Online play?

Omegaflare · Post by **Omegaflare** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:40

Is it possible for anyone to mod a game that allows online play? Thx

The_Abyss · Post by **The_Abyss** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:44

X3 is single player only.

Apothos · Post by **Apothos** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:44

It's very unlikely.

The_Abyss · Post by **The_Abyss** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:45

And also improbable.

Apothos · Post by **Apothos** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:48

Which, funnily enough, i just defined. ;P

The_Abyss · Post by **The_Abyss** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:51

People will start talking at all this much attention to a simple "Is it online" thread.

General Dave · Post by **General Dave** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 03:57

There seems to be a lot of attention from moderators for such a simple is this online thread....

I just thought i'd break up the long line of moderator tags on the left hand side.

Also it's definately not possible for 'anyone' to mod a game, you'de have tobe a computer whizz with several years of free time and a decent team of programmers and such like.

reddsm · Post by **reddsm** » Sun, 27. Nov 05, 05:40

While much has been said (both for and against) mplayer in X3, I would like to request that the dev team consider a co-op multiplayer mode for a future version.

I think it would be neat to have a small group of my friends and I working for the same company in the same game universe fighting to build an empire.

Rival groups of players in a game like this would just be painful though since it takes so long to achieve any goals. You don't want to spend hours and hours getting money up for a new station, buying the stuff, placing it, and working out the parameters just to have some joe come along and take it down in less than 5 minutes just because he can. Perhaps if you want a competitive game you can do it through competing economics and/or political means and leave fighting between player factions out of the equation maybe.

But a co-op game, even if limited to just 2 players, would be a good start in the multiplayer direction I think.

Anyway... just an idea....

-- Redd

daedalao · Post by **daedalao** » Tue, 29. Nov 05, 04:50

In theory it would be possible to make this game with some kind of co-op. I'm not sure if anyone has tried the Morrowind Online mod, but it has taken steps in the right direction. You have to use an external program that creates an NPC where in theory the other player is located. It uses a log file to update co-ordinates, which is very slow due to not having any write-combining errors (This means it updates once every 3 seconds). At one point there was talk of utilizing RAM to update player positions, the benefit of this is that the updates can happen as fast as your ram can handle. But recommended I'd say about once every 10-60ms.

The only reason I don't see this working for X3 might be the copy protection in place, but I don't see why it wouldn't allow for a mod like this to be run. Anyways, hi

Deiform · Post by **Deiform** » Tue, 29. Nov 05, 04:57

it's quite possible that someone will make a mod for it as it is a good idea and it will most likely bring them quite a bit of fame. Although, handling the mod online will prove a problem as the users themselves will have to host like on Freelancer and so forth

DJSoulJammer · Post by **DJSoulJammer** » Tue, 29. Nov 05, 05:29

Waste of time to even ask this question !!!! |||Imagine the game you play and 10 conected like that and how BIG have to be server and how much Procesors have to run and what kind OF RAM will have , not to say any thing about how many Reptors will have to have and runing maybe 20 000 RPM speed and still will not be good to play in like that on line ,heheheh funy some one even can ask this .Not to say also any thing about cooling that place ,maybe will be on north pol good

.And some how to bridge save file folders out of system folder to few other Hd-s and even game system folder to put it or bridge on few Hd-s also .pheww can not even think how damn complicated will be even thinking make me worry ,what about actualy trying to put this in work ,or other solution some how shrink game drasticlly and limite people to have just 2 fabs and no other much ships flying free in space but just bots and not trading any thing and ohhh my holly god to long ........

Very stupid of me saying this

reddsm · Post by **reddsm** » Tue, 29. Nov 05, 10:38

I'm not sure why you think it would take so much hardware to run the server side of a mplayer version of the game. Seems to me that the majority of the performance issues with the game are all graphics related. The game already manages to keep up with the economy and AI ship movments quite easily

In mplayer games, graphics would remain an individual client machine issue, and I can't see that there would be that terribly much overhead from just tracking a few hundred, or even thousand new stations and ships in the game world.

