Multiplayer?

What lack of development? The dev team is currently laying the groundwork for a good multiplayer experience by improving the single-player experience.

It wouldn't be very smart of the developers if they initiated multiplayer before the game's physics engine was fully optimized and the remaining features are finished. Once the tuning features are finalized, and more racetracks are added, racing in multiplayer will become much more immersive and enjoyable. At this point in time, we can only go so far before we begin to run out of options and multiplayer becomes boring.

Once the Jbeam structures and damage features (engine thermals, brake thermals, transmission damage, tire leakage, etc.) are finalized in single-player mode, then we'll have the groundwork for rewarding, realistic multiplayer demolition derbies.

In the meantime, we have the split-screen scenarios and the quickplay tracks, which appear to be on the verge of being connected to online leaderboards. We just need to watch and wait - The game is still early access and still very much a work in progress.

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You do know what false advertising is, right? Because this is not it. "We will look towards having multiplayer in the future" is in no way saying "this game currently has multiplayer". And anyway, the game has the 4 seat mode, which is in itself multiplayer, so even if they had said "We have multiplayer", it would not be false advertising.

 

You guys are silly "We plan on taking out the garbage in the future." *garbage bags and maggots begin piling up.*

I just don't get it. The future pretty much means forever. Indefinitely. So in taking the time to forever develop something that had had a long winded paragraph explaining it... to me it seemed like they were pretty serious about it. But it's taken them like how many years now? Games most certainly take a long time to develop, however, a total integration of a module that was mentioned several times... I feel it deserves more time and respect. Of all parties involved. :/ You know?

 

You have to finish one thing before starting another, namely the single player. I'd rather have a stable and finished game than a rough single player with a broken as fuck multiplayer tacked on.

You have no idea what you are talking about, this game is much much harder to create multiplayer for simply because of the physics engine

 

I'll chime in just to say that not everyone feels the same way about wanting multiplayer in this game.

Sure, multiplayer might be cool - and it's cool to know that it is on the drawing board. Even if it just means my kids and I can race together here at the house. I am fine with that. When you open up networking between clients, it comes with many problems. Even something as simple as a leader board. BeamNG has no cheaters right now, because there is nothing to cheat at. Once we have internet multi-player, leaderboards, or even some simple achievements... They'll have to worry about game hacks, glitches, and so many other things other than simply making it the best soft-body physics engine in any game.

I hope we don't see anything multiplayer for a long time. When we do, I hope it is something where we can simply join a map with a few friends.

 

Quick race leaderboards could be on BeamNG server and you could have lists compared to your own times and to world, nation etc. Maybe could be possibility to form groups like leagues where you could have weekend warrior events.

It would not be exactly multiplayer, but it would add a lot to game I think.

Maybe that could be extended, but multiplayer can be other things too than having visually other cars competing against each other, or maybe that is just extended single player, would spice things up for sure.

With GPL and RBR there was GPL rank and game times online, I don't know if devteam has considered this possibility, but if not, I think it would be far more easier to implement while still offering a lot to game.

 

The only thing keeping some ror players from coming over is the lack of multiplayer. I wantbto race against other people in my monster truck

 

It would be cool if the forums flagged the word multiplayer to search threads automatically for the term. That might prevent some of these burn-away threads.

 

There is an App in the application archive, called "Chat application." You can use it yourself by putting on your HUD using the apps section in the pause menu. It's mostly useless, but it says a lot for the future of the game. I think it may be possible to input commands on the application but I haven't had any success.

 

No, it says nothing for the future of the game. A chat application has existed since applications were added. All it does is interface with the IRC server linked in the site directory. It's poorly written and hasn't been improved since it was introduced. It's supposed to work, but I've never had it work for me, and clearly it doesn't work for you either, or else you would have a different perception of it.

 

Well then what's it for? Chatting with players on the site while in game? I mean, that could be useful but I think not.

 

It's also linked to other people in game, of course. But yes, that's all it's there for.

