KSP 2 Multiplayer Discussion Thread

[t_v]

2 hours ago, Master39 said:

Apollo-Soyouz, the shuttle on the MIR, the ISS, ASI LiciaCube on NASA DART, the Lunar gateway, the NASA-ESA mars sample return plans.

All missions that, to be played multiplayer without asynchronous time warp would require a single playing player and the rest waiting for their turn.

The thing about “asynchronous” is that a lot of people are seeing LMP and DMP as being equivalent to “asynchronous time warp” when there’s other ways to implement it. 
 

Since we’re jumping back into this (wheeee), I’ll talk about my system which does increase interaction and does fit under “asynchronous time warp” as defined here:

16 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

giving all players the ability to timewarp at their own pace

The idea is that you can time warp however you want, but you also see other peoples’ real-time movements and activities. Bej also said that the risk of paradoxes is overblown, and I agree. Even if there is a temporal paradox, players will probably not notice it if it is small, and LMP can’t fix it if it is big. 
 

Here’s a commonly brought up paradox: one player has progressed very far in the game and is further along in time, and the other player has not, and is less far along. The two players interact, and suddenly technology from the “future” makes its way to the “past”. Or, the advanced player has a base and the less advanced one goes around it, and suddenly they see a base that doesn’t exist yet. Well, LMP has ways to solve this… or does it? You can disallow interaction across time and you can have a “keep out” zone where future structures are, and then players can do their temporal mental gymnastics much more easily. But if the two players ever want to actually interact, then the less advanced player has to warp to the more advanced player. In-game “1000 year hiatus” aside, what functionally just happened is that the less advanced player, who has not actually advanced through the timewarp, has just come into contact with the player in the future. All of that non-interaction just to have an in-universe explanation for why two space programs that were founded at the same time and are thousands of years apart in their development suddenly interacted in the “present.” That seems like a paradox to me, even though it is (weakly) explained in-game. 
 

Since we are also on a trend of using Minecraft for analogies, when you walk over to someone’s base in the LMP system, you wouldn’t see or interact with them, you would see a recording of their actions at the time that you are at (as in, if you played less hours than them, you would see them some number of hours ago) and instead of seeing the world populate with cool creations, you would see it populate with chunks that you can’t interact with because another player did something there in the future. In order to have interaction, you press a button to populate the world, but why would you want to have that system when you could just see the other players and their creations by default instead? I’m just saying, if LMP doesn’t actually solve the problem of people in the past and the future interacting, why would you have all those extra steps to have an in-game justification and the semblance if a paradox-free experience?

[Pthigrivi]

43 minutes ago, t_v said:

Here’s a commonly brought up paradox: one player has progressed very far in the game and is further along in time, and the other player has not, and is less far along. The two players interact, and suddenly technology from the “future” makes its way to the “past”. Or, the advanced player has a base and the less advanced one goes around it, and suddenly they see a base that doesn’t exist yet.

The main paradox problem is much more mundane. Player 1 has a space station, docks with it, and drains the fuel from it. Player 2 is tooling around in Player 1’s past, connects to the same docking port, and drains the same fuel because from their perspective it hasn’t been drained. The way to prevent paradoxes both in resource levels and in having two vessels attached to the same port is to grey out the station for Player 2 until they have synched or jumped ahead of Player 1, or more specifically ahead of the station’s last edit. 

Edited September 28, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

12 minutes ago, t_v said:

The two players interact, and suddenly technology from the “future” makes its way to the “past

It does not need to be this complicated.  One player has a technological advantage over the the other.  They're still in the same universe / time. 

The discrepancy can be handwaved as economic & technology based rather than future-based.  Happens here: whether you look at the historic analog of European technology vs Native American or say the Indian & Chinese space programs of today (vs 20 years ago) compared to the US & RU programs... Yes there was a mismatch in capabilities, but not a permanent one. 

It's fairly easy to play catchup if you are willing to invest the time and resources. 

The player who logs on once a week for two hours might be considerably behind the streamer who plays 6 hours every day and be just landing their first probe on Mun as the other completes her base - but that is to be expected. 

I think the main problem that still exists is try to match warps between players who are unlikely to agree on when and how often they can be done. 

