The Evolution of Multiplayer

[forenci]

With the release of 1.0 on the way, I thought it might be a good time to talk about the future of KSP in relation to multiplayer. I honestly haven't seen a thread talking about multiplayer too much lately, and with all the updates since they announced it several updates ago, and all the new updates expected in 1.0, I was curious how the changes to KSP might impact what you guys are hoping for in Kerbal multiplayer.

One thing that has changed a lot in terms of potential multiplayer for me is contracts. How cool would it be play on a server and be able to create contracts for people to fulfill for a price? For example, maybe you created an orbital fueling station, but you don't feel like bringing up all the fuel yourself. So, instead, you decide to offer a contract for (X) price to bring up four orange tanks to your orbital fueling station. Someone else could fulfill the contract, receive the money, and go on their merry way.

Another thing I really want to hear more about is multiple-person crewed vehicles. I remember them (somewhere) briefly mentioning it, but so much has changed, and I would be interested to see how it might work. I think it would be awesome if you could designate specific functions of control to other people on a ship. For example, if you were attempting to land on Duna you could assign someone to pilot the service module/transfer stage and someone to pilot the lander. Or, if you're big on saving money/recovering stages you could assign someone to control the first stage of a rocket to preform a Space X style landing and recovery.

What would you guys like to see in multiplayer? Again, this is just for fun and is pure speculation!

[Tex]

Those are some pretty cool ideas!

I'm a little confused as to how some of these would be performed. The ones where you contract pilots to fly your ships to Duna and elsewhere could be done by a simple objective like "achieve orbit around Duna", but what about your Space-X landing? They would be in control of the first stage through the entire launch, or would they have to accept the contract and perform it right after you stage?

While I do like your contract ideas, I do think that the implementation is gonna be tricky depending on the action being performed. I especially like the refueling contract idea.

[forenci]

Those are some pretty cool ideas!

I'm a little confused as to how some of these would be performed. The ones where you contract pilots to fly your ships to Duna and elsewhere could be done by a simple objective like "achieve orbit around Duna", but what about your Space-X landing? They would be in control of the first stage through the entire launch, or would they have to accept the contract and perform it right after you stage?

While I do like your contract ideas, I do think that the implementation is gonna be tricky depending on the action being performed. I especially like the refueling contract idea.

You're absolutely right. Implementation would certainly be tricky. As someone with no development experience I'm not entirely sure I could answer how it might be done in the best way.

I think the best way would be to have one person be the "captain" or "controller" of the ship. From there, they are able to assign (perhaps similar to action groups) what parts of the ship are controlled by who). The way I sort of imagined it working out would be, the person in control of the ship would have control as a rocket when up, and as the stage separated the person in control of the first stage would take control of the probe controlling the first stage.

I think contracts would be a little more straight forward. Have an option to make a contract, name it, and set the parameters for it (put one orange tank in orbit around Kerbin 250km by 250km) or (deliver orange tank to "name of space station").

One thing that might even be cool is perhaps the ability to "sell" spacecraft designs to other people. For example, need a rocket that can deliver 20 tons into LKO? Buy the design! It would be pretty cool, although perhaps risky if people don't build the rocket as well as you expect. Perhaps, some sort of "try before you buy" mechanism would be neat.

That's why I'm excited for multiplayer. There is SO much more potential for things that can be added to the game through multiplayer. That and this game screams for cooperative play.

[dryer_lint]

Contracts would be pretty awesome. You could give other players contracts, or you could have space races going on for the big exploration contracts.

Space races would be especially awesome.

[Guest]

<- Looks at multiplayer with great skepticism.

Even if they manage to add meaningful multiplayer to KSP, it will introduce all sorts of additional limitations to the code.

Like:

- We cannot add this feature, because it will break the multiplayer, and adding two mode switches to ALL the related code is way too much hassle...

My opinion: SQUAD should fork the KSP after vx.xx and SP and MP should be different games.