meier said:

This idea would also work inside the VAB for example. But in this case everyone will be in the VAB at the same time

On 7/7/2022 at 11:55 PM, SkyFall2489 said:

3. working together on ship construction. As with any teamwork, divide and conquer to avoid chaos. But how do you divide? might not actually be a good idea, but some people want it. Maybe just have multiple peple work on sub-modules, and have one person put it all together? you can do that with craft file sharing in KSP1. No fancy multiplayer stuff needed.

4. teamwork in space, simulating the crew of a deep space mission. Either you're together, or you're apart. If you're together, no timewarp is needed, if you are apart, nearly any time warp system works.

On 5/26/2022 at 9:10 PM, Redneck said:

I want to share the cockpit with someone.

On 5/5/2022 at 5:57 AM, Truebadour said:

Other players in MFS are an afterimage, nothing else. While it's fun to follow a propeller plane going 120 knots, I cannot imagine doing the same in KSP with crafts moving up to thousands of m/s in relative velocity.

And take note, this isn't including posts of people wanting a mostly synchronous style (which doubles it) and doesn't include the first forty pages. People want to be synchronized with other people. 

20 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

most probably you don't actually want to interact simultaneously except under very specific, probably rare circumstances like rover racing

Specific, debatable but sure. However, I definitely don't think these situations are rare. Also, I want to point out that you didn't really answer the question that you set forth: The base assumption is that you are not interacting with these craft, and the question is, why look at a recording when you can see the real-time actions? You actually answered this in your first answer, but I'd like to correct a few things. Yes, you'd see a craft with a trajectory going nowhere, but you aren't going to be able to intercept it outside of the transfer window without a very expensive burn, so just like the planets line up while you are intercepting in the leapfrog model, the planets line up while you are intercepting in the subspace model. 

20 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Now, this is just a hunch, but my guess is in the sense of local, temporally consistent reality the timing between interactions between vessels wouldn't most often be off by more than a hundred days or so. The reason for this is transfer windows. With groups of 3 or even 12 players you're going to get these waves of launches right around windows that all arrive with more-or-less similar trajectories at Duna, Eve, Jool , etc. all around the same time. You might be off by 20 or even 50 days but most of these things are arriving pretty close. If you were to skip a window to any given planet no sweat, you're just coming down the pike several hundred days later, which is fine, because you're still ahead of the last-edit date of everything that arrived earlier. Later in the game with things like Duna-to-Jool windows and crazy torch engines things might get a bit weirder,  but even to get to that point one thing is certain--a great deal of time has passed. You're watching a recording of where things were the last time other players left them, but you can still interact with them because you're coming in after they did.  

While players that play more slowly and skip transfer windows will be fine (because the other players probably play enough to catch up), the discrepancies become much larger and more negative when a player plays less. That player might arrive at Duna at the same transfer window as the other players (or one later, but that shouldn't hurt them), but everyone else is already colonizing Jool. Unlike the player you talked about, this one is not only coming late to the party but is also behind, which means they can't interact. At this stage it shouldn't matter too much since time warping a few thousand days won't interrupt anything important. But one that player is colonizing Jool (on-pace with the other players according to the in-game clock, or maybe a few years behind if they warped once they got to Duna), they can't catch up without messing up some new mission, and the other players are simultaneously moving way into the future, doing interstellar missions lasting decades and building up their infrastructure over centuries. If someone was at that point but was a few centuries late in-game, they could still interact with the other players since they are after the last interaction (they would lock down everyone else's bases through that though), but someone who arrives late in real-time won't be able to interact, and in the end-game, catching up by decades or centuries is infeasible. 

So that was the first thing, that players who just play less are really negatively impacted even if everyone stayed on pace, and then the second thing is that I don't think people will stay on pace. If you have a player who jumps on the first transfer window available and a player who skips a few, neither one of them are going to change pace. It is the responsibility of the faster player to warp to synchronize with the slower player, and call me a cynic but I don't see that happening very much. So, one transfer window at a time, the two will diverge and end up very far apart. 

20 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

You don't though, again, because by the nature of traversing time and space you're already going to be ahead of the things you're encountering most of the time. They're no longer greyed out because by the act of transit you've leapfrogged them.

As this relies on the previous assumption, you can see the problem I have with it, which is that meeting your friend at Minmus for a fun torch ship rover race, whatever you want, will take you two weeks and then another two hundred years if you actually want to synchronize. 

20 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Prep your vessels and colonies for a long warp to catch up, or more probably--just start a new sandbox group session outside of your coop-build where you can do anything without screwing things up, because as far as I can imagine none of things that you would do in-synch  has anything to do with progression. 