[Guest]

36 minutes ago, t_v said:

Since we’re jumping back into this (wheeee), I’ll talk about my system...

Nope, not going to jump back into this.

 

The fact that probably more than fifty people came up with their own completely different solution to the same problem in the past 50 pages of this thread is proof enought that there's no "time warp problem" at all.

 

I don't know how many professional game designer we have around here but I don't see how we can consider something a problem if everyone involved in the discussion has come up with several solutions.

[Pthigrivi]

10 minutes ago, Master39 said:

I don't know how many professional game designer we have around here but I don't see how we can consider something a problem if everyone involved in the discussion has come up with several solutions.

I’d say though that out of the 50 ideas we’ve seen only dozen or work at all, and just a handful solve the nitty gritty hard problems. Even the best solutions will require some real coordination and mental gymnastics if we want to accommodate things like depleting reactor fuel or life support. 

Edited September 28, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

34 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

The main paradox problem is much more mundane. Player 1 has a space station, docks with it, and drains the fuel from it. Player 2 is tooling around in Player 1’s past, connects to the same docking port, and drains the same fuel because from their perspective it hasn’t been drained. The way to prevent paradoxes both in resource levels and in having two vessels attached to the same port is to grey out the station for Player 2 until they have synched or jumped ahead of Player 1, or more specifically ahead of the station’s last edit. 

The thing is that is the same paradox, skinned differently. Someone in the future is interfering with actions in the past, and the solution can just be what @JoeSchmuckatelli was talking about (which is the solution I am proposing) which is to just accept the difference in time and allow players to interact, hand waving away the temporal weirdness. 
 

 

18 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Nope, not going to jump back into this.

 

The fact that probably more than fifty people came up with their own completely different solution to the same problem in the past 50 pages of this thread is proof enought that there's no "time warp problem" at all.

 

I don't know how many professional game designer we have around here but I don't see how we can consider something a problem if everyone involved in the discussion has come up with several solutions.

I agree, but a lot of people just put a lot of posts talking about LMP, and I wanted to mention that the problems people had with it were solved by just letting people interact. I hope this doesn’t become another huge discussion, but I don’t want people to think that LMP doesn’t have functional paradoxes or is the only solution that works well. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

25 minutes ago, Master39 said:

I don't see how we can consider something a problem if everyone involved in the discussion has come up with several solutions

We are not game designers.  We can handwave the technical problems of implementation of our brilliant solutions without even knowing why they don't work. 

I still suspect that MP won't be a roll-out feature, or if it is - will be the most complained about feature of the game.  There is a reason Squad (et.al) never patched MP into KSP. 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

We are not game designers.  We can handwave the technical problems of implementation of our brilliant solutions without even knowing why they don't work. 

Luckily for us the game is developed by an actual studio and not us.

They won't be discussing this on paper for literally years like we're doing, a meeting or two to brainstorm a bunch of ideas, a week to implement them into rough prototypes and then refining things out with actual working prototypes on their hands instead of just talking the same theory points over and over again.

 

13 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I still suspect that MP won't be a roll-out feature,

Technically speaking there's nothing magic or difficult going on.

 

14 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

or if it is - will be the most complained about feature of the game. 

That's for sure, but mostly because we start with half of the community thinking that anything multiplayer is a stain that corrupts the purity of the "serious" single player games.

 

16 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

There is a reason Squad (et.al) never patched MP into KSP. 

Given that even the most basic assets making makes the game seems like they picked up different assets and art styles from at least two dozen different games I would suggest considering the idea that probably Squad never was this technically talented studio.

Before starting to think that there's something impossibility difficult in implementing multiplayer.

[Deadmeat24]

My main concern is that, despite this feature being the one that people are most concerned about the technical complexity involved in solving its problems, the devs have still said little to nothing about it.

Edited September 28, 2022 by Deadmeat24

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, t_v said:

The thing is that is the same paradox, skinned differently. Someone in the future is interfering with actions in the past, and the solution can just be what @JoeSchmuckatelli was talking about (which is the solution I am proposing) which is to just accept the difference in time and allow players to interact, hand waving away the temporal weirdness. 

Well you can handwave away two players being in the same space with wildly different tech levels. You can't handwave 2 vessels simultaneously attached to the same docking port. 



