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kberg wrote:
**I think that for a massive multiplayer game, a more diverse and rich environment would have a cooler effect. Imagine going off into one section of the galaxy, building up a reasonable fortune and ship, and returning only to find that everything has changed and you're not as powerful as you thought... I think that such a dynamic setup would be one of the greatest strengths of a massive multiplayer environment.

As for players being able to conquer planets... I guess that's OK. There could be an administrative set-up that would be present on top of the normal planetary dialog if the user happened to own the system. Ownership could be transfered both by buying the planet, or by domination. This would mean that a player would have to choose between letting his planet be run automatically and flying around, or staying on the planet and running things himself. Money gained by domination would be a LOT more (enough to purchase and upgrade your defense fleet).

Alliances, this becomes almost essential in a multiplayer game. The effect would be like the two of you share a common government (can't shoot each other, appear green on each others radar) So it becomes possible then for you to dominate a planet, have a member of your alliance admin. it and go off to conquer another planet, thus forming a new gov't

I guess I'll also add this... Before anyone flames me for suggesting this read everything to see the advantages. We should do away with resource forked plug-ins. It restricts the game to a single state. The clients plug-in folder would be ignored during multi-player, only servers can run plugs. Loading a plug-in would be dynamic and would be done through packages (ala OS 9 or OS X) Allowing an infinite number of ships, planets, systems, everything to be added at any point during gameplay... When a player joins the game, the appropriate files would be uploaded to the client machine, any changes made to the plug-ins while the player was playing would be updated the first time they landed on a planet. This is actually not as impossible as many of you probably think. It's a LOT of work, for sure, but not difficult. If someone here has a good foundation in either metroworks or MPW on the mac, or knows a lot about TCP/IP, and is interested in all of this happening, email me and we can lay out a framework. Once I finish this set of mid-terms I might start some high-level designs... Missions are still a problem though. Any thoughts on how those should be implemented?

**

I agree that plug-ins should be on the server side only, thus making any changes they cause universal, and not just benefiting ( or penalizing) one player.This would also cut down on conflicts and such like.

I think that generic misions to take something from here to there, for a small fee, should stay just like they are in EVO. Perhapse more of them, and larger varities, but generally the same. It is the special govt missions that are the problem. It is possible that you could have conflicting missions, ie. one that you get from the UE that asks you to transport some engineers to this planet, while the voinians have a mission to destroy that ship.
The challenge would be to make all the special missions conflict ones like this. You could also have ones that support the main one like "escort the transport to <DST>, or "destroy the escorts around the transport in <DST> or something like those.

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Zitchas

that is a good idea but the programming alone would be enourmous to do this you would have to have a massive galaxy to allow for the possible 3 or 4 million people who might play it. and 1 minute of play thats not enough i find myself occalionaly sitting down and playing for 3 or 4 hours at a time. and how would you manage the missions with thousands of people playing getting a mission is harder thean throwing a rock at the moon and hitting it. and how would you prevent people from having a pilot for each name that they have impossible. i own the shareware version and went into the programming and deleted the shareware pathways. a good idea but it requires more thought

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Yorick wrote:
**I would have agree that EV would make a better universe than EVO, as its more unified along a central plot line. I would, however, rather their be a whole new plot than the old EV one, one with alot of factions like EVO but unified like EV. Have a central conflict thats really huge, between 2 giant space empires. Then add smaller alliances, breakaway groups, cults, corporations, pirate factions, etc.

I for one don't think that a player should be able to conquer planets on their own. AI ships are no match for human players, and people would log on and find that all their planets had been conquered. I think that it would be a good idea to form alliances with other players, and have the colors or symbols uploaded to the server. Whenever someone logged on they would take a few seconds to download any changed info, and so one could tell who a player was with wothout downloading the color schemes everytime they see a ship.

-Yorick

**

I disagree with your statement that conquoring planets should be disabled. WE all know that human players have a distinct advantage over computers. that is why there are about 60-300 computer deffense ships against 1 human with a couple of escorts/fighters. If the planets automatically assign a "Red Alert, we are under attack, please defend the station" missions, then there will be human players out there helping deffend the planet too. As well, we could give the planet deffenses, such as turrets, and such like that you must disable before landing and capturing the planet.