Prepping for a long warp is one of the activities I could see being fun for some people but not for me. This makes synchronizing time-consuming and difficult to do. You can always start a new sandbox save - but then does the leapfrog model really allow for synchronous play? If the solution is so tedious that you have to go to a separate game to get around the problem, then is it really a solution? And just because something has nothing to do with "progression" doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of it, it just means it is intrinsic motivation. If I only cared about progression in my Minecraft server and did the unrelated stuff in a separate server, then the progression server would be a pretty terrible experience, with no constructions except for ugly farms to get resources and ugly storage areas to store those resources since using them isn't really progression. I want to be able to do a base tour in KSP, and build a base with friends in KSP (not adding modules tens of years apart, actively planning and placing the modules at the same time), and use torch ship technology, actually earned, to do races, instead of doing the same thing in creative more. 

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8 hours ago, t_v said:

While players that play more slowly and skip transfer windows will be fine (because the other players probably play enough to catch up), the discrepancies become much larger and more negative when a player plays less. That player might arrive at Duna at the same transfer window as the other players (or one later, but that shouldn't hurt them), but everyone else is already colonizing Jool. Unlike the player you talked about, this one is not only coming late to the party but is also behind, which means they can't interact. At this stage it shouldn't matter too much since time warping a few thousand days won't interrupt anything important. But one that player is colonizing Jool (on-pace with the other players according to the in-game clock, or maybe a few years behind if they warped once they got to Duna), they can't catch up without messing up some new mission, and the other players are simultaneously moving way into the future, doing interstellar missions lasting decades and building up their infrastructure over centuries. If someone was at that point but was a few centuries late in-game, they could still interact with the other players since they are after the last interaction (they would lock down everyone else's bases through that though), but someone who arrives late in real-time won't be able to interact, and in the end-game, catching up by decades or centuries is infeasible. 

So that was the first thing, that players who just play less are really negatively impacted even if everyone stayed on pace, and then the second thing is that I don't think people will stay on pace. If you have a player who jumps on the first transfer window available and a player who skips a few, neither one of them are going to change pace. It is the responsibility of the faster player to warp to synchronize with the slower player, and call me a cynic but I don't see that happening very much. So, one transfer window at a time, the two will diverge and end up very far apart. 

That is a problem that is common for every group of people playing multiplayer in most multiplayer games (except for match based games like Overwatch or MOBAs). 

In every group playing an MMO together there's that friend, the one that's already level 50 by the time you're 15 and then complains that you and the others can't do the dungeons you're doing and wants to skip all the dialogues and cut-scenes because he has already seen them dozens of times. In games with a cooperative progression system the missing player may loose the experience of progression, but then catch up rapidly when they join after loosing a session or two.

Some games don't even make sense if all the players aren't present for a session, like Stellaris and other similar strategy games.

 

KSP has a huge advantage in this: the game doesn't railroad old players towards an almost mythical "Endgame

Yep, we all have that itch to try the new colonization stuff and  interstellar content, but it's not as important of a progression as any other game, as the veteran player in your group you can focus on building infrastructure, mining, colonies, the communication network and so on while the other players learn the ropes. And even in the pure exploration phase you can challenge yourself to something a little more difficult to slow your pace, a 100% reusable space program? A Spaceplane only for crewed mission challenge? A no-debris left in orbit clause?

While your friends struggle with their first Mun landing you could do the same because you're struggling to make a Lunex lander replica work.

Even without knowing what the new gameplay will entail I can think of at least two dozen mission to do in the Kerbin system or around Eve or Duna that will keep me interested and occupied while the others catch up.

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5 hours ago, Master39 said:

That is a problem that is common for every group of people playing multiplayer in most multiplayer games (except for match based games like Overwatch or MOBAs). 

In every group playing an MMO together there's that friend, the one that's already level 50 by the time you're 15 and then complains that you and the others can't do the dungeons you're doing and wants to skip all the dialogues and cut-scenes because he has already seen them dozens of times. In games with a cooperative progression system the missing player may loose the experience of progression, but then catch up rapidly when they join after loosing a session or two.

The issue I have is that KSP isn’t like those other games, because players can be separated by time as well as progression. If someone has almost finished their terraria playthrough and I’m not even at hard mode yet, at least I can benefit from the infrastructure and resources that the other player has set up to catch up. In KSP, that infrastructure and those resources don’t exist yet, and if they do, they can’t be interacted with. Even in the MMO example, an advanced player can carry the newbie through challenging dungeons, so there is still a little overlap where the players can play together. 