In broad terms I'd say there are 3 main branches to the ideas folks have come up with. The first branch are the 'permission to timewarp' versions, where everyone exists in one time-plane and players vote or take turns being able to time-warp with everyone else dragged along for the ride. These do technically work and there's no risk of paradox. The downside is it makes KSP a turn-based game, with each turn taking potentially 10 or 20 minutes, and with several players you're waiting potentially more than an hour before you can actually fly or do anything. And sure, you can mess around in the VAB while you wait, but in general the pacing would be absolutely glacial and this doesn't really sound like "playing together" anyway. Might be fun for some but it doesn't appeal to me. 

The second branch are bubble universe versions, where there's no continuous timeline and you just teleport into the timeframe of other players. This is mostly fine if you're doing simple things like flying jets together or a one-off mission to the moon in which you dock to a friend's station. It seems like the idea in KSP2 is that we're building little mini civilizations with colonies and supply vessels and prospectors and mining vessels going everywhere at once. When you have multiple vessels in interplanetary transit and entering and leaving different SOI's you really need some kind of spatial/temporal continuity, and having many different vessels jump from one timeframe to another sounds like a recipe for disaster. 

The third branch are the 'leapfrog' models, where everyone can play at their own pace and in their own time, but in order to interact they need to leap forward to sync with other players or at least past the last edit of any given colony or vessel. This preserves continuity and causality and still allows everyone to participate in a shared world at their own pace. There's still a bit of diversity in the way's this would work in practice (are things greyed out or solid and on rails? how do you manage permissions? is it hosted online and anyone can hop in or out or is the group save tied to a single host? etc.) but these are to me the most promising versions. Who knows though, Intercept may have come up with something better that none of us have.
 

10 hours ago, razark said:

Further, there's the assumption that the multiplayer KSP is a coop.  I have seen plenty of arguments about how KSP MP should work based on not forcing players into a coop mode.

This is a whole other question. The easiest thing of course would be to just give players access to the same space and let them do whatever they want. If people want to race rovers they can sync up and do that. If they want to build a station or interplanetary ship together they can put components together and send them on their own time and then hop ahead to assemble them. If they want to do a space race to the moon they can decide on their own whether they're racing in player-time or in in-game-time. 

Edited September 28, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

32 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

In broad terms I'd say there are 3 main branches to the ideas folks have come up with.

Nice summary!

[t_v]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Well you can handwave away two players being in the same space with wildly different tech levels. You can't handwave 2 vessels simultaneously attached to the same docking port. 

The thing is that you are still transmitting cause and effect backwards through time, and restricting interaction to give the impression of fewer paradoxes isn’t the best solution. Instead of blocking off that station or docking port, just show the other player’s ship docked to that port, and then hand wave the fact that that ship is from the future just like you can handwave the fact that one player has a far future colony network next to another’s starting bases.

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

When you have multiple vessels in interplanetary transit and entering and leaving different SOI's you really need some kind of spatial/temporal continuity, and having many different vessels jump from one timeframe to another sounds like a recipe for disaster. 

I can explain how complex infrastructure can work well, and work with time warp , under this system if you don’t want to read through previous posts, but right now I’ll just say that it isn’t a disaster.

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

this doesn't really sound like "playing together" anyway

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

still allows everyone to participate in a shared world at their own pace

I think the problem is that we have different play styles and ideas of playing together. I oftentimes have multiple missions goi g at the same time, and I think that a large percentage of the player base does the same, and there is never a time when I can just warp 800 years without several missions overshooting their targets by 799 years. This means I will essentially never synchronize with people, and to me, that doesn’t sound like playing together. I’d rather have to wait for people to take their turns (and participate in community events because we’re all at the same time) than have my own time warp and never interact with anything else. You might as well have everything be  ghost ships that you can see but not interact with, like Vl3d was talking about. 

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The main paradox problem is much more mundane. Player 1 has a space station, docks with it, and drains the fuel from it. Player 2 is tooling around in Player 1’s past, connects to the same docking port, and drains the same fuel because from their perspective it hasn’t been drained. The way to prevent paradoxes both in resource levels and in having two vessels attached to the same port is to grey out the station for Player 2 until they have synched or jumped ahead of Player 1, or more specifically ahead of the station’s last edit. 