As well, I like the EVO style universe with a whole swarm of races with ever shifting treaties and allieances, and various different strengths and weakness. However, there should be more ship AIs, like seperate ones for different races that take advantage of their strengths. I think that this methode is better than a EV style with companies and such, but I agree that either way there should be the largest possible variety of ships with different strengths and weakness, and upgrades, such as in EVO. As well, it should proabably be unique from both EV or EVO, although we could use EVO as a base for our ideas, and deal with making a new universe when the liklyhood of producing a beta, or test copy of EVOMP

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Zitchas

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Zitchas wrote:
**I disagree with your statement that conquoring planets should be disabled. WE all know that human players have a distinct advantage over computers. that is why there are about 60-300 computer deffense ships against 1 human with a couple of escorts/fighters. If the planets automatically assign a "Red Alert, we are under attack, please defend the station" missions, then there will be human players out there helping deffend the planet too. As well, we could give the planet deffenses, such as turrets, and such like that you must disable before landing and capturing the planet.

As well, I like the EVO style universe with a whole swarm of races with ever shifting treaties and allieances, and various different strengths and weakness. However, there should be more ship AIs, like seperate ones for different races that take advantage of their strengths. I think that this methode is better than a EV style with companies and such, but I agree that either way there should be the largest possible variety of ships with different strengths and weakness, and upgrades, such as in EVO. As well, it should proabably be unique from both EV or EVO, although we could use EVO as a base for our ideas, and deal with making a new universe when the liklyhood of producing a beta, or test copy of EVOMP

**

All a moderately skilled group has to do is wait until everyone has left a system and then invade the planet. If the systems have a set number of players that are present, they can just fill up that number so no one could help. If there is no limit, large groups of player could move from system to system in packs conquering planets. And you would have to assume that a large number of people there would accept a planet protection mission, even though it would be much more dangerous than in normal EV.

The reason I didn't like EVO as much is that it didn't have a central story. It could have just as well have been 3 differant scenarios. EVMP should have many differant governments, but their should be some sort of common thread, have the kind of diversity of EVO with the unity of EV.

-Yorick

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I think it should have a set number of escorts and fighters, as in, you can't get a lot of crriers as escorts and then deploy all your fighters then get into a fight and have ALL of them deploy escorts (Think! Even against a dreadnought 2000 kraits can kick butt.:eek have a limit of friendlys in a system( Unless its there system). about the conquering thing, have a person take over the system, but his gov is who gets hold of it. :frown:

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Yorick wrote:
All a moderately skilled group has to do is wait until everyone has left a system and then invade the planet.

And that doesn't sound like a hell of a lot of fun to you...

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**
The reason I didn't like EVO as much is that it didn't have a central story. It could have just as well have been 3 differant scenarios. EVMP should have many differant governments, but their should be some sort of common thread, have the kind of diversity of EVO with the unity of EVO.**

I have to totally disagree here, especially for a multiplayer game. Forcing everyone to play the same plot would get rather boring. In multiplayer, this problem of going away and playing out another string and then coming back a year or two later to pick up right where you left off would be gone. If you went off to participate in some other war, the war you left would rage on while you were gone. I think it would add a whole new dimension to gameplay in fact.

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Yorick wrote:
**All a moderately skilled group has to do is wait until everyone has left a system and then invade the planet. If the systems have a set number of players that are present, they can just fill up that number so no one could help. If there is no limit, large groups of player could move from system to system in packs conquering planets. And you would have to assume that a large number of people there would accept a planet protection mission, even though it would be much more dangerous than in normal EV.

The reason I didn't like EVO as much is that it didn't have a central story. It could have just as well have been 3 differant scenarios. EVMP should have many differant governments, but their should be some sort of common thread, have the kind of diversity of EVO with the unity of EV.