5 hours ago, Master39 said:

And even in the pure exploration phase you can challenge yourself to something a little more difficult to slow your pace, a 100% reusable space program?

I think you mean speed up. The problem is that not only will some players fall behind progression-wise, but they’ll fall behind in time, and having your in-game time increase more makes it harder for others to catch up. If you land on Duna on the first available transfer window, then other players catch up to that by the first time they get to Duna. If you spend a few years exploring the Kerbin system plus Gilly and Eve, then the other players won’t be able to interact with your Duna outpost until several years later, which will take them a longer real-life time. The problem is that infrequent players have to play very slowly and frequent players have to play very fast to even get a chance at interaction and similar in game time. 

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What I know is that infrequent participants in any reoccurring group activity in general are typically, and quite naturally and logically,  proportionally less able to determine group direction and nearly always playing catch-up. I see no reason why KSP2 should uniquely address a situation programmatically that already has social norms that address it just fine.   

For example, in meetup type groups, if there is a sudden high turnover of participants, with a lot of new arriving and a lot of veterans leaving, then typically a new, fresh game will be declared, while a lone new player joining a group of veterans is just going to have to deal with being behind and catching up and it isn't like anyone is being coerced into any of these scenarios.  I just don't see it as a programming level "balancing" problem; it is purely social and pretty much solved

Edited by darthgently
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1 hour ago, darthgently said:

proportionally less able to determine group direction and nearly always playing catch-up. I see no reason why KSP2 should uniquely address a situation programmatically that already has social norms that address it just fine.   

For example, in meetup type groups, if there is a sudden high turnover of participants, with a lot of new arriving and a lot of veterans leaving, then typically a new, fresh game will be declared, while a lone new player joining a group of veterans is just going to have to deal with being behind and catching up and it isn't like anyone is being coerced into any of these scenarios

This is exactly what I meant, that the infrequent players have to catch up, and KSP makes this much, much harder to do than other games. Imagine if that lone new player had to play single player to try to catch up with the others, and since they play less frequently, they will pretty much never join the main group. It is unreasonable to expect the veteran players to play less or differently to accommodate for the people lagging behind, but the way that the leapfrog model is structured, there is really no way for veterans to even try to help infrequent players, and no way for infrequent players to actually play multiplayer while they catch up. you could compare it to an MMO where someone joining their friends has to spend dozens of hours doing solo quests while the others go even further ahead, but in KSP there isn't even an option for those players to interact at all, because they are separated by a gulf of time. So, if you are playing multiplayer KSP, you are signing onto a single player experience until you grind enough to catch up. 

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13 minutes ago, t_v said:

This is exactly what I meant, that the infrequent players have to catch up, and KSP makes this much, much harder to do than other games. Imagine if that lone new player had to play single player to try to catch up with the others, and since they play less frequently, they will pretty much never join the main group. It is unreasonable to expect the veteran players to play less or differently to accommodate for the people lagging behind, but the way that the leapfrog model is structured, there is really no way for veterans to even try to help infrequent players, and no way for infrequent players to actually play multiplayer while they catch up. you could compare it to an MMO where someone joining their friends has to spend dozens of hours doing solo quests while the others go even further ahead, but in KSP there isn't even an option for those players to interact at all, because they are separated by a gulf of time. So, if you are playing multiplayer KSP, you are signing onto a single player experience until you grind enough to catch up. 

Do we know enough about KSP2 MP to assume the above?  I imagine that simply editing a file could put them in the same time frame (sans tech advancement etc).  If players can transfer control of bases, craft, and kerbs to a new "must include" player, problem solved

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20 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Do we know enough about KSP2 MP to assume the above?  I imagine that simply editing a file could put them in the same time frame (sans tech advancement etc).  If players can transfer control of bases, craft, and kerbs to a new "must include" player, problem solved

So, that’s a situation that’s already been solved. The problem that I think is not solved is when the player that is catching up is already embroiled in the middle of a complex infrastructure network. In the situation where the player has nothing, they can just warp forwards and then other players can help. But if the infrequent player is on year 600 with their first interstellar mission to DebDeb and the other players are on year 1500 with full colonies on every body, warping by that many years will mess up a lot of stuff. And in that time, there’s nothing the regulars can do to change the past. So, my question remains: why have all of these grayed out things that you can’t interact with while catching up, when you can have interactible craft and bases of other players while you are catching up?

