Knights and Merchants.net Forum

My idea was to make KaM more MMO...

There will be a huge map for very much players and teams.
The server will run non-stop on low speed.

Settings:
Map: 512x512
Players: 24
Teams: 3 or 2 players or no teams
Game Speed 0,1
Army hunger 0,5 because they would die after 7,5 hours while you are sleeping
Peasant hunger 1,5 for compensation
Personal Peace Time 90 minutes

Server will run always also if you are not online.
You can join again when you want and log out when you want


I think it would be very nice to play, but there is a lot of work to do.
and i need to be better worked out than this
The numbers are variable.

and maybe this is also nice to play on normal maps with low speed

Pleas comment....
Greets Job

Yes, more than 8 players would be so awesome, but: more lag, more unreliable internet connections, not sure if people want longer games than they already are..

you join and leave when you want, but the game goes on.
so you can be attacked while you are away.
But every thing goes slow so you see things coming

I'm thinking of the battles, sending archers to the right spot (or even microing ), swordsmen in a "storm attack" taking almost a minute to get to the archers. Hmmm
Next, I'm thinking of building: in a 60 minute game, I might be busy at least 50 minutes (surely more than 40, so say 40), so I have to be active 400 minutes anyway . No this is not gonna work XD.

I do like the idea of a bigger map and more players, I'm not seeing this happen :S

i have the idea that every one understands me wrong.
because i am very bad in English

i mean that the battle don't need to be played in one day or 2 hours
it can take 5 days or 7.

i mean that
you give orders in the morning to build 6 farms and 3 waponcraft buildings, you shut your PC down and in the midday you start it up and you select your map and then you play on the loc you left.
because the server didn't stop your buildings are finished or almost finished.

you can leaf and join again and play were you left only the game goes on while you left, so you need to plan better and more.

large map - yes
24 players? for what? .... 10 ok but 24???????

I can hardly imagine anything more boring in "real-time strategy" then to send an attack, sleep, wake up, and see if my guys are dead or half-way to enemy village. The whole point of RTS is interactivity, see what other guys are doing and react immediately.
Sorry to be negative, but I see nothing fun whatsoever about this. I don't even see a point in having more players (my personal opinion), as already pointed out, there are many unreliable players (lags, leavers, etc.). Also if you have to defeat more players, it will take more time, and the whole point of multiplayer speed was to decrease playtime...

Well I'd perfectly imagine a huge map, with hundreds player where you can disconnect and come back later, that'd be incredible.
But I don't think that's ever gonna happen, I don't think that reducing the speed would be fun too.
And also, the game mechanics aren't thought for such a thing (and I'm not even talkin about the technical problems of the large map), because the attacks are fast, so you need to be here to resist, and what if when you were sleeping all your town died of hunger ?

I agree it's a dream I did myself, it'd be really nice, but as I said I don't think that's possible with the current mechanics and all the other problems.

Unfortunately to support that many players would require a redesign of our multiplayer architecture. Currently the server does nothing more than forward packets between clients, it does not understand knights and merchants at all. Clients all simulate the game from the same random seed and synchronize commands with each other. So it's kind of a distributed architecture, every client does exactly the same thing and simulates the entire game, the only thing the host does is have permissions to kick people and choose the map.

This has many advantages:
- Server process is simple
- Easy to code once you have a deterministic game (which we do for replays)
- Lowish delays in command execution (ping between two highest ping players divided by two)
- Works fine with fairly high latency (only affects command execution delay)

However, it means if one client lags or has a bad internet connection, all of the clients will find the game is running slowly because the slow client can't keep up with synchronizing. What we'd need for an "MMO" is a centralized architecture where the server does all of the thinking and receives/sends updates to clients. This means a client can disconnect or have a slow internet connection without screwing up the game for everyone. Coding it is not impossible, but it certainly wouldn't be easy within our current design.

Even once we pass that hurdle, the game isn't really able to simulate 24 players at once on every PC of people who play the game. Modern PCs would probably manage it most of the time.

I'd say it's very unlikely that we'll implement something like that

This reminds me that I have to write that DevBlog article about multiplayer architecture.

I doubt RTS are suitable for MMO at all.

Do you mean something the likes of the browser game Travian? If you don't know this game yet, you will love it, it's basically the same like you describe.

I stopped with games like that to play KaM

I all already thought this was to hard to make :/
But i wanted to give it a try

Something like http://www.tribalwars.nl (or http://www.tribalwars.pl) ? more of a browser based game strategy game~

yeah whitewolf tribalwars was the first thing that came to mind when i read this.