KSP 2 Multiplayer Discussion Thread

[darthgently]

The ideal solution is likely the same as it always is with software: it can be configured to the needs of the user.  In this case, having a few MP settings and tools that a group can apply and adjust to match the group's style is the way to go:

A way to transfer  craft and kerbs between players.

A straightforward way to logically allow/manage or disallow interaction with other player's past craft and bases.  I'd keep this very simple, like only if the owner has not made any non automated changes to the base since the time frame the new player attempts interaction and only if the player in the "past" has game enforced permission (to alleviate mischief).

A way for a player to sync into the group timeline at any given point, but some mechanism to keep this from becoming a normal gameplay mechanic implying kerbals have unlocked time travel.  

[t_v]

20 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

Not only do they start at their present, but they stay in their present the whole time, and simultaneously are synchronized with everyone else. Everyone has full freedom over time warp as well. This works suprisingly well without paradoxes in most situations, and while I would have it so that even the situations with paradoxes are available, those situations aren’t interactible in the other model anyways so removing them would just be the status quo.

20 hours ago, darthgently said:

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.

In my solution, you would see that the base has already had fuel taken out of it, and you would be able to dock with it. Essentially, it would be as if you warped ahead those 10 minutes until after the last interaction, but this applies to everything. From my perspective, there is no reason to limit an interaction until after you have warped forwards, because it isn’t like you are going to gain gameplay from that non-interaction if you are just going to warp forwards anyways. 

49 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

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.

Craft in transfer wouldn’t be interactible under the leapfrog model because the other player would have to edit its course at the end of the transfer. Bases and craft left in orbit would be interactible, assuming that no one interacted with it in the meantime (which is either irrelevant if everyone is within a year of each other or insurmountable if people are further apart) but again, those aren’t really benefits of the leapfrog system, that is just normal. Bases and unattended vessels can be interacted with under every solution, unless some anti-griefing measure stops it like in large multiplayer. 

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

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.

The de-sync happens with the positions of crafts and planets. There won’t be a situation where someone else’s craft suddenly zooms somewhere else unless you need to synchronize with it, and at that point you are docked with it so you are going along with it. Just like in the leapfrog system, when you warp, everything warps. The only difference is that nothing is greyed out and everything can be interacted with. Once you come in contact with something that isn’t in the place it should be, like a station that is receiving solar power when you dock at night, then you warp to the point in that frame of reference where the craft was. This reduces the warp times from a few months to the lat point of interaction (assuming the (optimistic) idea that most players will be within a year or two) to a few minutes to the right point in the orbit. There isn’t any time when something disappears from an orbit except when someone actively changes the orbit, and in the leapfrog model you would just suddenly not be able to interact with that craft anyways and you wouldn’t even see where it went until you warped forwards, which to me is the same level of annoyance. 

[Pthigrivi]

45 minutes ago, t_v said:

The de-sync happens with the positions of crafts and planets. There won’t be a situation where someone else’s craft suddenly zooms somewhere else unless you need to synchronize with it, and at that point you are docked with it so you are going along with it. Just like in the leapfrog system, when you warp, everything warps. The only difference is that nothing is greyed out and everything can be interacted with. Once you come in contact with something that isn’t in the place it should be, like a station that is receiving solar power when you dock at night, then you warp to the point in that frame of reference where the craft was. This reduces the warp times from a few months to the lat point of interaction (assuming the (optimistic) idea that most players will be within a year or two) to a few minutes to the right point in the orbit. There isn’t any time when something disappears from an orbit except when someone actively changes the orbit, and in the leapfrog model you would just suddenly not be able to interact with that craft anyways and you wouldn’t even see where it went until you warped forwards, which to me is the same level of annoyance. 

