Elite / Frontier What is it?

[Bungarus]

you mean get around the problem with a server bubble kinda thing?

Well did he mean that? And what exactly is a "server bubble"? Google was not helpful.

In spirit the MMO version of Elite would still be single-player Elite, but with real people flying the other ships. PC's instead of NPCs, basically. It need not change out of recognition.

What you say is: The game mechanics can be basically the same with only the NPCs being replaced by human pilots. I agree.

But you can't call this "an MMOG which in spirit is still single-player, but with real people flying the other ships" because this is an oxymoron. (-: Single-player is defined as only one human character in the game; as soon as all the other characters are also human, it has no resemblance with that what defines a single-player game as single-player whatsoever.

You could have some resemblance in places if NPCs are still included, like the Conflux in Jumpgate. If you go hunting Flux there in deep space with no other human pilot nearby it feels similar to fighting pirates or Thargoids in Elite I-III.

And of course you can still be playing sort of "single" in the sense that you interact no more than necessary with other players: don't join a guild, never fly with wingmen, avoid areas of conflict etc. Still it will be inevitable to have encounters with human pilots.

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

If you are unable to interact easily with the other players, then it's still effectively you against the rest of the world. It would be no different from single player Elite other than the received messages would be cruder and the enemys that much more dangerous.

 

[Bungarus]

Encounters are not always dangerous, more often they are rather friendly and sometimes they are quite useful. As a newbie you recieve a lot of help, as an advanced player you sometimes meet like-minded players which results in long term cooperation, or someone who simply has short-term-plans that suit yours. For instance in Jumpgate I was fluxing while doing missions one day when I met a miner who had problems getting some Flux off his back in his mining ship, so I killed them and he gave me valuable tips for mining in return.

So encounters are mostly friendly. At least this was my experience in two MMOGs. Three if you count Second Life as an MMOG - I could understand if you don't - which I took a look at recently. (I have a new video card but my joystick is still broken, so I thought now or never.)

On the other hand of course it is usually harder to fight against human pilots than against NPCs.

 

[steve tyler]

yeh i made up the term 'server bubble' as i couldn't think of any other way of describing it.. i'm sure there's a better and correct term for it.

so essentially you have a whole lot of people attached to a master server, but as a player you'll only be connected to a restricted number of people, people close to you physically in the game and real world if available.

If you had vast numbers of players all in one system, or in one starbase, you might only see a few of them at a time, with some popping in and out of the "bubble" you're in... i guess it worked ok in Test Drive. In games with a dedicated server you could have more players visible at a time, but however it works there has to be a cap right? otherwise massive slowdown and lag is inevitable. So lets say you asked all the other players in the entire game to meet at some spacestation, well you'll only see 64, 128 players? perhaps more but it seems unlikely. even though there could be thousands of people there when you jump in it would be impossible to even connect to everyone and impossible for a server to transmit all that data in real time to everyone. Especially in the UK, where the internet is just awful for most of us... so anyway, you have to have some way of dealing with that i think.

 

[steve tyler]

oh as for NPC's i could see a lot of 'traffic' computer generated ships flying here and there... to really make it feel populated. and there are bound to be computer generated people in spacestations and so on.

Perhaps there will be military campaigns running dynamically, where you participate in large battles along with AI's following dynamically generated orders... perhaps if you ascend the ranks you could become a general or whatever and start commanding them and the other human pilots who wanted to join your fleet. just some wild ideas, but just to re-iterate, the game will surely need NPC's AI's just for clutter, traffic, mission generation and making the worlds feel populated.

 

[Steve O B Have]

oh as for NPC's i could see a lot of 'traffic' computer generated ships flying here and there... to really make it feel populated. and there are bound to be computer generated people in spacestations and so on.

Perhaps there will be military campaigns running dynamically, where you participate in large battles along with AI's following dynamically generated orders... perhaps if you ascend the ranks you could become a general or whatever and start commanding them and the other human pilots who wanted to join your fleet. just some wild ideas, but just to re-iterate, the game will surely need NPC's AI's just for clutter, traffic, mission generation and making the worlds feel populated.

I'd be all over that - getting involved in a military campaign, running courier runs, covert missions all that good stuff. I agree - getting traffic in the busy centres, ships coming and going, docked in ports. So much scope always would present a difficulty enabling the player to stay focussed but still get the feeling of being 'in the thick of it'.

 

[Bungarus]

I would prefer no limit for players per server. How should that be done other than against logic? I'd rather live with lag. If a place becomes too laggy, I guess pilots will avoid it for a while and that should regularize the situation. In the MMOGs I played I never experienced such a limit. In Mankind (Space-RTS-MMOG) sometimes one could not move ships into a system because it was already too crowded with ships, but you could still enter the system without (new) ships. I must admit I have no particular insight in the technical side of things though.

How do you think a "server bubble" could implement sense for time compression in multiplayer? Players who are on a server (bubble) where another player or a group of other players is / are about to use time compression get thrown off the "bubble"/server with a message on screen saying "You are offline" or "You have been transfered to another server (bubble)"? I would hardly see any sense in this.

Concerning an MMOG the necessity of NPCs depends on certain factors for me. In an RTS game I find them superfluous, in a space sim it it depends on the number of players if NPCs are of importance to me. In a big space MMOG where thousands of pilots are always online I would not miss them. If it is a niche game where perhaps 100 pilots online at the same time it may become boring without them sometimes. I see there is a sort of player though who likes playing an MMOG but who prefers to avoid PvP as much as possible, so to give these players something to shoot at NPCs are inevitable I guess.

 

[steve tyler]

I'm sure we would all like a game like this, where there are no limits. Xbox's and PS3's are finite systems and you could still do a lot with these systems, and even the mightiest PC with an awesome internet connection will choke eventually. As a developer of a game like this, you want to ensure a smooth experience for your customers - which is essential for a simulator game like E4, moreso than something like world of warcraft - or the game will get tons of complaints and will not become popular. E4's combat for example, if its anything like the previous games, is like a mixture of a space flight simulator and a first person shooter. It's bad enough trying to play a shooter like MW2 on a bad computer, or with a poor connection that causes lag... And if you're shooting at something small and fast, it can be very difficult to land a shot on your enemies hull in the previous games. Whacking massive orcs with a big hammer doesn't take the same level of precision and timing, nor does instructing a unit to do *something*. I suppose i'm really saying that certain types of gameplay can support different numbers of people and performance is not so critical in some games so these tend to be the games that are closest to being truely massively multiplayer.

 

[Bungarus]

I think you are too pessimistic. There are space-MMOGs out there, even a quite old one like Jumpgate, that work pretty well technically. When I played Jumpgate for the first time years ago it was still with a low bandwidth connection and I didn't have any problems. And user numbers at the time where higher than nowadays.

 

[Steve O B Have]

...Whacking massive orcs with a big hammer doesn't take the same level of precision and timing, nor does instructing a unit to do *something*. I suppose i'm really saying that certain types of gameplay can support different numbers of people and performance is not so critical in some games so these tend to be the games that are closest to being truely massively multiplayer.

I agree, what the solution is really down to is latency on your internet connection and servers big enough to deal with quantities of users and information.

Thankfully these are out there now and our internet connections are catching up.