KSP 2 Multiplayer Discussion Thread

[Bej Kerman]

4 hours ago, Beerasaurus said:

I'm way more concerned about how they're going to handle things like Science and Kerbucks across multiplayer. I'm seriously torn whether I think you should absolutely be allowed to hop in to your buddy's game just as they're about to unlock an achievement and get it as well, or whether that fundamentally breaks the game.

I'd imagine with the new colonies, the game will be able to generate new space centers (with their own science and kerbucks) for new players. Besides that, achievements might be saved per-save as with games like Minecraft.

Edited July 1, 2021 by Bej Kerman

[MKI]

(getting into this topic just now and not about to read all that came before sorry)

Are there any official updates to how multiplayer will work in KSP 2? 

 

I know it's been confirmed KSP 2 provides a few features that KSP 1 doesn't have, that may have an impact on how any KSP 1 multiplayer mods work. Stuff like "automatically executable burns" might make the idea of "divergent timelines" unnecessary if your kerbals can execute tasks for you regardless of time-warp or if your focused on something else at a given time. 

 

My only requirements for the mode would be:

1. The solution is simple enough it doesn't require a flow-chart to explain to my friend how to meetup... because that will turn off so many new people it may dissuade people from playing the single version experience because their multiplayer experience was too convoluted. 

2. It must support the idea of my and my friend blowing ourselves up in "real-time" within the "same localized space". KSP is the game where you come for the explosions, and stay for the science. If the game is to have multiplayer it must support that sort of gameplay or I'd say multiplayer has failed. Players must be able to experience the same stuff at the same time within the same space, but not necessarily the same craft. If me and a friend want to go have a ground race on the sands of Duna, this game better let me. 

 

If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on Minecraft's "sleep" mechanic. Where timewarp is only allowed when everyone agrees on a given jump. If KSP 2 allows more automation, leaving your kerbals to execute a task while you "jump ahead" cuts down on some busy-work, and allows you to let your friend complete their mission in the "future". Things would probably get more hairy the more people are involved, but I don't really believe KSP works well with huge numbers of people "all just doing their own thing". With too many people "doing their own thing" things get too impersonal, and a traditional "share my save" single-player mechanic would work just as well without having to force other's of having to deal with dramatic time-weirdness.

 

If you can watch/help you friend execute their tasks, see them fail learn and succeed in real time with them. That is what I'd want from KSP multiplayer.

 

 

 

[Linky]

53 minutes ago, MKI said:

If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on Minecraft's "sleep" mechanic. Where timewarp is only allowed when everyone agrees on a given jump. If KSP 2 allows more automation, leaving your kerbals to execute a task while you "jump ahead" cuts down on some busy-work, and allows you to let your friend complete their mission in the "future". Things would probably get more hairy the more people are involved, but I don't really believe KSP works well with huge numbers of people "all just doing their own thing". With too many people "doing their own thing" things get too impersonal, and a traditional "share my save" single-player mechanic would work just as well without having to force other's of having to deal with dramatic time-weirdness.

I kinda doubt it will be like the Minecraft "sleep". With the scale of distance in this game, that would be unpractical. 5 years to another star system IN REAL TIME as other people are doing their own thing would be terrible for almost every party involved. My own personal bet is that they already have a decent plan in place, and everything that this entire thread has guessed is wrong. There have been good ideas, don't get me wrong. But most of them are either far too simple or far too complex.

[MKI]

12 minutes ago, Linky said:

5 years to another star system IN REAL TIME as other people are doing their own thing would be terrible for almost every party involved.

5 years in real time is unreasonable (duh), so everyone needs to commit to a time warp for that.

A better example would be more common tasks, like circularize an orbit in 20 minutes. Sitting around for 20 minutes is boring in itself, but situations like this are solved if the game supports automating this task. Then it's less about sitting around for 20 minutes, and more about setting up a future node your kerbals will execute for you in 20 minutes regardless of what your doing. This not only leaves you able to agree to other people's time warps, but also frees you up to do other stuff, including other missions, building or doing stuff with other people your playing with.

The goal isn't to focus on executing everyone's tasks out of warp, rather its to execute more tasks within warps, so you can warp to what you (and what the people your playing with) care about. 

You could make an argument that the game shouldn't make those tasks so easy, and I'd agree except if your playing with other people that don't care about you executing that maneuver, then you shouldn't care about it much either and let the game execute that ask for you, so again you can focus on what the people your playing with want to focus on.

A key aspect of multiplayer should be having multiple players within the same context to observe what your doing when out of warps. So if you and your friends are building a station, when one friend gets to the station and needs to dock, warps are off. But all players should be able to more or less "setup" what their missions are doing if they aren't important, switch context to what the friend docking is doing, watch them succeed/fail, then jump back to what they were doing before hand, or if you don't care about their docking procedure you go check on other missions during the "non-warp" period. If everyone is just "waiting", then everyone can agree to warp to what matters next thing together.