So, are we to have a new "trait" of kerbals who are "sensitive" and can see into the future but only a ghost of it?  ha ha.

If players want to play together they will most often do what has been done for ages: start a new game and meet on a schedule.  If you miss a gaming session, your loss. 

It works for poker and dungeons and dragons, it will mostly work for MP KSP2.  You'll just have to warp to catch-up if you missed a meetup, or play by yourself in the past seeing ghosts everywhere. 

If the point of the group is to play together most will simply warp to catch-up, and try not to miss any more game sessions.

Of course one could code a bot to play in one's place when you can't make it, ha ha.  Though warping later would probably be safer than dealing with the aftermath of the mind games your friends played on your bot while you were away

Has there been any mention of being able to transfer player ownership of craft and transfer management of kerbals in MP?  This way a new player entering an ongoing game could wheel and deal to get maybe a base and some tech and a few kerbals to catch-up, I suppose

[Bej Kerman]

55 minutes ago, darthgently said:

5 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The main paradox problem is much more mundane. Player 1 has a space station, docks with it, and drains the fuel from it. Player 2 is tooling around in Player 1’s past, connects to the same docking port, and drains the same fuel because from their perspective it hasn’t been drained. The way to prevent paradoxes both in resource levels and in having two vessels attached to the same port is to grey out the station for Player 2 until they have synched or jumped ahead of Player 1, or more specifically ahead of the station’s last edit. 

So, are we to have a new "trait" of kerbals who are "sensitive" and can see into the future but only a ghost of it?  ha ha.

Are you going to explain what makes you think this solution is silly, or nah?

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, t_v said:

I can explain how complex infrastructure can work well, and work with time warp , under this system if you don’t want to read through previous posts, but right now I’ll just say that it isn’t a disaster.

And maybe Im not understanding, so help me out. I could be wrong but I think we're missing something fundamental: the relative position of each planet to each other is driven by time. Likewise the position of every vessel relative to every other body is driven by the date. If I zoom out on day 3 I will see a very different arrangement of planetary positions than if I zoom out on day 200. This means you need to know what the date is at all times in order to make transfers. In order to rendezvous with any other player's vessel you need to be able to see where it is, and where it is is also relative to what its date is. If it's traveling between Kerbin and Duna that flight path and those encounters are tied to the relative positions of those planets and what time the transfer maneuver was made. If I have a trajectory that leaves LKO, swings by the Mun, exits the SOI and encounters Eve there is really only one time that that specific trajectory can exist. 

So if I have a vessel that's going to Duna, a probe that's going to Jool, and I have a shuttle I want to meet up with a friend's station in orbit around Minmus, what happens? Does my shuttle get transported to the stations' time? Does the station get pulled into the shuttle's time? If the person who made the station then also wants to dock does that vessel also get pulled into my time? When I'm in map mode looking for friends' vessels to rendezvous with where do I see them? As they are in their time or as they were in my time? 

Do you see the problem?

3 hours ago, t_v said:

I think the problem is that we have different play styles and ideas of playing together. I oftentimes have multiple missions goi g at the same time, and I think that a large percentage of the player base does the same, and there is never a time when I can just warp 800 years without several missions overshooting their targets by 799 years. This means I will essentially never synchronize with people, and to me, that doesn’t sound like playing together. I’d rather have to wait for people to take their turns (and participate in community events because we’re all at the same time) than have my own time warp and never interact with anything else. You might as well have everything be  ghost ships that you can see but not interact with, like Vl3d was talking about. 

Oh I think this is absolutely a real issue that players will have to navigate. On the positive side you don't actually have to warp all the way to another player's current time to interact with most things--just past the date that an individual vessel was last edited. If a player decides to jump way out ahead of the group and timewarp with a vessel for 800 years then that vessel won't be accessible for a while, but everything they left behind will be. I suspect this and the desire to engage will keep players steadily leap-frogging somewhat close to each other. If I join a group thats been going for a while I don't have to start at day zero and catch up. I can just start close to their current time, dock with their already elaborate stations and bases and hop along as I need to. If that group is voraciously zooming through time and constantly updating things way into my future maybe that just isn't a good group for me and I should find a gang thats' more my speed, so to speak. 
 

