UESP Forums

I decided to start such a project .
For further info go to:
http://s9.invisionfree.com/OblivionOnline/

Pray tell me, what are your plans to go around the showstopper which prevented Morrowind from ever becoming a multiplayer game, that is non-linear time flow? (pauses when accessing inventory, talking to NPC, replaying animation (sitting, mounting horse), speeds up when resting or waiting, travelling, slows down when your framerate drops etc?)

There were plans for a minimal-multiplayer mod where the game would pause for everyone, allowing them only to access inventory or do other game-paused stuff, or wait and would unpause when the last person closes inventory, resting would be a party thing, everyone rests, to rest everyone must be safe, far from monsters, and the game would force all players to be in the same (or at worst adjacent visible) cell at any time (follow/teleport to the player who moves indoors) to keep the party from getting too fragmented and unmaintainable for the server (too many cells to process at once), and there were some more issues that were to be solved.

In the end it appeared nobody posesses enough programmer skills to do it and Morrowind remained a single-player game forever. Somehow I don't believe Oblivion will be different, especially with cut down scripting language, but who knows? Feel free to try, just think about these issues.

Add to that the randomness of Havoc, Radiant and Speedtree, nondeterministic so you must transfer all the decisions of NPC and movement of all affected items over the net. Somebody drops 40 pieces of ham on the floor and everyone gets a lag as each piece of ham needs to be calculated by the server and its position and movement distributed to all the players.

vook did you pull that crap out of your ass? Have you ever even played ragnarok online? theres thousands apoun thousands of items laying on the ground at once, and there isnt the slightest lag. Just because Oblivion is graphic intensive doesnt change anything either, because all the server has to hand le is the coordinates, angle, position, etc of the items, npcs, and players, while the client handles the models and maps so why it would lag with just 40 items. Plus I dont see where you are getting this non linear babble. Why not just edit the menu so thats its real time, as well as sleeping, actions, talking, and traveling (no fast travel?)

Thousands upon thousands of static bitmap items. Not 3D objects interacting with each other through havok physics engine, when one arrow shot in a pile of strawberries will make each strawberry push 3 others in neighborhood, itself being pushed by them as well.

Try the "item duplication" trick using 200 arrows, see how your framerate drops to nil. And consider that lag multiplied by number of players. 10 players times 20 items will give about the same result. Or worse because natural network lag will have to be included.

Well, I would actualy not liek to have Oblivion online, it would be WAY too hard to do so. BUUUT, what would be fun is that you could have a minor online gameplay, sorta liek you know...rooms? Where thers around only 4 poeple playing. This would make everything much easier.

Even that would be tough. And it would be entirely pointless. You'd still have to re-engineer a large portion of the game, and unless you want to reverse engineer the game through assembly (yuck!), you're stuck with the tools you've been given to do it.

Well, the game as minimal-multiplayer (2-4 players co-op) would be cool but still time continuity problems would have to be solved (even if my framerate drops because I look at lots of grass, my "time" slows, my character moves slower than normally. And if I travel on the horse really fast, the game freezes every 3-4s to load extra stuff!)

I guess if Bethesda doesn't get to do it, nobody does. I bet about the best that could be arranged would be Arena matches, one on one with whole inventory of a player locked as "quest items" to prevent dropping them and as result spamming the server. Still, that would require reverse-engineering the game in assembler...

Well has anyone here played NWN, not to mention NWN2 will also be online. If you want to get it done, it can be done, focus on the solution not the problem.

NWN was build from ground up with multiplayer in mind. Features were added or removed with this single thought: "Will that work in multiplayer?" No time continuity issues, no need for external mods for network layer.
Oblivion was made with single-player in mind and nobody ever bothered if any feature could or couldn't work in multiplayer.

Answer the basic question: Menu access pauses game normally and there's no way to have the game running while the menu is open and vice versa. In all multiplayer games the game is running in the background, an enemy can hurt you while you try to find a potion in the list. In Oblivion the time stops.
Think of a way around this.

You saw neighbor's dog fetch, swim and bark on command, so you try to teach your cat the same tricks and especially insist on barking.

Vook wrote:NWN was build from ground up with multiplayer in mind. Features were added or removed with this single thought: "Will that work in multiplayer?" No time continuity issues, no need for external mods for network layer.
Oblivion was made with single-player in mind and nobody ever bothered if any feature could or couldn't work in multiplayer.

I like the fact it's a single player game - and that it's not online for a variety of reasons:

1.) I don't have to deal with idiotic people that I would normally have to deal with in MMORPGS.

2.) I can stop and start the game and come back to playing it whenever I like.

3.) I don't have to be worried about playing 24 hours just to be around for a certain event that occurs at a random time, just to get a quest item I need for 1 part of a 24 part quest.

4.) Visually the game can be nicer since it doesn't have to worry about many of the things MMORPGS have to.

5.) Game tends to be more involving and focused on the story and questing, not hoarding items to parade around your MMORPG's town, thus generating lag for everyone around the area.

6.) There's more but we'll just stop with that but I could go on for quiet awhile.

Co-Op with a friend would be nice, but whatever is done it will just be a 'hack' and they are never usually very well received by the critical "Get oof my game" type peeps (of which I am more than likelly one).

~Ancalagon

While designing Morrowind multiplayer we came up with these mods:

Easier: Item exchange. Make a specific traders' inventory to be carried by the server. Anything you sell is availavble for anyone to buy. You can get nice pieces of daedric, interesting items etc there - whatever one player sells, other player can buy. Midair collision - two players buying same thing from one trader would be solved by locking. "Sorry, I'm busy now. Try again in a moment." so that no 2 persons buy the same one item.

Harder: Arena battles. Co-op against monsters and PvP duels between players. Always two players at most. The winner can loot the body of the loser. Accessing the inventory freezes the game for the opponent. No waiting, sleeping etc. Any items dropped are erased the moment the battle ends and are invisible to the opponent. Only character stats, movement and hits are transferred. No summons - if you summon anything, the enemy doesn't see the summoned creature and doesn't feel its attacks, it just doesn't work. Whoever dies or leaves the arena first, loses. This would keep the server load on reasonable level...

This is as far as we got in some 15+ pages thread discussing the matter on one of Morrowind forums, very seriously approaching the topic. We agreed on set of features that felt peossible, we decided this could work and if it is done, we may use the experience to try something more ambitious. Then we set off in different directions in search of assembler guru to write the network interface hack for the game. We didn't find any. That's where the idea died.

First send a single bit from Oblivion running on a computer A to Oblivion running on computer B, then we can start talking about design of multiplayer mods - maps, co-op, PvP, guilds etc. Otherwise these ideas have no sense.

About the Morrowind Online, I found this mod a few months ago. Although It didn't work for me, some people said it worked just fine.

Go see it by yourself.
http://archives.ravensky.org/2006/01/16 ... nd_online/

There is a oblivion multiplayer mod i even got it working its still in alpha testing but it seems promising although right now it is very minimal
http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~mloxto01/ Have fun.

^^^ was me but i just made this acount.