What does my seeing another player in open play depend on?

[Queebatron]

Hello all,

I sort of half-raised this question in a response to another thread, but I'm wondering, once the current standard beta "bubble" of systems is burst, and given the vastness of the available play area, what has to happen in order for human players to even see each other or interact? On what does that depend, apart from being within sensor range of each other in the same star system in-game (which I gather is referred to as an "island" and is currently limited to 32 players)?

1) Being logged in to the same geographically-nearby server? What does that imply for people who live far away (like me, in the Pacific NW of the US) from the bulk of the player base (currently in the UK and Western Europe)?

2) Neither player being blocked by the other?

What with the fact that there will eventually be a couple hundred thousand inhabited systems (with stations), and hundreds of billions more stars to journey to, and that at best only a few hundred thousand people worldwide will be online at a time, how likely are players to run into each other randomly? It seems that there would be a very low probability of this happening, especially if each server is running its own instance of the galaxy.

Anyway, if I'm misunderstanding the way it's going to work, or the network topology, please enlighten me. Links are appreciated too.

 

[McLaine]

As a base, the matchmaker will try and match you to players in similar geographic locations, with a similar ping time.

Blocking a player REDUCES the likelyhood you'll share an instance with them

Friending a player INCREASES the likelyhood you'll share an instance with them.

Playing in a private group further increases your chances of sharing an instance with those on your friends list, and reduces the chance you'll come accross other players blocked or not.

As I understand it, blocking a player, or playing in a private group, does not guarantee you'll not come across other players.

It is a bit more complex than this, but theres a thread in the design discussion archive that gives the full run down.

 

[ste]

Its just like call of duty really.

You pick a map - (fly to a destination)
Then the game matches you to suitable players who are also playing that map.(at that destination)
Its Peer to Peer just like COD too, so part of the matchmaking equation will be matching you to players of a similar ping time to yourself.

The players host the game so there isnt really a server location.

I'm not sure what the player limit is now, or what it will be in the future, probably as many as it will handle without blowing up. Or as little.

Maybe 8, 16, or 32. I would be surprised if they manage 32 or more. 16 would be my guess at best.

Ignore list - decreases the chance of meeting up
Friends - increase the chance of meeting up.

Theres probably other things considered as well.

At the minute though its not really working properly.

What it needs to aim at is... say if there are 2 people in the same area with suitable pings that they should be visible to each other. I would guess we would still be split up at times if this happened currently.

 

[Zenicetus]

Its just like call of duty really.

You pick a map - (fly to a destination)
Then the game matches you to suitable players who are also playing that map.(at that destination)

Not quite, because the instances aren't static and based on locations in the Galaxy.

As I understand it, you're always flying inside an "Island" instance bubble of a certain size, centered on your ship. If another player is flying nearby, and your two instance bubbles overlap far enough to include each other's ships, you see the other player. Your bubble can (currently) contain up to 32 players. Aside from that, the Friend and Ignore priority, as well as the P2P connection stability works as mentioned earlier in the thread.

I don't know how physically large your traveling instance bubble is (does anyone know?), but obviously it's large enough to contain all the stuff that goes on around a station, or in one of the conflict zones.

 

[Queebatron]

ste, if there's no server location, what's the IP address that I connect to in standard beta all about?

So given the two responses so far, all other things being equal, ping time seems most important, and that depends mostly on IRL geographic location. Thus it seems that the more remote the player (some unlucky soul playing in Hawaii, for instance), the less likely he/she is to see another player, correct?

 

[ste]

Not really, I dont know what the ping limits are. Say if its 200ms you could probably ping under that to the UK I bet.

Yeah, the server thing confuses me aswell.

 

[Adept]

I'm not sure what the player limit is now, or what it will be in the future, probably as many as it will handle without blowing up. Or as little.

Maybe 8, 16, or 32. I would be surprised if they manage 32 or more. 16 would be my guess at best.
.

I think there was a recent message about island size having been raised from 16 to 32. They are dynamically rowing bubbles as well, not fixed groups.

 

[Zenicetus]

ste, if there's no server location, what's the IP address that I connect to in standard beta all about?

Someone more knowledgeable may jump in here, but I think that's a server that handles account login, savegame loading, and then acts as a matchmaker to find other players for loading into your traveling Island. The main connection between players running in realtime is a direct P2P connection between those players' individual computers.

That's why it's heavily dependent on each player's computer and network stability (including firewall settings and so on). You can have a massively fast and solid Internet connection, but you'll still see another player glitch, or not load into your Island at all, if their own connection is flaky.

So given the two responses so far, all other things being equal, ping time seems most important, and that depends mostly on IRL geographic location. Thus it seems that the more remote the player (some unlucky soul playing in Hawaii, for instance), the less likely he/she is to see another player, correct?

Ping time, but also other things like whether a player's firewall is acting up, their ISP is slowing anything down, etc. And they may be segregated by timezone, at least for random player loading. I'm in the Pacific Northwest USA, and if I have someone on a Friend list located in the UK, the game will try to preferentially load that player in, as long as we're in the same area. But it's not guaranteed. Same thing for Private Online groups.

 

[Queebatron]

Ah, a fellow PNW resident (I'm in Portland). BTW, is your avatar Dr. Smith from the old Lost in Space series (I'm dating myself there--they were showing reruns of that in the early '70s when I was a kid)?

 

[Zenicetus]

Ah, a fellow PNW resident (I'm in Portland). BTW, is your avatar Dr. Smith from the old Lost in Space series (I'm dating myself there--they were showing reruns of that in the early '70s when I was a kid)?

Aha! We may meet in space one day, then!

He does look kinda like Dr. Smith, now that you mention it. No, that's Walter Frederick "Fred" Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee (A.K.A. "Pluto Platter"). He was also a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in WW2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Frederick_Morrison

I needed a geezer image to fit my increasingly decrepit age, and that one seemed to fit. I'm much handsomer in real life, of course.

 

[Orion03]

How do I add people to friends list? I have players friend request me but I don't know how to accept

 

[Queebatron]

How do I add people to friends list? I have players friend request me but I don't know how to accept

I've only sent Friend Req's out, but I assume that their names appear with a little arrow on the right, which shows a drop down list when you click on it. The names on my friends list have that, and the options are "unfriend" "block" and "back".

 

[Orion03]

do they still have to be in contact range for me to do this?

 

[Hellhawk666]

How do I add people to friends list? I have players friend request me but I don't know how to accept

You can only do it from the main menu at the moment, not in-game. Go to "Friends" from the main menu and it's self explanatory how to accept.

 

[Hellhawk666]

Someone more knowledgeable may jump in here, but I think that's a server that handles account login, savegame loading, and then acts as a matchmaker to find other players for loading into your traveling Island. The main connection between players running in realtime is a direct P2P connection between those players' individual computers.
...

Pretty much this. The server(s) also handle the background economy database and all the other details that can be dynamically influenced by players, but are essentially static and need to be referenced by everyone "simultaneously".

The client deals with the server for some things, but when encounters happen a lot of that is handled in P2P.

The commonly accepted knowledge is that it's the amount of variation in individual connections that gives rise to most of the flaky behaviour in multiplayer. In the dev's own environment where all of the testing happens over a fast, reliable intranet and everyone's machines and connections are essentially identical the vast majority of issues we players see probably never occur.