Ah! This helps. So you are still looking at recordings because as soon as other players warp the positions of everything they own move with them, but you don't see that. You see those vessels locked to your timeline, which is now different. When you dock your vessel is teleported to whatever position their vessel is along its orbit according to them, is that right? If they were to look at your vessel after a timewarp they would see nonsense because your vessel isn't where it really is and its and approaching a version of their station they can't see, but why do they care? At this point my only issue is that you're not seeing a coherent picture of reality or how things are progressing in transit if you're working in coop, but thats probably a player to player communication issue. Im not sure the best UI method, whether you'd want to see nonsense trajectories or just hide them? But in the end it just comes down to a personal preference of what you would like to see--to look out in Map mode and see a consistent, shared timeline of where things are in your own time, or to see first where things have moved to in other players' near-present. In one case you have to communicate with players on any changes that have happened in your future, and in the other case you have to communicate on where everything is that's in transit. I would say the issues in Leapfrog are more manageable because players can work together to keep up, whereas those issues are fundamental and permanent in local bubbles, but if a player fears they are just always going to be left behind they may not see it that way. 

Edited October 17, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

But in the end it just comes down to a personal preference of what you would like to see--to look out in Map mode and see a consistent, shared timeline of where things are in your own time, or to see first where things have moved to in other players' near-present. In one case you have to communicate with players on any changes that have happened in your future, and in the other case you have to communicate on where everything is that's in transit.

In both situations, craft in orbits and on the surface would display as they are. If a player put a station in LKO, technically years into the future, you would see that station in LKO and be able to interact with it instead of it being a grey ghost of a future station. So you don’t have to communicate about changes that happen in the future because once something is there, it just exists. For the crafts in transit, you can hide them or show them (and showing them would probably lead to some nonsense) but once they are in their stable orbits, then they display that way and when you warp, their position along that orbit changes. As we’ve discussed before, docking with a ship that is on a different transfer window than you can lead to some issues, but I’d like it to be possible anyways, because ships in transit should be able to be interacted with. 

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, t_v said:

As we’ve discussed before, docking with a ship that is on a different transfer window than you can lead to some issues, but I’d like it to be possible anyways, because ships in transit should be able to be interacted with. 

Yeah I'd like that too even though its applications are rare. When I say communication I mean communication about where vessels are in space and how long it will take them to arrive at their destinations. Like when another player tells you they'll be dropping off supplies at your base the answer they can give you is "sometime next session" rather than "on year 2 day 50" because you aren't living on the same plane.  Setting up supply routes between players is a sticky wicket for the same reasons. And you need to guess and tell other players these things verbally because vessels in transit are not visible in a coherent way, and some strange things happen if we both have vessels in orbit and are both warping different amounts and changing course. You can still dock, which is good, but the sense of what the "real" position of everything in orbit is becomes a bit wonky. Like if you have a station in orbit, I come in with a tanker and set up an elliptical orbit that intercepts it, then you warp ahead a few days, you will then see my vessel at some random point along the elliptical orbit. Then I make a burn to intercept your station where I see it, but from your perspective I make that burn at Ap rather than close to the intercept point, and then where am I? Can you tell without asking how close I actually am to your station or how long it will be before I intercept? It's probably not a problem right away, but if someone has a tug that they're using to move things around for a couple different players change after change viewed from different perspectives could result in some strange behavior. You're kind of in this odd position where if you switch focus you see the vessel in its current configuration, which is good, but much of the information about where things actually are and where they are going is not coherent most of the time. Of course you're not seeing exactly the same things and need to communicate in the leapfrog model too, but at least the things you are seeing are part of a linearly consistent timeline shared by all.
 

3 hours ago, t_v said:

Not only do they start at their present, but they stay in their present the whole time, and simultaneously are synchronized with everyone else. Everyone has full freedom over time warp as well. This works suprisingly well without paradoxes in most situations, and while I would have it so that even the situations with paradoxes are available, those situations aren’t interactible in the other model anyways so removing them would just be the status quo.