My ideal KSP multiplayer is a shared experience, rather than a shared sandbox, but that means coordination is key to deal with time warps. It's a simple enough concept to understand since its essentially what you'd do by yourself, except you only need to coordinate with yourself on when to warp so you don't crash some other mission out there. The idea breaks down if one wanted to just go out and do their own thing thru time, but I personally think playing that way is just single-player with shared saved data, which technically can be supported right now.

Yes a shared warp scheme forces you to coordinate when/what is going on... but I feel like that should be the point of multiplayer in a game like this and in that sense KSP becomes more of a "team game", except your playing against the environment the game creates.(space physics)  Remove some of the "busy-work" to the kerbals themselves and your more or less left with stuff you'd like to see your friend accomplish (or fail).

 

18 minutes ago, Linky said:

My own personal bet is that they already have a decent plan in place, and everything that this entire thread has guessed is wrong.

I agree, they have to already have a plan and are executing it. Everything in this thread is essentially speculation.

But due to the sheer amount of ideas, I'm sure someone, or multiple people have gotten close. 

 

 

 

[Missingno200]

Personally, I think LMP has it down pat. Not the vote-to-warp option, thats been explored both in Minecraft and DMP/LMP's settings  and quickly gets out of control and difficult when you have 4 or more people, but rather the independent warps solution. You don't need a flowchart to understand it when you witness it in action, the problem here is that almost no one here seemingly PLAYED with LMP, and unfortunately, the system is better left seen than explained.

 

On a related note, hey mods can we get LMP and DMP to be pointed out as acronyms for Light Multiplayer and Dark Multiplayer?

Edited July 2, 2021 by Missingno200
Hi mods.

[Guest]

14 hours ago, MKI said:

(getting into this topic just now and not about to read all that came before sorry)

Are there any official updates to how multiplayer will work in KSP 2? 

 

I know it's been confirmed KSP 2 provides a few features that KSP 1 doesn't have, that may have an impact on how any KSP 1 multiplayer mods work. Stuff like "automatically executable burns" might make the idea of "divergent timelines" unnecessary if your kerbals can execute tasks for you regardless of time-warp or if your focused on something else at a given time. 

 

My only requirements for the mode would be:

1. The solution is simple enough it doesn't require a flow-chart to explain to my friend how to meetup... because that will turn off so many new people it may dissuade people from playing the single version experience because their multiplayer experience was too convoluted. 

2. It must support the idea of my and my friend blowing ourselves up in "real-time" within the "same localized space". KSP is the game where you come for the explosions, and stay for the science. If the game is to have multiplayer it must support that sort of gameplay or I'd say multiplayer has failed. Players must be able to experience the same stuff at the same time within the same space, but not necessarily the same craft. If me and a friend want to go have a ground race on the sands of Duna, this game better let me. 

 

If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on Minecraft's "sleep" mechanic. Where timewarp is only allowed when everyone agrees on a given jump. If KSP 2 allows more automation, leaving your kerbals to execute a task while you "jump ahead" cuts down on some busy-work, and allows you to let your friend complete their mission in the "future". Things would probably get more hairy the more people are involved, but I don't really believe KSP works well with huge numbers of people "all just doing their own thing". With too many people "doing their own thing" things get too impersonal, and a traditional "share my save" single-player mechanic would work just as well without having to force other's of having to deal with dramatic time-weirdness.

 

If you can watch/help you friend execute their tasks, see them fail learn and succeed in real time with them. That is what I'd want from KSP multiplayer.

There are 2 ways of dealing with timewarp:

1) you don't.

You either vote or the server deals with everything manually, everyone has to wait for every other player action, past 2 or 3 players it effectively becomes a turn-based game, just marginally better than sharing a save here on the forums.

2) you have the game dealing with it automatically.

The Devs in a meeting deal with all the flowcharts, the mechanics and the complexities and then implement a solution in the game.

You, the player, don't have to understand any of that, just knowing that if you want to sync up and play in real time with anoter player you have to just press a button in the map view, and the game does the rest.

 

There's no risk for any solution they came up with to remove the ability of playing in real-time since that's the whole point of having a system to deal with asynchronous timewarp.

The point of multiplayer is to play together, not to be forced to have half a keyboard and half a mouse each, having 2 different space programs in the same save file collaborating on some missions (ex. Duna exploration) while competing in other (i.e. building the first off-Kerbin launch site) is absolutely a valid and desirable style of play.