Edited by t_v
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27 minutes ago, t_v said:

So, that’s a situation that’s already been solved. The problem that I think is not solved is when the player that is catching up is already embroiled in the middle of a complex infrastructure network. In the situation where the player has nothing, they can just warp forwards and then other players can help. But if the infrequent player is on year 600 with their first interstellar mission to DebDeb and the other players are on year 1500 with full colonies on every body, warping by that many years will mess up a lot of stuff. And in that time, there’s nothing the regulars can do to change the past. So, my question remains: why have all of these grayed out things that you can’t interact with while catching up, when you can have interactible craft and bases of other players while you are catching up?

I think the grayed out is so you know why the game won't let you build a base there in the other players past?  Not a big deal in my view

I'm not sure I understand? How could you reasonably interact with the solidified past of other players? I'm missing something

 

Edited by darthgently
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4 hours ago, t_v said:

The issue I have is that KSP isn’t like those other games, because players can be separated by time as well as progression. If someone has almost finished their terraria playthrough and I’m not even at hard mode yet, at least I can benefit from the infrastructure and resources that the other player has set up to catch up. In KSP, that infrastructure and those resources don’t exist yet, and if they do, they can’t be interacted with. Even in the MMO example, an advanced player can carry the newbie through challenging dungeons, so there is still a little overlap where the players can play together. 

That if you let the players drift apart session after session.  But this is the same for every system, synchronous or not, people have to play together to play together. 

If I time warp ahead a year or two to do a Duna mission I can reasonably expect the others to warp a few months to catch up. 

KSP has that small quirk that without forced pauses you do your first 10-20 launches going from the first suborbital hopps to the first orbital rendezvous only to realise that due to the minimum time warp required your now orbital-capable Space company is just a month and a week old.  If the player timewarps a few months between launches to catch up the others is not going to make the game any worse. 

 

1 hour ago, t_v said:

But if the infrequent player is on year 600 with their first interstellar mission to DebDeb and the other players are on year 1500 with full colonies on every body, warping by that many years will mess up a lot of stuff.

They already said that the colony system and whatever LS they went for won't punish you because you timewarped to do something else.

But there's another thing, players being independent competing entities with different goals and stuff doesn't mean that the game won't consider things like colonies and interstellar travel coop-only endeavours.

Plenty of competing agencies, companies and nations with very conflicting interests cooperate to make projects the ISS or the Lunar Gateway possible.

Space exploration is also that, cooperation between competing entities being a must if you want to go anywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if colonies and other "big projects" like interstellar mother ships are automatically shared among all players in the server.

Asynchronous gameplay doesn't necessarily means two players exploring different stars while the third is doing their first suborbital launch back at year 0, it mostly means player being more or less in the same year most of the time while being able to independently work on the different resource supply lines for their newly built orbital shipyard, without being forced to play in turns to deal with a shared timewarp level.

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1 hour ago, darthgently said:

I'm not sure I understand? How could you reasonably interact with the solidified past of other players? I'm missing something

Basically, the system I've proposed lets you interact with other players as they are in the present, so instead of seeing a grayed-out base that doesn't exist yet, you just see the base and you can dock to it. It is as if you warped to catch up, but without having to warp to catch up. 

27 minutes ago, Master39 said:

That if you let the players drift apart session after session.  But this is the same for every system, synchronous or not, people have to play together to play together. 

If I time warp ahead a year or two to do a Duna mission I can reasonably expect the others to warp a few months to catch up. 

Can you really expect that? I don't think people are going to be willing to let four active missions overshoot their targets just to catch up. Drifting apart is the default state; making things stay together requires additional effort that isn't as present in other games, and as I said above, the consequences here are that you are essentially booted out of multiplayer, not just that you are behind. 

30 minutes ago, Master39 said:

I wouldn't be surprised if colonies and other "big projects" like interstellar mother ships are automatically shared among all players in the server.

Asynchronous gameplay doesn't necessarily means two players exploring different stars while the third is doing their first suborbital launch back at year 0, it mostly means player being more or less in the same year most of the time while being able to independently work on the different resource supply lines for their newly built orbital shipyard, without being forced to play in turns to deal with a shared timewarp level.

I know I'm going to work on big projects with other players (that's probably all I will be doing honestly), and I'm confident that most people will make efforts to do that. We can agree to disagree that most players will be close together in the timeline, but the alternative to leapfrogging isn't necessarily turn-based gameplay or locked down time warp. In other words, Asynchronous and independent time warp aren't synonyms. It just returns to the question of the latest discussion: What is so compelling about that system that you would rather not interact with all of these future events when you could? It's not the independent time warp because there are other solutions that have that, so what is it?