-Yorick
**

Firstly, if you want to wait around for all the ships to leav before attacking, go ahead. I beleive it is called propre planning, and it is an accepted tactic during wars and raids. However, there is always a chance that ships allied with that gov (human players) might see your litle raiding party, and will quietly start to converge on another nearby system. When they receive a hyperwave broadcast alerting them to the attack, the deffence fleet could warp in and squish the attackers between the station/planet deffenders and the incomming deffenders.
As well, you could have the deffend the station mission, or a variant of it, appear in all the staions and planets allied with the one being attacked, asking ships to go and attack those who are attacking <DST>. Even if they didn't get there in time to prevent capture of the planet, they may be able to recapture it.

I beleive that the lare number of un connected missions is what makes EVO such a good game. Without this, multiplayer games would require all participants to be either on one side, the other side, or neutral. I think it is funner to have several wars going on, so if I get bored with one, I can always go fight in the other. If it was in quasi real time this would be even better, since if you don't particulary like the current mission in this war, go join someother war and come back in a few weeks or months (game time) to find that the war, and thus the mission set, as progressed along, and thus different missions are available to you.

As for your comment on a linear, orderly plot line being better, I shall simply repeat the motto for the Azdigari millitary.
As the Azdigari say, "Chaos is our ally, order is our enemy"

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Zitchas

It seems I have a completely different concept of EVMP than anyone else. I think it should be in REAL real time - a minute is a minute, and it would look like EV. As everyone knows, multiplayer games have little in story - and EVMP would have to be lacking in true depth to allow for full freedom for conflict among player-controlled govts.

And missions would be completely different than EV/O - they would be posted to a mission board by govt. GM's or mailed directly to a player.

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"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
-Gen. Jack Ripper, Dr. Strangelove

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ColdFusion wrote:
**It seems I have a completely different concept of EVMP than anyone else. I think it should be in REAL real time - a minute is a minute, and it would look like EV. As everyone knows, multiplayer games have little in story - and EVMP would have to be lacking in true depth to allow for full freedom for conflict among player-controlled govts.

And missions would be completely different than EV/O - they would be posted to a mission board by govt. GM's or mailed directly to a player.
**

Yup, I totally agree... A good multiplayer game wouldn't try and force all the players into a pre-written plot line, instead it would let the plot evolve naturally. The extent of hard coded missions should probably be economic in nature, and still allow for some measure of administrative control. Same thing with your comments on real-time. One minute to one minute only makes sense, and solves a lot of problems that would otherwise be present considering that main gameplay HAS to be in real-time.

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Okay, its time to get the brains churning.

Dominating Planets:

Of course, this is all assuming you'd be able to dominate planets or whatever.

So you want to wait for all the players to jump out to destroy it... thats great. I mean after all, one ship can pretty easily take on a ton of computer AI ships, so a fleet of 20 could take it easy.

Thats great, everyone leaves.

Now, if you're in a fairly large system, people will usually enter and leave in fairly increasing numbers.

Okay, so some guy comes in. Could be an allied warship to come help kick your ass, even one or two ships could offset a balance.

Or it could be an enemy of that gov, yay, you've got some help.

Or it could be a merchant, see's he's in way over his head, and splits to the next system.

So now, this merchant is hoping to pick up a few extra mill, and hails (or asks some allied warfleet) to land and give them the friendly tip.

You're toast.

My point is, there's tons of different ways this could happen, and ways you'd be screwed, thats part of the fun

Oh yea, and Real time IS a must, but do you really think hyperspace jumping can be instantaneous? No way. There'd be some delay i bet...not much of one, perhaps just enough time to review your stats and your plans

CS

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Reasons why the UE and Voinians hate each other...
€Voinians prefer SPAM, while the UE likes SPAM light....
€The heads of both governments were trying to figure out which wife was
uglier...
€Tomato, Tom'aaa'to, is there a difference? Aparantly so...
€Two Voinians accused the UE of using IBM computers...
€A UE Cruiser accidentally blew up a Voinian planet...
€Two words: name calling

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ColdFusion wrote:
**It seems I have a completely different concept of EVMP than anyone else. I think it should be in REAL real time - a minute is a minute, and it would look like EV. As everyone knows, multiplayer games have little in story - and EVMP would have to be lacking in true depth to allow for full freedom for conflict among player-controlled govts.