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

So, are we to have a new "trait" of kerbals who are "sensitive" and can see into the future but only a ghost of it?  ha ha.

No no, you would see the station as it was in your own time, not as it is in the future. Whether it's ghosted or highlighted or its icon is a different color or whatever, it's just a visual cue to the player that you can't dock with it until you move forward to its edit last date. 
 

Edited September 28, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

And maybe Im not understanding, so help me out. I could be wrong but I think we're missing something fundamental: the relative position of each planet to each other is driven by time. Likewise the position of every vessel relative to every other body is driven by the date. If I zoom out on day 3 I will see a very different arrangement of planetary positions than if I zoom out on day 200. This means you need to know what the date is at all times in order to make transfers. In order to rendezvous with any other player's vessel you need to be able to see where it is, and where it is also relative to what its date is. If it's traveling between Kerbin and Duna that flight path and those encounters are tied to the relative positions of those planets and what time the transfer maneuver was made. If I have a trajectory that leaves LKO, swings by the Mun, exits the SOI and encounters Eve there is really only one time that that specific trajectory can exist. 

So if I have a vessel that's going to Duna, a probe that's going to Jool, and I have a shuttle I want to meet up with a friend's station in orbit around Minmus, what happens? Does my shuttle get transported to the stations' time? Does the station get pulled into the shuttle's time? If the person who made the station then also wants to dock does that vessel also get pulled into my time? When I'm in map mode looking for friends' vessels to rendezvous with where do I see them? As they are in their time or as they were in my time? 

Do you see the problem?

Thanks for asking! here's how it would (or could) work:

As you mentioned, the locations of things in space depends on time, so if players are at different times, they will see different locations. One of the biggest things that minimize this problem is that relative positions in space are cyclic, with the cycles being more frequent the less bodies are involved. Take the simplest example: a ship in GKO. On day 2 and day 200, this ship will be in the same position relative to Kerbin, so for all intents and purposes for someone rendezvousing it from Kerbin, it doesn't matter that it is in the past/future. This can be applied to more complex configurations that require more considerations. 

So, your first example, a ship going from Kerbin to Duna. A Kerbin-Duna transfer looks the same roughly every Kerbin year or so (a bit more), so the principle is that if you want to intercept a craft going from Kerbin to Duna, you don't have to travel to the exact transfer window that the other player was using, you only need to travel to any Kerbin-Duna transfer window (with a "jump to window" button on any inter-SOI ship).  If you want to intercept it outside of the transfer window, you can do that too with extra fuel, and it would be akin to launching a few months early or late, but offset by a couple dozen or hundred transfer windows (which don't matter because transfer window 1 and 1,000 both have the same relative positions).  This applies to more complex trajectories involving slingshots, it just requires you to warp to a less frequent window. 

Okay, so what happens to ships while you match up your planetary positions by warping to transfer windows (or not, you can just torch-ship your way there too)? Well, just like with subspace, all your ships time warp. The reason I'm fine with this and not subspace is because time warping 3 months to match a Kerbin Duna window (or just a few days for a Mun mission) is much more manageable than warping decades or centuries just to do the same little mission. Alright, so all your ships warp, they consume resources etc. If you were playing alone in a server, it would look like single player. When it comes to other players and stations, there is a little bit more. 

I'll expand your example of a few craft by adding that the other player is currently returning from an Eve mission and is going to dock at that same Minmus station. you set up the mission, make your Minmus injection burn, and time warp. All the craft that you have warp, but since you are only warping a few weeks, you don't overshoot in your interplanetary transfers. The Minmus station also warps, as well as any craft any other player has in a stable orbit. The logic behind this is that location-wise, the orbits are very cyclic and it doesn't matter if they are on their 2nd orbit or their 2000th, so the ability to rendezvous is preserved. The only ships that don't warp (that you are seeing in real-time) are the other player's ships that are on inter-SOI trajectories. You can still rendezvous with those without breaking physics because if you try, you essentially launched at the "same time" so you can still warp up to their ship, which is traveling at 1x speed, without cheating orbits. So, you rendezvous and dock with the other player's ship without difficulty, even though they interacted with it 800 years in the future. The other player sees that in real time, and for all intents and purposes, you are playing at the same time, except the transfers that you made are not ruined by an 800 year time warp. 