[Pthigrivi]

@OHara did a great job explaining Luna Multiplayer here. It sounds like a pretty solid framework. I agree that you need to allow players to engage in the same physics bubble, but its equally if not more important that players can collaborate while separated by weeks or years because of long interplanetary and interstellar transit times. So long as you can prevent paradoxes through non-interactive craft it should be fine. There are of course people who will race rovers and do dogfights but at its heart ksp is not a racing or combat game. Its a game about building and exploring, and most of the time you don’t necessarily need or want to share a physics bubble to do that. 

Edited July 4, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Hadur III]

On 8/19/2019 at 9:10 PM, Johnster_Space_Program said:

So, how do you think multiplayer, a thing we've all (or some) of us wanted in ksp for some time and are now getting in KSP 2, will work? My idea is that there might be a create server thing and after you create a server you can invite players to the server and build with them in real time. Maybe there will be a space-race mode where you can play against someone else and try and beat them to the mun or another moon or planet. But that's just my idea, what about you? (Edit: I guess this has now turned into a discussion thread, you can express your thoughts about the addition of multiplayer)

Two modes:

Space Race (vs mode): 2 or more players, each one in its own world, have to be the first to finish a given objective. Limited amount time warp. A window shows to everyone the players' status in real time (building rocket, on launchpad, flying, time warping, money spent, number of launches, etc)

 

Private Space Agency (coop mode) : Only the owner can time warp. Others can ask to warp. One can build the rocket, while other is flying on another rocket, while other is on AEV...  awesome.

[Missingno200]

49 minutes ago, Hadur III said:

Two modes:

Space Race (vs mode): 2 or more players, each one in its own world, have to be the first to finish a given objective. Limited amount time warp. A window shows to everyone the players' status in real time (building rocket, on launchpad, flying, time warping, money spent, number of launches, etc)

 

Private Space Agency (coop mode) : Only the owner can time warp. Others can ask to warp. One can build the rocket, while other is flying on another rocket, while other is on AEV...  awesome.

I agree with the game modes, despise how you are handling them. Ask to timewarp sucks, and owner being allowed to timewarp makes things even worse. How about the timewarp we've had in modded KSP for literally years and is proven to work. Also, there's no reason for it to be multiple worlds, we have confirmed multiple KSCs.

[Bej Kerman]

On 7/1/2021 at 11:25 PM, MKI said:

1. The solution is simple enough it doesn't require a flow-chart to explain to my friend how to meetup... because that will turn off so many new people it may dissuade people from playing the single version experience because their multiplayer experience was too convoluted. 

I believe this is an inescapable nuisance given the fact that this is supposed to be a game about learning your way about maneuvering through orbits. Simplifying orbital mechanics in any way would lean into earlier beliefs that KSP 2 would be baby-proofing the game, and we don't want that. Orbits are challenging; meeting up with your friend will probably require both sides know how to fly.

[Missingno200]

3 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I believe this is an inescapable nuisance given the fact that this is supposed to be a game about learning your way about maneuvering through orbits. Simplifying orbital mechanics in any way would lean into earlier beliefs that KSP 2 would be baby-proofing the game, and we don't want that. Orbits are challenging; meeting up with your friend will probably require both sides know how to fly.

I don't think that's quite what he meant. He meant to get around the time paradoxes themselves... which as pointed out earlier, is still a bad track to be on, since only the game designers and the game itself need to know how to solve such paradoxes behind the scenes, not you.

[SingABrightSong]

I'm just waiting for the procedural galaxy mod, the FTL mod, and the weapons mod to make discount Elite: Dangerous.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

only the game designers and the game itself need to know how to solve such paradoxes behind the scenes, not you.

Which is where this debate should have died 19 pages and 2 years ago.

[MKI]

7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I believe this is an inescapable nuisance given the fact that this is supposed to be a game about learning your way about maneuvering through orbits. Simplifying orbital mechanics in any way would lean into earlier beliefs that KSP 2 would be baby-proofing the game, and we don't want that. Orbits are challenging; meeting up with your friend will probably require both sides know how to fly.

I was specifically pointing out the complexities of some "time-travel/paradox-proof" multiplayer solution, not simplifying core game play orbital mechanics. 

 

Its true I pointed out "automated executed burns", in that your kerbals will execute maneuver nodes you have setup while your are warping into the future. But as far as I know this is a confirmed game-play mechanic, which is something that can be leveraged with multiplayer, and I don't see it impacting the "learning" aspect of the game all that much.

 

 

 

 

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, MKI said:

But as far as I know this is a confirmed game-play mechanic, which is something that can be leveraged with multiplayer, 

Is it? I know they said there will be some form of automated milk-run system but it might just be magic resource transfers from place to place on a schedule. Don't get me wrong there are forms of flight automation I'd like to see but I don't think they've been confirmed.