And missions would be completely different than EV/O - they would be posted to a mission board by govt. GM's or mailed directly to a player.

**

I think that the method I have outlined beofre, having a series of missions that swing back and forth for conflicts, anyway, would suit this environement perfectly, since It would give almost complete control over wars to the participants. It would probably have some feature beuilt in to realistically prevent one group or another from exterminating another, such as a rebellion of cptured planets, or such like.

It would be easy enough to make one second = one second type game time, but it would be nessecary to change the explained physics for the hyperjump (it says in the manual that each hyperjump takes one day for small ships, even though it appears instantaeous)We would have to delay hyperjumps a bit, a fair bit so that larger ships spend proportionatly more time in hyperjumps to add realisme. In fact, this modification would be nessecary reguardless of the time scale adopted.

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Zitchas

Hyperjumps would actually would be instant - fuel would be pricier for large ships.

As I've said countless times, missions should not be dictated by adminitrators trying to enforce a story - they should be a flexible, bulletin-board, chat and mail based system that lets government leaders to post their own special missions.

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"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
-Gen. Jack Ripper, Dr. Strangelove

You don't understand!! You cannot have instantaneous hyper-jumps from system to system. It'll cause a freakin meltdown of all operations. It'd be waaaay to much info to handle. You need some lag time to transfer data.

You seriously can't expect to jump, and in a period of 2 seconds go into the next system flawlessly.

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Reasons why the UE and Voinians hate each other...
€Voinians prefer SPAM, while the UE likes SPAM light....
€The heads of both governments were trying to figure out which wife was
uglier...
€Tomato, Tom'aaa'to, is there a difference? Aparantly so...
€Two Voinians accused the UE of using IBM computers...
€A UE Cruiser accidentally blew up a Voinian planet...
€Two words: name calling

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Captain Scurvy wrote:
**You seriously can't expect to jump, and in a period of 2 seconds go into the next system flawlessly.
**

He's right... A single system can contain a LOT of information. For a player to jump into a system requires two things, for the player to broadcast his ships info to the server which is <checks> close to 10 bytes now though I haven't implemented some very important attributes yet, so that number will go up. AND for the system to stream all it's data, including Spobs, All ships in the system, Asteroid Positions if there are any, SystemNebu's if U guys want them, etc... With sufficient players, that could add up to a couple hundred kbytes quite easily. In fact, it makes more sense to have jump time related to your connection speed. Especially considering that this HAS to be real-time.

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Damn, I hate to sound like I'm copying you, kberg, but that was my first idea - hyperjumps would be the time when you downloaded current system updates for the system you were entering - thus minimizing delays. Unfortunately, this is rather discriminatory and elitist.

But since jump time wouldn't be tied to ship size, extra fuel/energy for large ships still holds valid.

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"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
-Gen. Jack Ripper, Dr. Strangelove

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Captain Scurvy wrote:
**You don't understand!! You cannot have instantaneous hyper-jumps from system to system. It'll cause a freakin meltdown of all operations. It'd be waaaay to much info to handle. You need some lag time to transfer data.

You seriously can't expect to jump, and in a period of 2 seconds go into the next system flawlessly.

**

I'd say about 5 secs. for a small ship, 10 secs for a med. ship, and about 15 secs for large, and 20 for huge. add about 1 sec per escort as well. This would also fit the fact that the larger the ship, the more outfits, etc likely, thus the more data to transfer. The number may not be quite that big, but close. You would have to add the capability to send messages while in hyperspace to offset the boredom of watching your ship speed through space.

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Zitchas

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kberg wrote:
**He's right... A single system can contain a LOT of information. For a player to jump into a system requires two things, for the player to broadcast his ships info to the server which is <checks> close to 10 bytes now though I haven't implemented some very important attributes yet, so that number will go up. AND for the system to stream all it's data, including Spobs, All ships in the system, Asteroid Positions if there are any, SystemNebu's if U guys want them, etc... With sufficient players, that could add up to a couple hundred kbytes quite easily. In fact, it makes more sense to have jump time related to your connection speed. Especially considering that this HAS to be real-time.

