Topic: Please forgive me but, This could possibly be the dumbest question ever

[Davey-E]

Guys
erm i,ll get straight to the point

Why is it that we can only play 6 players in the multiplay game in SFC 2 EAW or OP,
i mean - why no more??

In this day of thousands playing on servers (eg: Eve online) - whats the take on this, some kind of hard coding etc ??????

Always dreamed of being able to play massive fleet battles in any environment (nebula, asteroids, base attacks etc etc - you get he message) I want 10 v 10 Klingon v Feds battles - lol

When we eventually started the vg battles and in our 1st contest againts the LSE (we were the Kzinti), the Lyrans were overwhelmed as its damn hard to play more than 1 ship using their tactics, we Kzinti just pressed the missile fire button lots - lol

Cheers for any answers and take care guys - jees i miss the old days

Davey

P.S Probs the only way to do this is go join some SFB battles perhaps?????

[GotAFarmYet?]

If I remember right
The game engine and allot of the code is from about 1994-1997 developement. I forget the game engine name they used but that was from before those dates and it is that age and the lack of video support that limits this. Along with the fact that the AI and other things really use allot CPU time

[EmeraldEdge]

Yeah, I think they even had the network code pulled out from under them on EAW and had to find a replacement last minute, didn't they?

Can you imagine a 64 player match (Battlefield 1942 got there, and that was an FPS with tons of stuff going on)?  All with captains coordinating over voice chat on multiple channels.  Oh, I think I just wet myself.

[Sirgod]

That was part of it, the other part was the amount of variables for each ship that needed to be passed through the lines, even telephone line for the time.

For example , with two ships, we are talking location, shield strength, emp, drones, weapons, etc. etc all at a constant update. with 6 that is a lot of info. Mind you, the amount of info that SFC passes along, is a lot more than say WoW, or the average FPS. 

I believe Either Scott or Dave explained it like that in the long ago. Just way too much info to share with larger groups. I mean, imagine if all 6 players had 3 ships each, all drone carriers. That's a lot of information to pass along at a constant rate. Anyways, It's a good question, and I'm glad you brought it up.

Stephen

[Panzergranate]

Seirra's Red Baron II (1994) ran 76 player games on Seirra Online (a forerunner of X-Box Live). Compared to Battlefield 1942, Red Baron II was light years ahead in game play. friends operated as squadrons or flights, went on patrol looking for trains to attack, artillery positions to bomb, attack enemy observation balloons, etc. or just hope (or not) to run into enemy players so as to have a good dogfight.

The game maps covered approximately 1,000 square miles so it was possible to run out of gas attempting to fly from one side to another. 76 online players all active inside the area, logging in and loggin out, flying missions, etc.

All this on 56 K. Dial up!!

I used to run an all black SPAD 13 with white airelons, elevators and rudder. Only aces were allowed to customise their paint schemes.

When Seirra Online closed many of the developers migrated to Microsoft to create X-Box Live.

Navigation in the game was by real period paper maps, which I still have. The game was extremnely realistic including the damage model. Some of the aircraft were lethal to fly on their own (Neuport 17, BE-2, Fokker D-II, Sopwith Camel, Dr-I) and would either break up or break into spins at the drop of a hat. then there were the engine failures for no apparent reason (BE-2).

The game was created by the guy who designed the F-15. I loved it and so did lots of other people.

You'd think that with all the technological progress such thing would still be possible....

However the internet is far more crowded today. Game lag issues are more common even with 10 Meg. Broad Band.

It's like decades ago when the roads were emptier and traffic was faster because of less jams.

[Sirgod]

There is a lot of truth to that. Even a constant 36k is in some ways better than a wishy washy connection that we all have. Never mind all the differing kinds of connections we do have.

Not really knowing, But I think the saving grace for the game Red Baron II , that you mentioned, is the air space was not quite as limited as say one map in SFC.  In other words, the game could bypass information from the opposite side of the map, where because the maps are smaller in SFC, they couldn't do that. Like I said, just a guess.

