fabianschuiki
Multiplayer Interaction
How would multiple players interact in a multiplayer game of openskyscraper?
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Cooperative: All players share the same tower, building on their own section.
- Should this section be computer-enforced or approximately agreed-upon?
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Competitive: All players have different towers, and have the ability to compare their resources and style with other players. E.g. see the other towers built beside them, and build their own.
- In this case, what would be added to actually allow players to interact with other players?
- Would you be able to "buy" natural disasters to unleash on other players?
- How would you deal with transient players? Would their towers simply disappear from the openskyscraper "world"?
- What if one person plays every night for 4 hours, gets a crazy huge tower, and owns everyone (with disasters) who joins the server? What can we do to to alleviate this unfairness?
And please, unless you are willing to implement it yourself, don't say "both". Each would require an entirely different set of rules, and would probably have a networking protocol designed to work best for that purpose. Changing the interaction like this really results in a different game, and having too many options will result in no (completed) game. However, a middle ground of these two possibilities is certainly an option, but I cannot think of what that might look like right now.
Damn read this issue too late :P IMHO cooperative would be easier to implement, since you just need to handle multi-user input. SimTower gameplay is so focused around long hours in a dark cellar… Maybe we should postpone intensive multiplayer to the deluxe version, where we might incorporate networking aspects right into the gameplay (elevator sabotage anyone?) ;)
In a cooperative mode, what happens if everyone logs off?
- Does the tower continue simulating?
- Full speed?
- Half speed?
- Fractional speed?
Should the simulation speed be a function of the number of players online? That is, two players playing results in a game faster than one player playing, and no people playing results in a game slower than one person playing. If yes, what would that function look like? 1 + numberOfPlayers/2? 0.25+numberOfPlayers*0.75? Should it be logarithmic or linear? How many players would we imagine play on a typical server?