You'd possibly see some issues if there were several pitched battles at the same time, but if the mplayer engine were setup in a peer server arrangment you can just have the game delegate processing the sectors with such battles to the different peers in response to the load.

In a peer server setup you could possibly see inprovements in overall game performance since you could split routine processess up among different client machines.... probblably just a matter of splitting up processing of various sectors to the differnet peers.

But I don't think you can do this with log-file shipping or a simple mod. But it wouldn't be a drastic thing to add in X4 or a later X3 expension perhaps.

Now, for MMORPG style games you are in a whole new ballpark... but you use server farms for that and scale new hardware out as needed by increasing load. Whole different game engine required for MMORPGs though.

Post by **Cycrow** » Tue, 29. Nov 05, 11:47

actaully the main performance problems will be the CPU usage rather than the graphics, as it has a full dynamic universe that is always processing every sector station and ship

multiplayer would increase the number of stations and ship around, making it even more CPU intensive, you can imanage if you have something like 4 players, will with a few hundred stations and ships

DJSoulJammer · Post by **DJSoulJammer** » Tue, 29. Nov 05, 16:59

Cycrow wrote:actaully the main performance problems will be the CPU usage rather than the graphics, as it has a full dynamic universe that is always processing every sector station and ship

multiplayer would increase the number of stations and ship around, making it even more CPU intensive, you can imanage if you have something like 4 players, will with a few hundred stations and ships

Right and more ,other think is to see all other trading ships from AI so many in space and many many more ,there is no chanse they can do that .See only how your PC working on after you play game just for week and have some fabs stations ,man this is just waste of time definitlly ,becouse is to complex to do any think like that and require system that is little to huge to run it ,I just don't want to imagine 10 people playing game what will happen after 2 weeks .

reddsm · Post by **reddsm** » Wed, 30. Nov 05, 16:57

In a 4 player setup, each person's computer would only have to process 1/4th the game's universe. How would that slow the game universe down exactly?

The game world is already broken down into nice neat little compartmentalized pieces (sectors) so it wouldn't be a huge task to just ship each piece around to multiple coordinating peer computers.

Of course a lot of that depends on how the game was written, but assuming the game engine was as well designed as it appears it shouldn't be an impossible task.

Though I was thinking you'd keep the number of players small, 2 to 4 at most just because you don't need huge numbers of human players to make the game enjoyable. Mplayer would be about a few people sharing a game experience, more than competing with strangers in an online deathmatch.

Post by **Cycrow** » Wed, 30. Nov 05, 17:09

thats not how network games work, the load between the universe is not split up between the computers, but rather, you have a server that process the game for all your players, then this data is sent to the client computers to allow them to render everything to screen

so adding more players will most certainly increase the CPU load required

even thou X3 is broken down into sectors, it stil lprocesses all sectors in the universe, not just the ones the player is in

AgtSmith · Post by **AgtSmith** » Wed, 30. Nov 05, 18:06

DJSoulJammer wrote:Waste of time to even ask this question !!!! |||Imagine the game you play and 10 conected like that and how BIG have to be server and how much Procesors have to run and what kind OF RAM will have , not to say any thing about how many Reptors will have to have and runing maybe 20 000 RPM speed and still will not be good to play in like that on line ,heheheh funy some one even can ask this .Not to say also any thing about cooling that place ,maybe will be on north pol good .And some how to bridge save file folders out of system folder to few other Hd-s and even game system folder to put it or bridge on few Hd-s also .pheww can not even think how damn complicated will be even thinking make me worry ,what about actualy trying to put this in work ,or other solution some how shrink game drasticlly and limite people to have just 2 fabs and no other much ships flying free in space but just bots and not trading any thing and ohhh my holly god to long ........

Very stupid of me saying this

It could actually be done quite easily - IE Eve Online. only a few things like SETA drives and some others would have to be dropped though as real time live prevents it. By done I mean the game could be run online, but it is something the developers would hav eto do - no MOD can change core engine items such as the complete absense of netcode and such without a complete rebuild from the source code and SDK and scripting tools don't give that much acecess.

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Online play?

Online play?