**

Spob info, systemNebu's, as well as interferance could be handled by the info contained by the data on the user's end, since these shouldn't change. Asteroids, if you look closely, are one repeating position, so, the server only needs to indicate which pattern it is using and where it is in that pattern. Unless you want to treat asteroids like ships and have seperate speed, mass, etc info for each one.... that could really push up the size.

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Zitchas

First of all, I would love to see a multiplayer EV. However, there are some major points that I feel must be brought up (Some of which I have brought up in other threads and <a href="http://members.xoom.com/knuckllehead/EVMPIdeas.htm">here</a>.)
Primarily, I have a problem with what most people think when a planet is dominated. First of all, when a planet is dominated, you do not own that planet, you just recieve money from it every so often. The original government still owns that planet and system. Therefore, in a multiplayer setting, eveyone could dominate one planet and everyone would get money from that planet. No loss of tribute when the next player demands tribute for himself. This is a major source of confusion. For a network game that feels like EV/EVO, this is what I feel should be done.

Second, the comment about asteroids brings up an interesting point. Currently, when someone fires a guided weapon in a system that contains asteroids, if the shot gets past the edge of the screen, it won't hit any asteroids because they're not there! The only asteroids in the system are the ones on the player's screen. This causes problems when thinking in multiplayer terms. If this system is used in a multiplayer setting, it is possible that a shot would pass right through an asteroid on one player's screen while it explodes for no apparent reason. About the only way to solve this is to implement the Asteroid pattern that Zitchas suggested. However, this causes another problem, albeit a rare one. It is possible to have a weapon so powerful, it can destroy a small asteroid. Of course, with careful planning, such a weapon would never be allowed to exist (see link above, section 8). If this method is used, it would result in a major strategic disadvantage, due to the fact that weapons would now have asteroids to contend with beyond the limits of the screen. If the field is dense enough, nearly all guided weapons would be useless. However, this could be considered a feature. The way I see it, asteroids would probably have to follow this pattern-based flight method, with a common reference point such as the center of the system. (no, not a spob, coordinates 0,0) It could also allow for only those asteroids visible to a player to be "active", so to speak.

Once again, this is just my opinion of what it should be like. If anyone disagrees, go ahead. I don't mind. I'm just trying to preserve the feel of the current games in my ideas of the game.

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Knucklehead, Aeon Productions

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(Insert witty remark here)

Have any of you guys heard of Parsec? (www.parsec.org) I don't think that was mentioned. That is, in essence, multiplayer EV. It solves most of the problems that have been presented, except that it doesn't have missions, or interaction with spobs, or plugins. (Yeah, I know, that is the bulk of the problems.) But the thing is, that could be added. E.g: plugins could be hosted at, and distributed by, each gameserver. Missions and spobs aren't that hard; in fact, they're being planned for a later version of Parsec. So apart from the fact of it being totally 3D, Parsec is the answer, more or less.

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We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill...

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Obormot wrote:
**Have any of you guys heard of Parsec? (www.parsec.org) I don't think that was mentioned. That is, in essence, multiplayer EV. It solves most of the problems that have been presented, except that it doesn't have missions, or interaction with spobs, or plugins. (Yeah, I know, that is the bulk of the problems.) But the thing is, that could be added. E.g: plugins could be hosted at, and distributed by, each gameserver. Missions and spobs aren't that hard; in fact, they're being planned for a later version of Parsec. So apart from the fact of it being totally 3D, Parsec is the answer, more or less.
**

Parsec is completely different from EVMP as we (will) know it - EVMP as a concept is a complex, player-interaction oriented game that's a far cry from the massively multiplayer shoot-em-up of Parsec. And Parsec has ludicrous hardware requirements - you need a G3 with powerful 3d acceleration to play it. Admittedly, it's a great concept on its own, but in no way is remotely similar to EVMP.

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"Be quiet. I'm inspiring you."
-my Spanish teacher