Multiplayer

[xfractalino]

I found this ancient thread on here, and I found the idea pretty interesting, especially because multiplayer games/gamemodes tends to attract a broader player base. As of today, I’m aware the idea has been overall discarded due to the massive hurdle of multiplayer systems, including the technical difficulties, which would likely divert attention from the more important milestones in the development of the actual game. Still, I found this worth an analysis, so I’m putting my idea of a multiplayer prototype here.

Multiplayer as online arcade gamemode

My idea of multiplayer is to have a fun, fast-paced gamemode. The most appealing prototype would be, just like discussed in this thread, in the microbe (and perhaps multicellular) gamemode.

@Kasterisk

the emergent gameplay of agar.io where not only you just devour and conquer, there’s a mechanic in place to allow beneficial interaction between players.

Basically this.

This would ensure fun lobby gameplays with a basically endless replayability and different meta.

Technical issues

I wanted to reply to this thread particularly to talk about the technical details of this, to add actual useful info, hopefully.

@Kasterisk

The communication protocol used is UDP as this is common for fast-paced realtime games, conveniently provided by Godot’s wrapper for ENet.

Reading about Godot’s Multiplayer features, they have substantially improved in Godot 4, so that’s especially a good thing.

@Kasterisk

The network topology used would be P2P client-server hybrid to allow player host servers. For this (according to my humble research), server host may need to do port forwarding to allow other people to connect to their network. However, if UPnP is enabled and is available to the host’s network, it might be possible for this to be achieved automatically.

I believe that using Steam IDs for steam players makes this kinda trivial. There’s a Godot plugin for that, but even if we were to implement it ourselves, it’s not a huge work to make a wrapper. Most indie games use this as a solution if they cannot host their own servers.

@hhyyrylainen

So while the multiplayer is still in the early stages it’s probably easier now to futureproof it, though I won’t definitely say if that alternative game logic way is ever used so I won’t make a hard recommendation for the multiplayer at this point. But I’ll say that the protocol for the master server communication should definitely be done as a custom protocol over UDP so that we can have the master server made with pure C#

I believe the modern ENetMultiplayerPeer implementation in Godot is extremely flexible on this regard. Multiplayer in Godot 4.0: Scene Replication – Godot Engine

@hhyyrylainen

One thing to note is that compound cloud synchronising over the network is going to be the most difficult thing.

I had this concern as well, but clouds are fully deterministic. So, sending “cloud spawned” commands and deltas instead of the whole clouds.

@hhyyrylainen

So my idea with the cell battle arena was actually to forego compound clouds to make it easier to implement.

This could be good too, for example eating dots instead of clouds, again like agar.io or similar.