I saw a video of a real multiplayer, its pretty buggy but it could be something, or are the modmakers gonna recieve a letter from the devs they need to stop it asap like Take 2 is doing?
Our official FAQ about multiplayer is here: https://wiki.beamng.com/BeamNG_FAQ#Is_multiplayer_planned.3F Now, having said that, we have known for quite some time that rudimentary multiplayer is possible. Rigs of Rods for example had such a rudimentary multiplayer system which worked only with a few vehicles, vehicles did not move smoothly, the wheels were not soft body and there was no proper collision. So we know that if we reduce our standards by a lot, such a rudimentary "multiplayer" is possible. The thing is that we are not interested in that. What we are interested is smooth multiplayer with a lot of vehicles with full collisions and everything being softbody (including wheels). And this is hard, extremely hard. So hard that we have been doing research on that for many years to move the state of the art so that it might become possible at some point in the future. To give an indication, a simple deflate like this mod does, can compress up to 2x the nodes. Our current replay system can reach up to 10x compression rates (we used replay to do some experimentation). Our research shows that that up to 20-40x real time compression rates might be possible, which would allow to have fluid motion transfer with more than 2 vehicles and with typical connection bandwidths. And all of above is just scratching the surface of the complexity of the problem, as there are complex problems to solve in all of the stages of the pipeline, traffic shaping on the connection (to avoid problems like bufferbloat), time merging/extrapolation on both the client and the server, adaptive compression, and the list goes on. Doing all this work and knowing how hard it is, we also know that it is a false expectation to believe that a simplistic solution can be incrementally improved to become a fully fledged one. If one tries to do that, he'll be faced with a large "gap" at some point that cannot be surpassed with small incremental steps, and we have been staring into this abysmal gap for a long time to understand this fact.
I don't see why they would be mad, at worst it's giving even more visibility to the game and bringing more people to support the devs by buying it, I for example have some friends that decided to buy the game just because now we can do stuff together online At least for me the just because it's not possible to reproduce the fully fledged crash/damage experience, it shouldn't prevent us from having the best experience that is possible The fact that BeamNG has the best softbody/crashing/damage simulation, it doesn't mean that it's the only thing that we like to do in this game Since the tyre physics had a massive improvement some years ago, I never used BeamNG for crashing, of course it happens sometimes unintentionally and it's beautiful, but I find driving around, modifying cars, doing rally, rock crawling, hill climbing etc much more exciting than just crashing And even with the current state of the mod, it already proved to me that you don't need to have the most perfect collision simulation to have loads of fun online with your friends, I already done some races, drag races, cruising, hillclimbing, and it was just awesome!
Okay my mind has officially exploded with all that and its understandable why this game really isnt suited for Multiplayer, its the sheer amount of physics that this game has that makes that unlikely to happen I have always known since you did speak to me a few years ago about this about the complexity of adding multiplayer into it I still remember that user who wanted P2P networking Multiplayer and half the forum got involved to defend that it was not possible at any time, I guess if its local multiplayer on a single computer that would be radically different, but again I am not sure exactly depends on what happens I suppose But again a few hours of deep thinking later, multiplayer across a network is an entirely different animal and its frankly not that easy to figure out how to handle the data traffic from this game about all the game updates and how each physics object would handle it, its simply beyond my understanding of how you would possible be able to handle all that data all at once across a network, there isnt a way to do it cleanly
This is amazing news! Such a dedicated team of people working on BeamNG over the years it's amazing. We can wait until you guys think everything is perfect because we know it will be an absolute masterpiece to enjoy.
Actually. What you stated about Rigs of Rods multiplayer hasn't been true for a number of years. Using the latest version of RoR (2020.01) There is collision, vehicles move smoothly, and the wheels have soft body physics. Multiplayer handles pretty much like singleplayer, if the vehicles are laggy then its your connection to the servers. Here are some examples of RoR multiplayer.