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42 minutes ago, t_v said:

Basically, the system I've proposed lets you interact with other players as they are in the present, so instead of seeing a grayed-out base that doesn't exist yet, you just see the base and you can dock to it. It is as if you warped to catch up, but without having to warp to catch up.

As long as paradoxes are avoided, I suppose. Like you shouldn't be able to drain all the isru produced fuel from the base when in his past he did that 10m after you arrived.  But coding for those things and the overhead to mitigate them could be way too much.  Maybe if a big simple rule were used, like future player hasn't interacted with the Minmus isru base since he left for DebDeb decades ago so there is no reason it wouldn't have plenty of fuel and it is known that none was drawn from it in the interim. 

I don't know, just an example that comes to mind.  But maybe a better example of a base that could be transferred to the new player

Or maybe you mean the player simply starts at their present with no need to warp and catch up?  That is dirt simple I'd imagine

 

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13 hours ago, t_v said:

Can you really expect that? I don't think people are going to be willing to let four active missions overshoot their targets just to catch up.

I don't usually timewarp away most travel times I like to do things while the transfers are ongoing, and I usually have multiple missions going around.

In this context if a friend is a year ahead of me and I have a mission that's 9 months from its target I would just timewarp those 9 months, do the thing the mission is supposed to do and then timewarp the remainging 3 months before starting something new.

I don't just let the mission overshoot, I timewarp to the next alarm, do the action, and then timewarp again till there's no more alarms between me and my friend and I can sync up. There is where I would left the game at the end of the session or the point from which I would start my next mission.

 

13 hours ago, t_v said:

Drifting apart is the default state;

It wholly depends on how you play, it's not an absolute.

And also depends on what kind of asynchronous system the game uses.

 

13 hours ago, t_v said:

the alternative to leapfrogging isn't necessarily turn-based gameplay or locked down time warp. In other words, Asynchronous and independent time warp aren't synonyms.

There are really only two "systems" in discussion here, sync or async.

Whether a synchronous system is controller by the host, in turns or by voting doesn't matter.

And the same goes for asynchronous, to allow for everyone to play at their speed and still interact something must be out of sync, it can be the players, the crafts, the time, the space, the planet, physics bubbles or whatever.

I make examples using a simple "you only warp forward to catch up and crafts operate on a 'last seen' basis'" not only because I prefer it but because it's simpler than most.

 

13 hours ago, t_v said:

I know I'm going to work on big projects with other players (that's probably all I will be doing honestly), and I'm confident that most people will make efforts to do that. We can agree to disagree that most players will be close together in the timeline

I don't understand this, if we work on big projects together, and you think that this is how most players are going to play, how is it possible that I am at year 600 starting my first trip to Debdeb and you are at year 1500 having fully colonized another system?

Interstellar travel is the biggest of possible big projects, almost a soft restart of the game due to the transfer times for resources. It's not something I picture players playing together in the same server doing independently.

 

Also let's not forget that a lot of this is going to be based on how every other gameplay system works, just to say a random thing that probably isn't going to be in the game, if Kerbals die of old age people will be a bit more wary of "just timewarping 1500 years in the future".

That's extreme but every colony and gameplay mechanic is going to influence how people are going to use the timewarp and thus the requirements for whatever system they use for multiplayer.

A random example: construction times with production upgrades that allow to greatly reduce them over time would make the player begin the game by timewarping for months between launches and then gradually transition toward them being less relevant and waiting for launch windows and transfer time becoming the main timewarp consuming factor. That would make less experienced player taking more launches to accomplish the same goal drift less from the veterans that will start doing interplanetary missions earlier.

Also the veteran will probably have more points/resources/money to invest in reducing the waiting times, reducing his need to warp ahead to launch.

(this is not a proposal, just an example).

Edited by Master39
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There's too much to quote, but the idea is simple. Stop obsessing about time and only consider the local system configuration as important. Everything else is in an on-rails loop, time is cyclical thus irrelevant, it only matters when seeing the solar system configuration in map view.

When you understand this everything else is just a logical consequence: all players should play in real-time only when in multiplayer and the server decides what the system configuration is in map mode for every player. When they plan a journey they have to wait for a transfer window so the server takes them out of multiplayer and shows them the appropriate  planetary positions. When they arrive at the destination they sync automatically to the server configuration for that area and re-enter multiplayer. It's all done by the server and the player can still control time-warp but only when out of the multiplayer state.

Deep space / map view is generally single player, multiplayer is always local.

This way all the talk about warping / on-rails time zoom is really irrelevant. You just play the game as usual, server does all the job for you in showing you the appropriate system configuration.

