i actually dont know how multiplayer would work in this game since non player species arent allowed to evolve further than a certain point from the player so how would you restrict players that have reached spacestage already from getting on a planet where another player just popped into existence as a microbe?
I thought it just this way, that for computers that dont have the cpacity to simulate the autoevolve thing alone other players computers could help them out, but only if they’re not playing thrive at the same moment.
since there would be always more people not playing thrive than playing thrive i think it should be possible. don’t know much about network computing or such things, so don’t know how much processing power you would actually need from the computers in the thrive network.
but i think were getting a little bit offtopic with that.
Firstly, non-player species can evolve as much as they want. The possibility of finding the ruins of a past sapient is a very interesting concept.
In addition, the timescales between space age, where developments happen over decades, instead of millions of years for simple cells are vastly different - a space age society could very realistically die out in the time it took to evolve a chloroplast. Unless the spacemen were to nuke the planet your microbe is on, the plankton wouldn’t notice. Even then, there is a simple preventative measure: we can’t visit every star in the galaxy, so we just hide primitive planets in the fog of being a background star.
So what is the “resource” that you are reffering to? Is it energy or memory storage? If it is energy how about I try to make a self powering generator and send you the specs, but if it is storage then make the servers smaller. Something like a tower room could possibly work?
Storage on servers is quite cheap. Also unless you are a huge company you don’t buy servers, you rent them (or more often you rent virtual private servers). What I’m talking about is raw computation. If you have 3 years old laptop the server processor will only be something like 20-30 times faster. So even theoretically we need one server per 20 people whose computers aren’t fast enough to run the simulation themselves, unless of course the simulation resources can be shared, but unless we force the players to share a planet (with the same species and evolution), we can’t reduce the load.
So imagine how many servers we would need to support 1000 simultaneous players. And then multiply that with about 20 euros a month, which is the cost of a reasonably powerful server. And so we end up us needing server resources worth 1000 euros a month. And if we get very popular (like top 10 on steam) on a good day we might need servers to support 60 000 players, which would cost 60 000 euros a month.
Who is going to lend that to us, or how else are we going to pay for it. The other option of having people install a server on their computers is not perfect either as we can’t control how many of their computers are online at once and at peak times people might not be able to play. And if someone just shuts down their computer while someone is playing are we just going to say to the player “sorry the person who was lending you computation turned off their computer and now everything since the last save is gone”?
hmm I do see your point, have you guys tried making a prototype or an experiment with multiplayer just to see how such a thing could be tweaked to help reduce cost and or problems like this? Something like a test drive maybe.
As the FAQ says multiplayer is not a huge priority and offloading the simulation (other than playing multiplayer) is an even lower priority.
How about later when the game is more developed we should just allow the player to make a private server to play with friends, that way the storage is on their computer by choice. Do you remember when playing spore that you could download creatures that other people made? maybe we could do something like that as well?
Allowing private servers is definitely going to be part of multiplayer. We probably will have just one official one with quite a low player limit, due to limited money. So most people wanting to play multiplayer will have to host their own servers or join someone else’s.