And let's be honest also, The Devs constantly hated the net code they had to work with. It was a miracle that they did what they did with it.  Heck DirectX was also pretty new as a development tool back then also IIRC.

Reminds me of the old days of Ultima on DOS, where Origin wrote their own memory management system, that was a nightmare at times for the user.

Stephen

[Davey-E]

Thanx for the replies Guys

Played a few games since the SFC series, but nothing comes close to this IMHO
Just as the Kzinti launched a full strike on the Klingon Empires northern borders
http://www.coinich.com/starfleet/oclub/vg2/currentmap.gif
You have no idea how much we all wanted to go head to head with full on fleet battles (actually YES i do know)

oh the memories, i don,t think i,ll ever have that kind of fun again, boy i,ve tried

Oh well, we can always dream

Take Care All

Davey-E

[marstone]

another point of difference between Red Barren and SFC.  The first was run on a server/subscriber network.  Thus each player had only one packet to send out, and received only packets that mattered to them.  SFC while on the Dynaverse main map is a server/subscriber network and thus you can have 64 or more players on that map/part of the game.  But when you drop to a combat game, the game is changed into a peer to peer network and thus you have many more packets to fire off to everyone in the game.  Each player adds substantially more messages to the game.

[FA Frey XC]

While the code itself may be old, the concepts behind it are not, and Marstone hit the nail on the head.

Different techniques to handle vastly different methodologies.

We ARE, however, looking at the network code right now and who knows? Perhaps we'll be able to do something about that once the code update work is completed.

Regards,

[Panzergranate]

SFC ship models have a lot of attributes linked to them. (Warp Boxes, weapons & locations, APR, MOD File used, etc.). Just looking at how many attributes a ship has attached to it gives some idea of how much information has to be passed between all participants in a peer to peer combat engagement. Star Trek Legacy, on the other hand, has very few attributes attached to each ship hence the lack of realism in combat but faster online game play. If Legacy actually had all the correct weapons, which they've missed out on most of the starships (Klingon D7 for instance), they would also have to attach and pass all the attributes for these weapons. The same goes for Star Trek online.... more weapons hardpoints means more attribute passing between peers in an online combat game.

Red Baron II had every strut, spar, gas tank, engine, oil tank, bullet, gun, paint job and even the pilot's wounds passed between peers in the game. For instance I once attacked player flying a Hun Talbe single engined bomber which had been up to no good over our lines. He was no noob and good at the evasive maneuvers to foil my shots at him. I did manage to spinter his right hand outer wing strut however. 3 minutes after I did this he pulled a swooping right turn and his whole upper right wing let go. I wasn't firing at him as I figured I was low on ammo and had held my fire for over a minute hoping for a good shot. He went down but Hun players had the option of parachutes so he was able to bail out, as was his team mate tail gunner.

Red Baron players passed probally as much attribute data between peers in a game as SFC players. I sure miss flying over the Western Front.

The internet was less crowded in those days. Packets were 1 kilobyte on average. All you needed was a 16 megabyte or RAM 33 Mhz. plus 386 and a modem. Them were the days....

Ouit of interest it was noted on TV recently that in the mid 1980's one had to wait 3 minutes for the cassette tape to load word processor software into a 8 Mhz. Z-80 C Sinclair Spectrum before one could start typing a letter.

Now with faster computers and the help of Microsoft it now takes cloer to 10 minutes to achieve the same....

And the Spectrum didn't crash for no apparent reason....

Progress??

[FPF-DieHard]

11v11 battles that actually emulate SFB's fleets would have been friggin amazing and would absolutely had different tactics than we saw in 3v3s . . . I mean 42 Proximity photons fired at once would make the "magic photon" debates of old seem tame. 

The coordination required to pull off of this off would have been a beautiful thing to see.  Getting together to practice this would have been AWESOME.

