Well, it’s been a hard couple weeks of intense testing and bugfixing. It’s incredible how many issues crawl out of any update, but MP has taken the cake.
We’re getting close. You’re going to ask when. “When it’s ready” or “Soon” or “Very soon” – take your pick
After a 12 hour sunday jam, we finally smashed three of our biggest, longest lingering bugs that had been really slowing us down. Unless some unseen issue comes up, we’re down to minor bugs and quick fixes.
We’d like to re-iterate that the MP coming out is a work-in-progress. We’ll be labeling the button “Multiplayer Beta” in the menu for a reason. It should be solid code, just not polished. By not polished I’ll mention again that we won’t have any animations for the player models (avatar or voxelized), any special fx outside of rotating the model if they grav boot, and that the voxelized player model is very rough and first-pass. We’re really pressing full-court on getting something playable out first, then we’ll come back and make it pretty.
As has been mentioned in other threads, I’ll consolidate here:
Containment Units will be private. Only the person who placed them will be able to use them (and also remove them, again for now).
The bot will start as Host only.
Relays, Cores, Centriforges, Gravpads etc will still function for all players.
There is no trade window or public containment, but you can exchange items by Dropping them (the other person can pick them up). Drop is X on a stack in the inventory screen.
There will be a Public, Friends-Only and Invite-Only multiplayer mode as currently planned/implemented (subject to testing feedback).
The host will be able to Kick and Ban unwanted guests.
You will be able to use a mini-voxel model for players, or Avatars. The choice is client side for now, so you choose what you see (each player in the same game can choose differently).
It is really fun to run around with several other people building massive structures.
Multiplayer is a gamemode you can turn on (or off) for ANY world. While playing a world, in the pause menu, there will be a new Multiplayer Beta button, which leads you to the selection screen for activating MP.
Containers will not longer be allowed store containers with things in them. You can store containers, but they will have to be empty. Containers will empty their contents when dug up to ensure this. (There are a host of serialization and networking issues that come from infinitely recursive storage, as well as the fact that from a gameplay stance, it is pretty game-breaking. It was intended that this would never be an option to the player, but alas, it’s taken this long for us to get around to fixing it). We highly suggest that if you are using containers to store containers (with things in them) that you take the time to empty them out and sort your things as you’d like.
We’ll be doing another heavy round of testing and debugging tomorrow night, which should get us pretty close to being bug free unless something nasty rears its head this late in the game.