[MKI]

4 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Is it? I know they said there will be some form of automated milk-run system but it might just be magic resource transfers from place to place on a schedule. Don't get me wrong there are forms of flight automation I'd like to see but I don't think they've been confirmed.

AFAIK it stems from the fact most of the interstellar craft must execute their burns "in warp" as no one is going to sit around for 5 days executing a transfer burn using an Orion engine to get to a percentage of light speed. 

Sure maybe you just need to "start" the burn out of warp, and leave it "burning" while in warp while setting an alarm to stop it later but it doesn't seem like too far fetched to just have a kerbal hit the button for you at the right time if they are the one's "holding the stick" for 5 days anyways. 

 

 

 

[Pthigrivi]

@MKI Oh of course. Forgot about that. And yeah it should certainly be possible to set those to burn and then change focus to do other things for a couple of years before they have to flip around and decelerate. 

[Hadur III]

10 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

I agree with the game modes, despise how you are handling them. Ask to timewarp sucks, and owner being allowed to timewarp makes things even worse. How about the timewarp we've had in modded KSP for literally years and is proven to work. Also, there's no reason for it to be multiple worlds, we have confirmed multiple KSCs.

It's because I dont know how the modded KSP timewarp on multiplayer is.

I suppose timewarp is really a problem to implement on a multiplayer game. Thats why im proposing solutions.

 

So if it's a space race, almost everything can run on clients, and the sever will be only to gather and validade some client's data then show it.

 

And if its a co-op i think synchronism is a core thing. I don't want to be on a rocket or airplane and suddenly somebody TimeWarp 10x ...   

[Hadur III]

Maybe a vote for warp is a good idea. So, if i am in a rocket, and i need skip 2 days. I click on warp and everyone receives non intrusive message, to allow,  delay, or ignore.  If everybody allows, than i can warp freely until i stop. 

In this case, if somebody else is on AEV, and a timewarp request appears. He/she can enter in a vehicle before accept the warp, or maybe if  some dangerous action is going on he/she can delay or ignore the request until he/she resolve the problem.

[SpruceRory]

It would probably be fun to play with you're friends but I want to know can two people control the same ship.

[Dientus]

11 hours ago, SpruceRory said:

It would probably be fun to play with you're friends but I want to know can two people control the same ship.

Has to be the one in the driver's seat.

But if you think a little deeper about it... Hmmm.. what if you and another player enter the vessel at the same time how would you decide at that point? A pop-up box? And what if it's not agreed upon who flies the craft?

[MKI]

1 hour ago, Dientus said:

But if you think a little deeper about it... Hmmm.. what if you and another player enter the vessel at the same time how would you decide at that point? A pop-up box? And what if it's not agreed upon who flies the craft?

I like the idea of being able to "hand over the stick" between 2 players focusing on the same craft, along with the idea of "observing" the same craft.

I can't see 2 players having control over the same craft at the same time being necessary though haha.

[Dientus]

1 hour ago, MKI said:

I like the idea of being able to "hand over the stick" between 2 players focusing on the same craft, along with the idea of "observing" the same craft.

I can't see 2 players having control over the same craft at the same time being necessary though haha.

I am curious how they will handle that ingame. I can see a dramatic power struggle brewing between Jeb and Val

 

[PlutoISaPlanet]

Im more foxised on the massive multiplayer aspect (the devs never said it would be a mmo but a lot of what has been revealed makes me infer it will be along those lines).

[Redneck]

On 7/2/2021 at 6:21 AM, Missingno200 said:

Personally, I think LMP has it down pat. Not the vote-to-warp option, thats been explored both in Minecraft and DMP/LMP's settings  and quickly gets out of control and difficult when you have 4 or more people, but rather the independent warps solution. You don't need a flowchart to understand it when you witness it in action, the problem here is that almost no one here seemingly PLAYED with LMP, and unfortunately, the system is better left seen than explained.

 

On a related note, hey mods can we get LMP and DMP to be pointed out as acronyms for Light Multiplayer and Dark Multiplayer?

LMP only fails because its limited to KSP fails such as the games positioning system. Darklight has pointed this out many times. Requests by the LMP and other devs have fallen on KSP devs deaf ears.  Have you ever wondered why a parked craft on a runway tends to slowly slide one way with brakes on?  Remember all the problems with the landing gears and tires? Ever wonder why the game trys to freak out when transitioning from surface (packed and unpacked) to orbit? Or how the craft freaks out when doing a atmospheric reentry?  Yeah......thats all on KSP! But hey we got planet/part revamps and plushie toys 

Edited July 14, 2021 by Redneck