(sorry if that was confusing, it is really an intuitive system when you see it. Essentially, you are functionally always synchronized without messing up orbital mechanics or having to warp a lot. If you didn't get that from the paragraph above, I can try to explain it differently.)

The last consideration is - now the other player wants to dock with that station that you are currently managing. You don't want to suddenly be thrown into warp when the other player starts to rendezvous, so as you see them come into an orbit of Minmus, you are moving at 1x speed but the other player sees a version of the station warping around Minmus. When they rendezvous with it, they are put at the point in the orbit that you are at, so that you see the same thing passing below. That is the only time when a spatial discrepancy has to be resolved, when two players are actively interacting with the same craft or station. Any other time, it works like subspace bubble except instead of warping to the exact time that the other person is at in order to interact, you can be functionally synchronized (but not actually synchronized) relative to select celestial bodies and craft. 

 

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, t_v said:

So, your first example, a ship going from Kerbin to Duna. A Kerbin-Duna transfer looks the same roughly every Kerbin year or so (a bit more), so the principle is that if you want to intercept a craft going from Kerbin to Duna, you don't have to travel to the exact transfer window that the other player was using, you only need to travel to any Kerbin-Duna transfer window (with a "jump to window" button on any inter-SOI ship).  If you want to intercept it outside of the transfer window, you can do that too with extra fuel, and it would be akin to launching a few months early or late, but offset by a couple dozen or hundred transfer windows (which don't matter because transfer window 1 and 1,000 both have the same relative positions).  This applies to more complex trajectories involving slingshots, it just requires you to warp to a less frequent window. 

I think theres a small but crucial flaw here. If we're trying to rendezvous with anything that's in transit its not actually good enough to be close. You have to be exactly at the same place at the same time. Player one is at Year 1, day 258 looking at their first Duna window. Player 2 has already launched a vessel on Year 5, day 368 on their 3rd window. It wouldn't be a problem to just merge one onto the other if Kerbin and Duna had exactly circular orbits and no inclination, but they don't. If Player 1's transfer would arrive at Duna near its Pe, and Player 2's transfer would arrive at Duna when its near its Ap, then there's a 2,000,000 km difference between the transfer trajectories. When Player 1 looks at Player 2's vessel trajectory in Player 1's reference frame it will miss Duna's SOI entirely. And what happens if they dock and ride together? Does the combined vessel enter Player 2's timeline 5 years in the future and reach Duna safely? Or is it pulled into Player 1's timeline and miss the planet? It can't be in two different times at once. This is even kind of a problem for vessels in stable orbits. If they're inclined or eccentric (as they all are) then what controls the longitude of Ap or the argument of Pe? Say our Minmus station's orbit is eccentric: one player will see that eccentricity perpendicular to Minmus’s line of orbit, another will see it nearly tangental to it. When two players are trying to rendezvous with it in different times who is right?

Edit: Sorry, it sounds like Im nitpicking but I know multiplayer mods must have found some way around this and Im curious how?

Edited September 28, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think theres a small but crucial flaw here. If we're trying to rendezvous with anything that's in transit its not actually good enough to be close. You have to be exactly at the same place at the same time. Player one is at Year 1, day 258 looking at their first Duna window. Player 2 has already launched a vessel on Year 5, day 368 on their 3rd window. It wouldn't be a problem to just merge one onto the other if Kerbin and Duna had exactly circular orbits and no inclination, but they don't. If Player 1's transfer would arrive at Duna near its Pe, and Player 2's transfer would arrive at Duna when its near its Ap, then there's a 2,000,000 km difference between the transfer trajectories. When Player 1 looks at Player 2's vessel trajectory in Player 1's reference frame it will miss Duna's SOI entirely. And what happens if they dock and ride together? Does the combined vessel enter Player 2's timeline 5 years in the future and reach Duna safely? Or is it pulled into Player 1's timeline and miss the planet? It can't be in two different times at once. This is even kind of a problem for vessels in stable orbits. If they're inclined or eccentric (as they all are) then what controls the longitude of Ap or the argument of Pe? Say our Minmus station's orbit is eccentric: one player will see that eccentricity perpendicular to Minmus’s line of orbit, another will see it nearly tangental to it. When two players are trying to rendezvous with it in different times who is right?