As for the progression - why would anyone care? It's fascinating to start as a beginner and see advanced players with sci-fi ships go by or go exploring some advanced colony. You don't need to confront time paradoxes when all players are in real time multiplayer in their local region. Building can be persistent (but I would recommend pass through able). You don't have to think about "reserving a spot in the past", recording actions in 4 dimensions (which is crazy) or anything like that. All the universe has a single real-time persistent state in the database. Everything else is single player basically, customized for your experience by your PC.

Trying to solve time travel for multiplayer is pointless, it's a mind trap.

Edited by Vl3d
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38 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

There's too much to quote, but the idea is simple. Stop obsessing about time

Not obsessing about time:

10 hours ago, Master39 said:

And the same goes for asynchronous, to allow for everyone to play at their speed and still interact something must be out of sync, it can be the players, the crafts, the time, the space, the planet, physics bubbles or whatever.

You're just moving the "out of sync" part of the game somewhere else.

 

41 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

This way all the talk about warping / on-rails time zoom is really irrelevant. You just play the game as usual, server does all the job for you in showing you the appropriate system configuration.

As for the progression - why would anyone care? It's fascinating to start as a beginner and see advanced players with sci-fi ships go by or go exploring some advanced colony. You don't need to confront time paradoxes when all players are in real time multiplayer in their local region. Building can be persistent (but I would recommend pass through able). You don't have to think about "reserving a spot in the past", recording actions in 4 dimensions (which is crazy) or anything like that. All the universe has a single real-time persistent state in the database. Everything else is single player basically, customized for your experience by your PC.

Me and my friends want to build the ISS, not a colony on Laythe, a simple station in a 400 km low Kerbin orbit at a 51° inclination.

Not advanced interstellar ships, not colonies, not anything else. The ISS. Can your system allow us to do that without waiting around hours for each other launches and to wait the orbit is in the right position to launch from the KSC?

(we also suck at building rockets, so no, we don't have the delta V to make a 51° burn, we have to wait for the launch window.)

 

45 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Trying to solve time travel for multiplayer is pointless, it's a mind trap.

Again a small reminder, this is difficult only because we don't have access to prototypes. We spend pages trying to explain things that would be immediately clear as soon as you see them working on your screen.

There's nothing difficult or exotic in the problem, it's just difficult to explain.

If we were talking about the LOD at the same level of detail it would seem the same kind of "impossible to solve" problem to us. The same goes for millimeter precision over multiple solar system in an engine that wasn't designed for it (the whole floating origin system), the physics bubbles, the planetary tech, the interactions with the ground, and so on...

We fixated on multiplayer just because it's a new feature.

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1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Not advanced interstellar ships, not colonies, not anything else. The ISS. Can your system allow us to do that without waiting around hours for each other launches and to wait the orbit is in the right position to launch from the KSC?

Yes, you plan the journey and set the ISS as a destination, launch the rocket whenever you want (meaning you time zoom to the appropriate time window and get desynced from Kerbin multiplayer), fly the rocket to the ISS in single player or team-only mode, get resynced to multiplayer when in vicinity of ISS (let's say local 5 km radius), do real-time stuff.

0 waiting, 0 warp limitations above let's say the atmosphere (like in KSP1 when on-rails kicks in) - because you exit multiplayer when you launch to a predefined destination that is non-local and that requires time zoom.

But other players could still see you leave in real-time as long as you don't physics warp, even though you are desynced (because you cannot interact). It's just that if you waited for s transfer window on your PC you see a map view configuration and other players see another (this is what being in the past or future actually means in practice).

So the only actual problem is the configuration of the celestial bodies in map view. So you let the server decide what to show each player on his local PC.

I'm advocating for planerary size real-time bubbles + smaller bubbles for stations, desyncing from multiplayer when leaving the real-time area or warping, resyncing when in a looped condition on arrival (like in orbit or landed).

Every player can see his own custom map view on his PC when desynced.

Edited by Vl3d
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1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

Yes, you plan the journey and set the ISS as a destination, launch the rocket whenever you want (meaning you time zoom to the appropriate time window and get desynced from Kerbin multiplayer), fly the rocket to the ISS in single player or team-only mode, get resynced to multiplayer when in vicinity of ISS (let's say local 5 km radius), do real-time stuff.

0 waiting, 0 warp limitations above let's say the atmosphere (like in KSP1 when on-rails kicks in) - because you exit multiplayer when you launch to a predefined destination that is non-local and that requires time zoom.

