Multiplayer?

[Ebon Heart]

I have never seen an emitter or gateway move... :)

they don't need to. :P

[Ytaker]

The previous topic on multiplayer in CW2 is in the now-locked-for-posting CW2 Pre-Release Talk board. There is also a misleadingly-titled poll on multi-player in the Random section.

Since talk of multi-player is inevitable, I will leave this topic here rather than move/lock it. Note however, that since this topic was broached many moons ago in CW1, Virgil has never responded at all. That should be a clear indication of where his thinking on this is.

More than a technical decision, it is also a business decision and a substantial one on both fronts. I would imagine that the business case for a multi-player game is a hard one to make.

http://forums.highdefdigest.com/game-consoles-smackdown/17693-report-online-features-double-game-sales-wii-trails.html

The study, which examined more than 400 games for Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii through June 1, found that titles supporting online multiplayer bring in twice the amount of sales than those without. Even games with minimal online support tend to make almost 25 percent more revenue than offline games.

There's a reason developers put multiplayer in it so often. It doubles your income. It's a pretty good business decision.

[peter]

Just a few things that would be needed to make CW2 a miltiplayer game, there are many more, and all make it a complicated thing to do.

Recoding many parts of the game.  (The game took best part of a year if not more to write, so would be possibly just as long to add MP into it)

Dedicated MP servers.  (While a MP game can be played on a p2p format those that do generally are not as complicated as CW2 would be)  (To run a game as complicated as CW2 there would be the need for dedicated servers to run the games, this would cut down on some of the latency issues that would happen due to PC's not being Wii's so everyone has a different system.  However, this would not stop latency issues, and would cause more problems than it would solve.)

Cost of the game.  (To make CW2 into a MP game, with everything needed to do so, would make the game a much more costly game for players to buy.  Therefore lowering the number who may take it up as a casual game.)

CW world in general.  (CW world is not really a MP enviroment, this is a game you can pick up when you have 5 or 50 minutes spare, to blow away some time, if it were a MP game there would have to be in general a more organized player mindset as to when people choose to play.  It would not be as casual as it currently is, and was designed to be.)

Subscriptions.  (Many games on platforms such as Wii and XBox use a subscription service to help cover the ongoing costs.  They can do that because those players are playing on systems that are almost identical, so no advantages or disadvantages are gained, so they have a constant gaming experience.  This would not work with a PC based game such as CW2 as a tiny latency would result in the loss of a game session due to faster connection speeds by other players.  Not something anyone enjoys.)

Those are just a few reasons why this game would not make a great MP game, but mainly, it was never designed to be a MP game, so it would not be the same game you currently play if it were ever to dive into the MP world.

Yes, many platforms out there have great MP games, but there are only a few great MP games on PC's, and I do not think any would come close to the type of game that CW2 is, so are not really comparable.

This is just my thoughts and opinions, so if you do not agree that is your right, but do not try to rip my thoughts to shreads as they are only thoughts, not law.

[Kithros]

I can't really speak for other people, but quite frankly even if there were multiplayer I know I wouldn't even use it simply because the pause feature couldn't exist in a multiplayer format, and I'd rather not have the game devolve to whoever can click the fastest.

[Ebon Heart]

I can't really speak for other people, but quite frankly even if there were multiplayer I know I wouldn't even use it simply because the pause feature couldn't exist in a multiplayer format, and I'd rather not have the game devolve to whoever can click the fastest.

first off, whoever clicks the fastest would just go into deficit fastest. second, I don't know much about this, but what if it just used a lan network for multiplayer games? Of course, there'd still be the issue of coding, but... eh.

[Echo51]

More importantly then any other issue i believe, is that it's Flash. From what i've seen, it's just too slow to communicate with a backend(server), retrieve and render all of the creeper, packet locations and such, along with the server also has to simulate that creeper, and send out updates atleast twice a second.

Bandwidth hog and probably quite a bit too slow to actually... say "work" in a practical manner. now before you come say stuff like Transformice works fine. sure, but that only tracks the position of the players, which is just x+y+a few loose variables.

[thepenguin]

the game engine can barely handle what virgil has given it already, MP would give us a nice, stable 10FPS

[Ytaker]

You could run it locally on one master computer, and simply have the other computers send position updates and build updates. Maybe have them run local simulations which would update every few seconds That would remove a lot of the hassle of doing it cross multiplayer. You'd get some artifacts, but all multiplayer has artifacts.

It won't happen though, sadly.