Edit: Sorry, it sounds like Im nitpicking but I know multiplayer mods have found a way around this and Im curious how?

The problem of things being off because of differences in Ap and Pe will already have to be resolved for supply routes to work at all. I don't think that Kerbin and Duna will ever be in exactly the same position relative to each other even if you looked at a million transfer windows, but the supply routes still need to go from one to the other and land very precisely. The landing site might be on the "front" or "back" of the planet, which will affect the trajectory that supply routes take to get to the surface. What needs to happen is a bit of handwavium to say "look at that trajectory, it is hitting Duna's SOI even though the test supply route mission hit Duna's SOI at Ap and this is at Pe." Similarly, seeing other players' trajectories, you will see them hitting Duna at the Pe and they will see your craft hitting Duna at the Ap. If you dock, then you have the same orbital speed as you enter Duna's SOI, and then it doesn't matter if it is at the Ap or the Pe because you only care about Duna's SOI. 

Similarly with the Minmus mission, if one person sees Minmus on one side of Kerbin and the other person sees it on the other side, that doesn't matter for internal rendevous with stations orbiting only Minmus. It will change the direction that you enter the SOI, but in LMP that is essentially just launching a week earlier or later. In this system you are still launching a week "earlier" or "later", but you get to see the other person make their transfer in real time and enter Minmus from the "wrong side" and interact with them directly at that point, since once you are orbiting within Minmus SOI, it doesn't matter where Minmus is compared to Kerbin, your rendezvous will still work the same. 

Alternatively, you can see the trajectory go off into seemingly empty space, and then a "Minmus encounter" shows up, just like in single player transfers. You always have the option to "time warp to transfer window" to get the relevant celestial bodies in the correct positions, but otherwise, you see them leave for Minmus and then show up in its SOI. If you dock with them while they are heading off to this empty space, you might need to change your time to their transfer window to interact, but you still don't need to warp all the way to their exact configuration. Or, and I don't like this one because sufficiently motivated player can exploit this, you could get dragged to Minmus when the other player enters the SOI. 

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, t_v said:

The problem of things being off because of differences in Ap and Pe will already have to be resolved for supply routes to work at all.

This is part of the reason I'd be surprised if supply routes are more than magic resource transfers on a schedule. I doubt you'll actually see the en-route vessel in engine. 

1 hour ago, t_v said:

What needs to happen is a bit of handwavium to say "look at that trajectory, it is hitting Duna's SOI even though the test supply route mission hit Duna's SOI at Ap and this is at Pe." Similarly, seeing other players' trajectories, you will see them hitting Duna at the Pe and they will see your craft hitting Duna at the Ap. If you dock, then you have the same orbital speed as you enter Duna's SOI, and then it doesn't matter if it is at the Ap or the Pe because you only care about Duna's SOI. 

I don't think this can be right. You cant hand-wave positional data. The orbital track isn't just a graphical element, its a precise line through space, and if you're trying to rendezvous you need to know exactly where the target vessel is and where it's going down to the meter. The target vessel has its own precise Ap and Pe and inclination and everything else and those are hard numbers, both for the player who owns it and for you. I think what you would see is a track that does visually miss Duna and instead encounters an invisible or ghosted Duna 2m km away from the Duna you see. If you were trying to rendezvous with a vessel far apart from the window you would see a random arc starting somewhere along Kerbin's orbit and ending somewhere along Duna's orbit. For planets with higher inclinations and more eccentricity the difference would be much greater. Basically all other players in-transit vessels would look this way because their transit orbits are tuned to encounter planetary positions that vary wildly from the one you see. As you approach and dock with any one of those vessels you're exactly matching those orbits that in your time hit nothing, so I don't think you have any choice but to have that craft enter the other player's timeline, teleported into the future. It seems like after a dozen or so encounters you're going to end up with lots of different vessels that exist in different times, coming and going from multiple ghosted instances of different planets and its going to be really difficult to know what's real. 

