Hello, I am new to the forums/game, tho I have been following the game's community and development even before I bought it the day after Christmas during Steam's wallet-murder fest called "Winter sales." I've also played both the version of the techdemo that only had the D-series in it as well as the techdemo that only had the Covet in it. So far, I have 38 total hours on record, and I am amazed how I have not scratched the surface of just the large amounts of content in the vanilla game! However, it feels like there is still something missing. Most of the time when you drive around, you are just by yourself in one map just driving around "inside" your lonesome car. I know that the AI kinda helps with that, but it is kinda dumb and is a bit difficult to manually set up races with them without having to download/make/play a scenario that is specifically for racing with the AI. I kinda just want to play with friends, but it hasn't been implemented yet. Although the bar on the right side of the main menu seems to be promising something... It always says that I'm online whenever I am playing this game. Seriously, though. I might be good at creating chaos and destruction by myself, but the ability to play with friend would mean even BETTER chaos and destruction. The rape map called "Deep Earth" does claim to be good for "Controlled chaos" in it's description, and, that map is HUGE and feels empty when you are the only person driving around in there, with or without the AI. What do you guys think? Honestly, I suggest the devs optimizing the game a bit more and doing some bug fixes before implementing it. I would also suggest improving the driving model a bit more, too. Spawns on free-roam maps may have to be optimized for multiplayer so that each player doesn't have to select different spawn locations and look for their friends, just for convenience. I think it'd be smart to have more like a grid for whatever amount of players there are at one spawn location at the same time, or players can just choose to spawn next to/behind their friends as their spawn location while in the spawn selection screen. Anyways, this is just my opinion. The rest is up to the devs/popular demand. I think that multiplayer will add more to the game's popularity and increase the game's replayability. It might not work in the game's current state, but the improvements I suggested should make multiplayer plausible.
For following the forums for a while, seems like you looked over the tons of threads asking for Multiplayer. I bet if you search for Online or Multiplayer, atleast 7 pages. It's great you put time into your post instead of asking "Multiplayer Please OKThx" But so far, it doesn't seem very plausible. Ask yourself this: If AAA companies can't even get Multiplayer working flawlessely, how do you expect a below-30 dev team to do so. Not only that, but the beast of a computer you'd need would surpass every player by a longshot. I bet someone else has more technical knowledge then me though.
The game engine used isnt well suited for multiplayer from what I recall correctly, its the Torque3D engine and programming that in would need hundreds of extra dev hours which could be used elsewhere, I still remember what was it Chris Lucas' multiplayer mod and it barely worked from what I recall and it didnt function right for me nor the other people in the lobby I was in, it was scrapped and I doubt he will ever bring it up again
Bonus points for the “wallet murder” comment, but as others already stated there’s a lot of threads about this already, some of which have detailed posts on the technical requirements. Last I heard it’s on their “very very distant future research list”
Actually, I haven't even seen the other threads for multiplayer at all. I mostly stalk the mods section.
networked multiplayer is literally physically impossible unless you don't want inter-player collision end of the story
Why wouldn't I want inter-player collisions/player-to-player collisions? That would kill the whole point of me saying: If I want multiplayer because of this reason, I want player-on-player collisions. What type of insane person would want to take out an opportunity to see a glorious crash in BeamNG that would be impossible without two human players? --- Post updated --- Also, completely off-topic, but can we mention how Google Chrome auto-corrected "repo" to "rape?" I don't even want to fix that typo! That's comedy gold!
yeah, no shit, that's my point. the type of multiplayer people want is not possible to implement. two computers cannot communicate fast enough. it's physically not possible.
@TechnicolorDalek Do you remember that thread about the "Peer-To-Peer Multiplayer" suggestion about a few years ago that I had to call everyone in to sort it out, I feel this thread MIGHT go that way
maybe? it sounds familiar. to expound upon the point further, dear gamers, beamng's physics engine runs at 2000hz. that's a frame every half a millisecond, or every 500μs. you'd be lucky to get a round-trip time of 100μs on an average home network, let alone the time it would take to send any actual useful data, even if it is a miniscule amount. outside of the home, or even through multiple switches within the home, you're far exceeding that limit. prediction is as much of an option as it is in other games, except multiply the inaccuracy and BS impacts by 2000x, since that's how many physical nodes you're calculating for. you MIGHT get it done with specialized network connections and protocols that ditch the overhead of the ethernet protocol and use faster transfer material than average home copper, but that's not a reasonable expectation for LAN play. the best option for networked multiplayer with BeamNG is having a centralized server run the game and take input from players. sure, locally, you wouldn't notice much, if any input lag, but across WAN, it would be an extremely limiting prospect for a fast-paced racing and/or driving game in general, especially one where tiny mistakes can actually straight up disable your vehicle.
Yeah it was September 2016 when it happened, okay so yeah I see what your getting at with the physics calculations there is no internet in the world fast enough to handle the data throughput
Ever heard of Discord? Skype? TeamSpeak? Google Hangouts? You know what all these apps have in common: They support voice chat.
I think what he meant to say is, computers can’t communicate THAT MUCH that quickly. Now Phones have gotten voice chat down pat, so I have no idea what your point was. Voice Chatting vs Playing BeamNG Drive together on both sides of the U.S isn’t comparable...
TLDR: It can be done... but some things need to be figured out first. Lag is an issue but collisions are the main issue (caused by lag and bad data transfer speeds) I write all of these, and then I wonder if anyone actually ever bothers to read them... so I am just going to keep linking them in threads like these until something actually changes... like a dev identifies a new issue or something.
Ok, but BeamNG car has hundreds to thousands of nodes, each consisting multiple words, all updated 2000 times in second, that is like speaking 10 000 words in a second trough skype, can you do that? Also 0.0005 seconds is time between updates, during that time computers need to find each other, send and process data, but your ping is likely much longer than that alone and there is two computers worth of ping. Less updates, more lag, try Gamer Gull's traffic scenarios, there is small lag as cars are spawned to new location, each update of car position during multiplayer would have such lag, constantly, many times a second, so it would just lag and not run. When you find solutions to these issues, BeamNG will hire you and finally we could get multiplayer which we as well as devs would like to have
I think there is actually a practically functional solution to this problem: 100 Gigabit ethernet for everyone. I'm talking 100 GB/s reliably, not peak. BeamNG multiplayer will be easy to implement in ca. ten years. --- Post updated --- @fufsgfen I'd actually say more like a million written words a second sent via Discord.