Well they're only non-interactable after some other player has already done something with it. So if for instance a player sends a vessel to Jool and then does another mission while its in transit (as many of us do) its still interactable en-route. If you were able to launch from Duna or Dres and catch it before it got to Jool you'd have no trouble. Likewise if you were doing a fly-by maneuver like the Martian, resupplying a vessel or dropping off passengers as it buzzed by on a gravity assist you'd have no trouble doing that either. And honestly doing those kinds of things are the only instances I can think of where you'd want to interact outside of stable orbits anyway. So the difference in the two models is that in-transit interaction is possible with some coordination in leapfrog vs being fundamentally not possible (so far as I can tell?) in local-bubble. At least in leapfrog you can adjust your pace or find a group that's more on yours.

Edited October 17, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Nazalassa]

Don't blame me for what follows - it may have been said before.
 

What if anyone could control any ship, the time warp is the same for everyone (all is sync) and players just do whatever mission needs to be done?

Like if there is a ship that needs to execute a maneuver, the game tells everyone that X has to do a maneuver in 15 minutes or something and then whoever can do the maneuver does it.

But this is with cooperation in mind.

Edited October 17, 2022 by Nazalassa
Again, don't blame me. Blame Time Warp.

[Bej Kerman]

On 10/14/2022 at 8:15 AM, Vl3d said:

50 pages of discussions and people still can't accept that you can just let the server control the common time speed limit for multiplayer and if you want to warp on-rails you automatically go into single player (or on-board team) mode.

Probably because that is, frankly, a bad solution that introduces problems a million times worse than any "paradox", namely either having to wait for your friends to catch up or not play MP at all.

6 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

Like if there is a ship that needs to execute a maneuver, the game tells everyone that X has to do a maneuver in 15 minutes or something and then whoever can do the maneuver does it.

And if you absolutely cannot timewarp because you're busy docking or something...?

Again, paradox schmaradox. Dark Multiplayer has had the solution for years and it's not being accepted because some people seem to place non-existent problems above being able to play at your own pace.

[Nazalassa]

7 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Dark Multiplayer has had the solution for years

Please help me, how does DMP work? I've forgotten with time.

I only remember of master-controlled time warp, and subspaces, but I can't remember how the subspaces worked.

[Bej Kerman]

26 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

I only remember of master-controlled time warp, and subspaces, but I can't remember how the subspaces worked.

You do whatever you want and sync with a set of players when you're ready to. It works perfectly.

[Nazalassa]

Thanks!

[Pthigrivi]

Well most of us are aware that Dark and Luna are perfectly capable of handling players flying planes around KSC and building a small station. What we've been talking about are all the tricks and trip-ups that could happen when several players are trying manage, coordinate, and combine multi-planetary infrastructure set-ups. 

[t_v]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

So the difference in the two models is that in-transit interaction is possible with some coordination in leapfrog vs being fundamentally not possible (so far as I can tell?) in local-bubble. At least in leapfrog you can adjust your pace or find a group that's more on yours.

So, in leapfrog, you have to be around the same time to properly intercept craft in transit. If you coordinate the same way in local-bubble (or whatever we call it, idk), then the planets line up in the same position and you can intercept things at the same time with no problem. Nowhere is there a situation where you can interact in leapfrog and not interact in the other system (if you find one, that'd be an interesting discussion). On top of being able to intercept when you are at the same time (which is basically what leapfrog requires), you can also intercept when the two planets are in the same position relative to each other, even if you are thousands of years apart. I think that players being very far apart will be common which is why this system helps especially there, but if players are close together, my system functions very similarly to leapfrog except you just don't have any situation where you are a few hours, days, months behind a station that you need to access. 

Edit: What I'm really getting from this latest page is that the biggest benefit that the leapfrog model has beyond free time warp is consistency. Things behave exactly as you would expect them to always, and there will never be a situation where someone is at Kerbin one hour and at Duna the next, unless you time warp that hour into a year or two. The price being not always seeing or being able to interact with with what other players are doing is something that is mitigable with coordination. That answers the question that I was having: instead of mitigating de-synced positions using coordination, you can mitigate de-synced time using coordination, and that is a better thing overall, combined with the consistency of stuff being in the right positions.