But other players could still see you leave in real-time as long as you don't physics warp, even though you are desynced (because you cannot interact). It's just that if you waited for s transfer window on your PC you see a map view configuration and other players see another (this is what being in the past or future actually means in practice).

So the only actual problem is the configuration of the celestial bodies in map view. So you let the server decide what to show each player on his local PC.

I'm advocating for planerary size real-time bubbles + smaller bubbles for stations, desyncing from multiplayer when leaving the real-time area or warping, resyncing when in a looped condition on arrival (like in orbit or landed).

Every player can see his own custom map view on his PC when desynced.

Then you're just talking about the same async system everyone else is talking about, just a slightly weirder variant.

You're dealing with time as anyone else here is doing.

Again, as I said:

13 hours ago, Master39 said:

There are really only two "systems" in discussion here, sync or async.

Whether a synchronous system is controller by the host, in turns or by voting doesn't matter.

And the same goes for asynchronous, to allow for everyone to play at their speed and still interact something must be out of sync, it can be the players, the crafts, the time, the space, the planet, physics bubbles or whatever.

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1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Then you're just talking about the same async system everyone else is talking about, just a slightly weirder variant.

You're dealing with time as anyone else here is doing.

You can mirror it in your mind on any way you wish - warp / async / real-time / sync. I don't care how it's implemented. The purpose of my idea was to show that KSP2 can have persistent world large multiplayer so 1000+ people build and play and explore together. You can't have that with the other proposals in this thread.

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13 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

You can mirror it in your mind on any way you wish - warp / async / real-time / sync. I don't care how it's implemented. The purpose of my idea was to show that KSP2 can have persistent world large multiplayer so 1000+ people build and play and explore together. You can't have that with the other proposals in this thread.

"Stop arguing about time and listen to me arguing about time" isn't going to get you far.

And you don't even have 1000+ playing together even in most traditional MMOs. I've played only a few games in which the gameplay wasn't split down to 5-20 people per instance (what's the difference between a MMO and a 6 players coop RPG? Mostly none.), and those are rare and far in between. The last one I played was Planetside 2.

Even in Minecraft (the definition of a sandbox game) the biggest 1000+ p;layers servers are mostly minigame hubs instanced for 20-50 players matches. Over 100 players it becomes actually difficult to make normal gameplay work (and it's just a survival / crafting game, with no complex mechanics or interactions).

And if you have a co-op progression (like Factorio) at some point you run into the fact that adding more people to the game means effectively splitting some if not most of the game length among players. Factorio (or modded tech Minecraft) is the best example of this as you literally divide the length of the game by the number of people playing.

 

Try to put 1000 people in KSP multiplayer and you'll spend more time and effort figuring out a system to prevent trolls from spelling out offensive words or symbols with colony parts than you need to develop the rest of the game.

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56 minutes ago, Master39 said:

trolls from spelling out offensive words or symbols with colony parts than you need to develop the rest of the game

You really think trolls will spend 100s of hours learning orbital physics and engineering testing to finally tackle building a sustainable colony just to make it look like a giant appendix vermicularis from space? If yes, I think that's wonderful.

I agree with you that gameplay wise it would be a cooperative 1-4 man teams + a few teams working on a bigger project together + space races. So yes 1000 players would never be in the same place at once, they would be spread out in all the solar systems, like in Elite.

But just imagine what we could build and see and explore if we all existed in the same game universe (even though we all mind our business and mostly play single player).

We would casually see the most original, creative and amazing cars, ships and stations and colonies ever imagined, just passing by. So many design styles.. some janky, some 60s like, some alien looking.. everyone could express themselves in the game.

I know you would see me flying by in the Prometheus.

Edited by Vl3d
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22 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

You really think trolls will spend 100s of hours learning orbital physics and engineering testing to finally tackle building a sustainable colony just to make it look like a giant appendix vermicularis from space?

They can just hack it, no game is safe from cheaters and hackers. And trolls thrive in MP games

By the rest of what you're saying I get that you want something like No Man's Sky but with KSP lego style building, am I correct?

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47 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

You really think trolls will spend 100s of hours learning orbital physics and engineering testing to finally tackle building a sustainable colony just to make it look like a giant appendix vermicularis from space?

I don't think it, I know it.

I managed a sizeable community and learning how to play KSP to troll is nothing compared to some schemes I've seen some people implement, and I'm talking about learning how to code to read the code of plugins and go around the protections we were using to grief.

And you don't even need to get to orbit, just build some laggy monstrosity just west of the runway to make sure that anyone trying to land back at KSC gets the pleasure of loading your lag-machine. (or a floating one east of the launchpad).