Edited September 29, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[poopslayer78]

10 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

or at least past the last edit of any given colony or vessel

If this were the case, not only would players accidentally learn orbital mechanics by playing KSP2, but they would also learn git without realizing it .

[t_v]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

I don't think you have any choice but to have that craft enter the other player's timeline, teleported into the future.

That’s a good concern that players probably have to exactly match the positions of at least the relevant bodies, which would entail at least a degree of long time warping. Even if you mitigated it by only considering the position of the destination planet important, that is still up to 1 revolution that you have to warp, and while it is better than dozens or hundreds of years, by the time Eeloo makes its way to the correct position, your interplanetary missions will have reached their destinations. 

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

It seems like after a dozen or so encounters you're going to end up with lots of different vessels that exist in different times, coming and going from multiple ghosted instances of different planets and its going to be really difficult to know what's real. 

Maybe I’m underestimating the amount of times when a repeated mission will feature interplanetary intercepts. I think that when it happens, it’ll be a one-and-done event, but I guess that if someone sets up a “space train,” it would see a lot of docking across SOIs. Thanks for raising that question, because previously I had though of a very complex space warping system by which incorrect trajectories would be warped to cover discrepancies, but now I see that the warping would be not just complex, but impossibly so. I still like this system for its interactivity and stability for simple systems, and for its minimizing of time warping to synchronize, but to allow players complete freedom on where to interact, it would need to add a fair amount of time warps to fix interplanetary problems. Oh well, hopefully we find out soon so that I can be disillusioned of the possibility of this in KSP 2. 

[Pthigrivi]

@t_v I think you're right though that this isn't nearly as troublesome for stable orbits. Is it alright if you're only really interacting with other players' colonies and stations, and I guess anything within your SOI? It might be worth it. It's just so rare that you're intercepting anything while it's in transit for all the practical costs entailed in causality preservation.

And I'll also say on the downside for 'leapfrog' models it becomes kind of a big problem for casual players who constantly feel left behind, especially if you consider LS and reactor fuel or anything that depletes over time. I would be really disappointed if those kinds of elements were cut just to make multiplayer easier. Supply routes are also a problem in this paradigm for a different reason--they're automatic. That means if that one player does warp ahead 800 or even 20 years presumably their automated supply routes will keep updating which will add and subtract resources from many of their colonies and stations and schedule-up last-edited dates pretty close to wherever the player is in time. 

---On the other, other hand don't players want to all kind of be on the page and contributing to a mutual progression project and working together to get that next fusion drive so they can build an interstellar vessel together? Doesn't that kind of require being in the same-ish timeline and tech-space? Its a social problem, but its also a question of group-based goals and practical logistics.

So I don't know! It'll be interesting to see where Intercept lands.

Edited September 29, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

---On the other, other hand don't players want to all kind of be on the page and contributing to mutual progression project and working together to get that next fusion drive so they can build an interstellar vessel together? Doesn't that kind of require being in the same-ish timeline and tech-space? Its a social problem, but its also a question of group-based goals and practical logistics.

I agree with everything you said in your post, and on the topic of the problem of players not being on the same page, I also agree but I think that it is a problem that can't be fully solved as long as people have the ability to time warp independently. The result that I'm realistically hopeful for is something like Minecraft, where players at higher advancement levels can give less advanced players resources and support to help them catch up. 

Edited September 30, 2022 by t_v

[Fullmetal Analyst]

On 9/15/2022 at 8:13 PM, TheOrbitalMechanic said:

???
KSP 1 has a console edition that works fine (barring a few bugs). No changes in core mechanics necessary.

<snip>

and what makes u think that we are not suffering worse performance on ksp1 from this already?

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

6 hours ago, Fullmetal Analyst said:

and what makes u think that we are not suffering worse performance on ksp1 from this already?

I've played on both PC and console, and in my experience, the game performs fine on consoles compared to PC (although obviously a 10,000 dollar gaming PC will likely run it better). Your original comment I was responding to, however, implied that core gameplay systems would need to be changed/revamped/removed in order to make the game work. I don't know exactly what you consider to be a core gameplay system (if you just mean the controls need to be changed, then yeah, I agree), but this has not been my experience--functionally, it's still pretty much the same game.