Edited October 17, 2022 by t_v

[Pthigrivi]

On 9/28/2022 at 5:48 PM, 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?

@t_v I thought this basically made intercepting vessels in transit impossible because you didn’t know where they actually are precisely in space relative to other bodies or anything else if they aren’t also anchored to a shared calendar date. What Im wondering is if there isn’t some loophole based on the idea that Kerbol itself is an SOI, just like Kerbin. What if you ignored orbit instability caused by passing through a planet’s SOI? Does it work to make interplanetary space its own synchronized subspace?

[t_v]

12 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

@t_v I thought this basically made intercepting vessels in transit impossible because you didn’t know where they actually are precisely in space relative to other bodies or anything else if they aren’t also anchored to a shared calendar date. What Im wondering is if there isn’t some loophole based on the idea that Kerbol itself is an SOI, just like Kerbin. What if you ignored orbit instability caused by passing through a planet’s SOI? Does it work to make interplanetary space its own synchronized subspace?

So there, you were absolutely correct, but it doesn't make it impossible. There are kind of finicky ways to get around it, like: warp to the same transfer window, even if it is a few years away, or warp so that the starting planet is in the same place then once you rendezvous, warp so that the ending planet is in the same place, but I think I conceded that in that situation, intercepting vessels in transit would require warping to pretty much the exact same window, however rarely that occurs.

On 9/28/2022 at 10:43 PM, t_v said:

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. 

This essentially turns intercepting transferring ships into the leapfrog system, but definitely doesn't make it any more impossible than that system. Because the problem of planets being in different positions only is a problem when the planets are in really different positions, which you pointed out happens more often than I thought. In any case, warping so that the planets are in the same positions would be a prerequisite for both systems (and is a prerequisite for any live interaction in the leapfrog system), unless you want to do some weird workaround. 

As for Kerbol orbit, why not? The way I see it, if a craft is in a stable orbit, it just stays there, and if the player that owns it time warps enough that it goes into a planet's SOI, you would see it appear there and then probably shortly after slingshot into another orbit of Kerbol, where it would stay for a while longer. Stable orbits and inter-SOI trajectories aren't treated differently in the code, but I'm talking about them separately because they bring up different issues. 

[t_v]

10 minutes ago, t_v said:

and is a prerequisite for any live interaction in the leapfrog system

oh, and by live, I mean stuff like rover racing, not docking to a station that hasn't been interacted with since the time where you are at. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 hours ago, t_v said:

oh, and by live, I mean stuff like rover racing, not docking to a station that hasn't been interacted with since the time where you are at. 

You just made me think about something. 

What if MP isn't full featured?  As in - they never found an elegant solution to the Warp Thing - but they do offer some kind of Sandbox MP, where players can load into a game with each other on Kerbin or some other place with a ship or rover and race (or whatever) without the possibility of warp? 

( the core game remains a SP experience, but there are MP features that players can take advantage of) 

How would you all react to that? 

 

[The Aziz]

Like that.

that applies to all MP interactions as well, most likely, regardless of implemention

[Ashandalar]

26 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You just made me think about something. 

What if MP isn't full featured?  As in - they never found an elegant solution to the Warp Thing - but they do offer some kind of Sandbox MP, where players can load into a game with each other on Kerbin or some other place with a ship or rover and race (or whatever) without the possibility of warp? 

( the core game remains a SP experience, but there are MP features that players can take advantage of) 

How would you all react to that?

I wouldn't be satisfied with that, and probably wouldn't play the game multiplayer much, if at all, if that were the only multiplayer mode available (half of my playgroup wouldn't even buy the game).