Gamergull made Traffic Tool, then it was added in game and if I'm right he became a dev after this. I think that will happen with this mod too, when it'll be done the devs will add this into the game with the agreement of the mod maker
Disagree, I don't think the Multiplayer mod will ever reach the point when the devs include it as it's impossible for it to meet the devs high standards. Obviously Titch and his team are doing some amazing work so I'm not trying to discredit that all, but they are also aware that they will not be able to perfect it just due to the technical limitations of the game engine. Although in saying that the mod still has a long way to go, and I do believe they will be able to get the vehicles to sync smoothly. Although the devs have known this was possible for a long time. It's still possible the developers of the mod could get employed just based on their skills, problem solving and passion for the game, although I don't think they will be employed just based on the fact that they made multiplayer 'possible'.
Hey, I just read the whole conversation and I would like to clarify what we are aiming right now. We don't pretend to do a smooth and perfectly working multiplayer, we made a lost of test and we know for some time that just vehicle inter-collision is extremely hard to do. My goal right now is to do something which is working as good as possible, you can have a lot of fun playing multiplayer even without vehicle collisions, even by seeing your mate teleporting everywhere weirdly. That's what I wanted to bring to the game, allowing player to, at least, be able to see other people cars even if they can't interact at all with them.
That sounds great. I played a lot of RoR back in the days, and it didn't have collision either. But there was still a lot of fun things to do without it
Me personally i dont long for multiplayer users collision as much as i need multiplayer, i see such a win in getting multiplayer races, drift sessions and so on that i dont need to run ppl off the track (of course a plus if it happens in some years time). BeamNGs physics gives it such a unique and true to life (IMO) vehicle handling that it goes a long way just in that.
In my opinion... I think that multiplayer with no inter vehicle collisions would actually be prefered unless we were doing a demo derby.... then obviously we would want collisions because without them that kinda defeats the whole purpose. But look at the way that Horizon does online play... well... in Horizon 4 anyways... no one has collisions in the main world so that we all don't end up pissing each other off by running into each other constantly. Honestly, in Beam, that would be exaggerated 10 fold. But honestly, time trials, trail rides, just cruising around, RP... all tons of fun without inter vehicle collisions... and in some instances... as stated... almost prefered. So even though RoR has gotten it to work in recent years, I think it would be nice to at least get it to a point were we can do Trackmania style races online with the random track generator... as that would be an epic ton of fun. Then, as time continues to pass, the average connection speed across the world will go up, and then the devs will have more bandwidth to play with to get it working even better and continue to add features.
Wouldnt it be possible to just send the movement ov the vehicle and render the damage/collision just locally (every players pc renders all car or objects, just like with AI controlled vehicles)
the problem with that is that there are so many variables in how a car moves that telling it "steer right now" will result in the car moving in 2 different ways on different computers, meaning it wouldn't match up. plus, you still have the problem of one computer tellling the other computer where and when their car is being driven.
Aight, time to bump this thread a little.. Recently the BeamMP dev team has been working on the 2.0 version. And this one brings a custom new launcher & UI, mod synchronization (server-side, basically like FiveM. Makes you download the server's mods before joining), inter-player collisions (still not perfect), and the use of velocity for smooth player movement. We've shipped that version to early access testing and we've also been improving it for about a week now. During that time we've been able to record some cool clips of what the mod if capable to do. (All credits go to UkDrifter since he was the one recording everything.) Timestamps for best examples : - New UI : 14:27 - Inter-player collisions & smooth movement : 1:16:20 ^ This is footage from the Early Access version which is currently only available to our Patrons and Discord server boosters as a gift for their generosity! you can still download the public version of the mod, which maybe isn't as smooth, but it's still a working multiplayer! If some of you want to join the Discord (only place where you can download the mod) then here's the link (Click me!) Also we'd like to hear your opinion about the mod, ideas, and your suggestions on how to make the mod better! - Lucas (I'm not a goddamn dev!)