 

49 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

like in Elite.

But just imagine what we could build and see and explore if we all existed in the same game universe (even though we all mind our business and mostly play single player).

We would casually see the most original, creative and amazing cars, ships and stations and colonies ever imagined, just passing by. So many design styles.. some janky, some 60s like, some alien looking.. everyone could express themselves in the game.

I know you would see me flying by in the Prometheus.

No modding, no offline play, forced DRM, moderation problems, updates being slow.

I don't need to imagine things, I've played them already, and live services made by small teams (like Elite) are always riddled with more problems than they're worth.

 

And remember, space is big (You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.) all of that effort and turning KSP into a live service game (which requires some sort of monetization scheme going on, so say welcome to micro-transactions too.) for what? The ability of watch another player craft if I make the effort to travel all the way there mixed with the certainly that all the good spots to make base and colonies on Mun, Minmus and probably Duna are going to be taken by some other random player?  At that point a craft/colony design sharing system, like Kerbal X or the Workshop would be better, at least you can choose what to see and where you want to put it.

 

Again, there's games that are literally built for that (Minecraft) in which people don't do that anyway. 

 

PS Look at Elite, it's way more arcade than KSP and yet they had to dumb it down even further with their FPS (Planetside 2 wannabe) DLC to try to gather to new audience because there's not enough people wanting to play the hardcore space sim standard gameplay. The game is basically on life support with a skeleton crew working on it and has been that way for years.

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On 10/15/2022 at 6:31 PM, t_v said:

People want to be synchronized with other people. 

So, people think they want to be synchronized but they don't actually want to be synchronized. That probably sounds controvercial. If Im understanding correctly, (and feel free to correct me) what you're saying is Im playing in the present and you're playing in the present but only locally. Your vessel that you're flying right now is in orbit above Kerbin in year 2 day 200 and my vessel is in orbit on year 1 day 300 but we're seeing the same things at least while in stable orbits. When I say we don't actually want to be synchronized what I mean is the game is much more difficult if the vessel you're trying to intercept is arbitrarily changing course or worse--randomly blinking in and out of existence and reappearing in different places. Now, on your end you're trying to keep a interplanetary infrastructure system running, you've got vessels en-route to dock to stations over Minmus or delivering supplies from Ike to Duna, so when you hit time-warp you really need everything you own to move together just like in single player. But that means if Im trying to dock with your station in LKO and my vessel is above KSC and your station is above Harvester Massif, and you time-warp anywhere your station and everything you own is going to suddenly vanish and appear somewhere else along its orbit. I also can't time-warp while trying to intercept because your station is going to remain fixed while my vessel, relative to you, vanishes and reappears rather than catch-up in the normal way. Basically any time you're docking, which means almost any time you're trying to interact, you don't want other players manipulating the positions of your targets. You want those things stable and moving naturally in your reference frame. There are of course a few activities in which you do want to see other players moving around, but only when those activities require close proximity and no time-warp. 
 

On 10/15/2022 at 6:31 PM, t_v said:

While players that play more slowly and skip transfer windows will be fine (because the other players probably play enough to catch up), the discrepancies become much larger and more negative when a player plays less. That player might arrive at Duna at the same transfer window as the other players (or one later, but that shouldn't hurt them), but everyone else is already colonizing Jool. Unlike the player you talked about, this one is not only coming late to the party but is also behind, which means they can't interact.

Just to reiterate: you don't have to catch up all the way to the player you're trying to interact with, just to the last edit date of the vessel you're trying to interact with. That means if they build a colony on Duna and then go off to colonize Jool Im not catching up the 3 years it took for them to get to Jool, just the 50 or 100 days it took for them to build the Duna base. You don't even have to catch up the 300 day transit to Duna because it's built in to your transit time. Same with Jool. They might be playing 4 years in the future setting up around Laythe and Vall, but it's going to take you 3+ years to get there too. You don't have to fill all those 3 years with other tasks. Your vessels should have enough LS to get where they're going anyway, and colonies should be operating in the black, so just build your Jool vessel and time warp like you normally would, stopping on your earlier alarms to make maneuvers. Thats way, way easier than leveling up in most other games. 
 

19 hours ago, darthgently said:

Or maybe you mean the player simply starts at their present with no need to warp and catch up?  That is dirt simple I'd imagine

Yeah you'd expect some player-churn over time, folks dropping in and out, but when the new player comes in they don't start at day 0. They'd start concurrent with with the rest of the crowd, probably with the furthest ahead player.

Edited by Pthigrivi
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