However, I think this scenario is highly-unlikely. Even if they don't find an elegant solution for asynchronous time warp, the options for synchronous warp, such as voting or the host alone controlling warp (though these are far from ideal in my view) are much easier to conceptualise, design, and implement. I would certainly expect some form of multiplayer time warp, whether it's asynchronous, elegant or neither, to have been implemented by now.

Edited October 18, 2022 by Ashandalar

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

What if MP isn't full featured?  As in - they never found an elegant solution to the Warp Thing - but they do offer some kind of Sandbox MP, where players can load into a game with each other on Kerbin or some other place with a ship or rover and race (or whatever) without the possibility of warp? 

I doubt the warp problem is actually as bad as it sounds with us talking all these edge cases. A lot of folks use DMP and LMP so I doubt the fundamentals are unsolvable. I bet the harder issues are things we haven't talked about much in this thread like communication, permissions UI, how all this might or might not integrate with progression mechanics, shared resources in coop, etc. To be honest not long ago I wasn't really that excited about multiplayer and wouldn't have been bothered if it never came. Racing rovers seems like something I'd do once or twice, and I don't really care about dogfighting or anything like that. What does sound fun is doing big coop collaborations on bases and stations, and being able to use MP as a teaching tool. Even if this wasn't ready at launch and came out closer to console I think it would be worth getting it right so you could really play the full game with it. 

Edited October 18, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

2 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You just made me think about something. 

What if MP isn't full featured?  As in - they never found an elegant solution to the Warp Thing - but they do offer some kind of Sandbox MP, where players can load into a game with each other on Kerbin or some other place with a ship or rover and race (or whatever) without the possibility of warp? 

( the core game remains a SP experience, but there are MP features that players can take advantage of) 

How would you all react to that? 

 

I would still play it a bit because something is better than nothing, but that same sentiment means that I would prefer a broken implementation of full multiplayer to none at all, and I think that some implementations are easy to make happen. I’d still really prefer a good implementation though. 

Edited October 18, 2022 by t_v

[Guest]

18 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You just made me think about something. 

What if MP isn't full featured?  As in - they never found an elegant solution to the Warp Thing - but they do offer some kind of Sandbox MP, where players can load into a game with each other on Kerbin or some other place with a ship or rover and race (or whatever) without the possibility of warp? 

( the core game remains a SP experience, but there are MP features that players can take advantage of) 

How would you all react to that? 

 

Personally nothing (I would be disappointed, but that wouldn't prevent me from buying the game and enjoying the SP).

In my extended group of friends? Probably 1 or 2 copies sold instead of 10-15.

Edited October 19, 2022 by Master39

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

my extended group of friends? Probably 1 or 2 copies sold instead of 10-15

That seems really weird to me.  While I know a bunch of people who enjoy gaming, only two of them are likely to buy /enjoy KSP2 (and for broadly different reasons).  

Are you sure they are interested in KSP... Or just another MP 'Something'? 

[Guest]

19 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Are you sure they are interested in KSP... Or just another MP 'Something'? 

The difference being?

We played thousands of hours together in games like Modded Minecraft or Factorio but most of us never finished a single player run of Factorio.

I never finished either game alone and I'm not interested in doing so.

If KSP2 has a "complete" multiplayer experience we're probably going to do a full co-op run together. If that's not an option then the game is going to be just one of those "single player somethings" a few of us play while the others don't.

For all the time we spend playing Factorio you would assume that we all own and play Dyson Sphere Program and yet I'm the only one having brought it.

Edited October 20, 2022 by Master39

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 hours ago, Master39 said:

difference being

KSP is hard! 

[Superluminal Gremlin]

On 10/19/2022 at 1:42 AM, Pthigrivi said:

shared resources in coop

I don't think resources will be "shared" as in you can access materials off planet. Rather if you want to stuff and your friends have it then you have to go grab it.

 

I imagine that the UI for permission will have at least 1 of the following

- Chat and Swearing blockers

- Controlling others peoples craft (Could be useful in some cases, could be terrible)

-All the standard resources, graphics, difficulty settings