 

And also I really don't know about Multiplayer. It seems a little overboard with BeamNG. It's kind of like; it just shouldn't exist. I would only think it to be chaotic and useless as BeamNG is to simulate driving, but more of collisions. If they want to turn this into a run-down copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator X, they can. But this game is made mostly for the crashing, not the driving.
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And if they had multiplayer, what would you do. I know racing wouldn't exactly work because of all the crashing and reckless driving. But if it was just roaming around and driving with other players, I know that even a Sapphire-Ripjaw-and-i7 combined computer wouldn't even run. I'm just saying my opinion because I'm really oblivious to what people expect they're going to get with multiplayer. Maybe I'm wrong, but again, I'm saying my opinion.

 

I mean, it would be cool, but this is a small team of people with a VERY complicated gaming engine, so not in the near future, and I think @Nadeox1 can definitely back me up here.

 

Actually, the game has pretty realistic driving physics as well, many of us hotlap all the time.

 

Often the big selling point of the game is "crashing into everything and see what happens" and getting a work of modding art only to smash it for like an hour and play with something else. Its kind of sad to see everyone wanting crashing, and nothing else.

but getting on topic, could the devs just use the old ROR servers? Or would it not work? Because I'm pretty sure servers cost a lot, so that's something too. and having like, a 18 player server with all those people just crashing everywhere would put a load on everyones network.

 

Everyone keeps saying that it would be a huge load to everyone's computer and we would need monster machines to run this and what not... so on and so forth... but remember your computer only has to simulate YOUR car... not everyone else's. Each computer has their own car to simulate. Everyone's computer would have to visually represent all of the vehicles, but nothing more... well if we go for the current state of the RoR multiplayer.

With no collisions between vehicles, things do get exponentially easier. Add in cross network collisions though and now you have a completely different ball game. Way back when multiplayer was introduced into RoR, there were cross network collisions... and boy oh boy was that a mess.

Think about modern racing games and lag... How many times have you been racing in a game and someone passes you floating about 6 to 10 feet off the ground... how many times have you started an online race and just had one of the cars glitch around and basically destroy the entire starting grid? How many times have you seen a car going down the road completely sideways or upside down while still driving perfectly normal? How many times have you been lag cannoned by another car at 500mph? The amount of data that can be sent to and from a server by a particular computer can wreak havoc on anyone that is currently in the game, especially when the server doesn't get enough data fast enough and the proceeds to try to predict these data points and gets them wrong.

What most games do is just send small amounts of data... x,y,z positions and rotations and velocities, steering angle, rpm, gear, throttle amount, car type, damage amount and location, and if the game is that special, your paint skin... but that is usually about it. Now imaging the amount of data that would have to be transferred by Beam... It would have to Transfer the position of EVERY node along with every node's velocity (rotation luckily gets taken out of the equation with this method, but still...), rpm, gear, throttle amount, car type, and color (assuming only stock skins here). That is an insane amount of data to be transferred and it's a miracle that RoR multiplayer worked at all back in the day with collisions.

Anyways, doing this means that each car simulated on other computers would not have any beams to be simulated on yours. This would lighten the load on your computer substantially, but your network would be straining to transfer all of that data quickly enough. This would mean that you would have to lower the update rate that data is sent to the server so the server can keep up with the distribution of your data. Beam runs at (I think) 2000 calculations a second... (correct me if I am wrong on that one) Let's pretend that with 2 cars on 2 computers, the network can only handle 100 data points a second (real might be better or worse) so that both connections can supposedly run smoothly. If there is no built in smoothing, can you imagine the jitteriness of the other car? It would be jittering all over the place... that and if you both ran into each other, the likelihood of both of your vehicles passing partially through each other before the node positions update would be very high... this would introduce almost unavoidable crash welding on an entirely new level. Now we pop another car onto the server and the refresh rate drops to 75 Hz... see where I am going with this?

What would need to be done to handle this kind of data would be to almost add in some in game prediction and smoothing so that this kind of thing didn't happen. So that the vehicle being represented on your screen would have 2000Hz update rate, but in reality that would only be being updated at 100Hz or less (just making up numbers but you get what I am on about)

So this all being said, this is one of the major reasons it hasn't been added yet. It would be so difficult to add and make work well that when they do start looking into it (if they haven't already) it will take years of research and optimizations... or possibly just waiting around for hardware to come out that hasn't even been made yet... to enable this to become a reality.