But honestly . . . this is what would happen in a D2 fight like this . . . one side would lose 3-4 attrition ships (CLs, CWs, etc . . .) and then disengage.  it was like that one SGO server where we had Battleships escorted by CVAs where we would dance around for a few minute, paint our shields, but never close.

In hindsight the PvP victory conditions we attached to kills were the dumbest thing we ever did.  it ended up with one sides vets killing the other side's n00bs as two vets killing each other was just too damned difficult. 

I'd love nothing better than SFB getting another video game like SFC but with a modern engine and facelift on the graphics, I just hope to god it not turned into some generic MMO with the inanely retarded "DPS - Tank - Heals" mechanic.

[Max Power]

Why can't it do more than it does? Because it's:

#1 Ancient by today's standards
 
and

#2, not well constructed even when it was new. I mean, how many alt-F4 shiplosses (for example) did you take? Just an example. Dyna didn't even work on release, it always felt like something they threw together at the last minute and with the greatest expense. IMO, no matter how hard Frey tries you can't make a Geo act like a Mustang. You can tune it so it's a really nice Geo, but it'll always be a Geo. What really needs to happen is for it to be remade. That'll never happen, because IMO paramount is out to get SFB, or at least make it appear as much as possible to everyone that it doesn't exist. Online gaming has come a huge distance since SFC has been released - I've been in engagements that broke 1500 in eve for instance. Laggy but everything is working (slooooowly lol). Now without hugely expensive dedicated server software, it's not likely you'd get anything like that. I'd guess 10 v 10 could be done easily on a server hosted by someone like us, and 20 vs 20 would not surprise me at all. Get that and you could work on doing something like federation commander online with battles fought out in person. I'd be a blast and I for one would be first in line to fight the lyrans and klinks in the retreat back to the homeworld (probably beating the snot out of all the new, stupid klinks that would have just started playing the game). Alas likely never to be, thanks to limited imagination and paramounts fascist intellectual property rights.

[Magnum357]

I agree with much of what people have said here.  I think Marstone and the SFB standard of Command limits are probably the biggest factor of why SFC only allows 3 ships per player.  I remember my old 56K modem using packets to send info (I have no idea how this wireless internet works now) and having the huge amound of ships you see in some of these other games would just be too much for some of the old  computers built in the 90's.  Also, keep in mind that SFB protocal has pretty ridged fleet limits (the typical engagement in SFB usually only had 3 or 4 ships most of the time).  Its possible Taldren just decided it was easier and basic to just limit it to 3 ships.

If you guys ever do make an SFC game, I sure hope you guys make a basic 2D SFC game because I'm getting tired of dealing with all the Direct X issues of Vista and Windows 7.

[Max Power]

I can't recall ANY limit to numbers of ships in SFB, though practicality would limit you to a certain amount. This is one of the reasons that SFB'ers like myself come to despise paramount because they make it impossible for any computerized official gaming aids to be created, as anything like that requires their permission. In F&E, 40 v 40 isn't unheard of, assuming there's enough reason for it. This is where computer gaming can shine because all of the minutia can be dealt with instantly by the computer, while the interesting parts are still controlled by the player. Personally I'd just like a game where you could get real fleets in on each side, and one that didn't have you fighting lame AI all the time. Ideally, battle hexes would be drawn based on moves and the ships engaged, then the players on each side would take control of the fight and resolve them. If there's not a person on the other side, it's generally not worth doing IMO.

[TAnimaL]

If you're playing SFB "by the book," there certainly are limits, under S8.2 "F&E Command Rating: This rating determines how many ships can be in a given battle." Since no ship has a command rating higher than 10, 11's the fleet limit size. While I suppose you could have two (or more) allied fleets participating against a common enemy for 22 (or more) on a side, a rules lawyer could quote the above rule as a limit rule of only 11 per side.

And unless you've got a lot of players for each side, in SFB, man, EA alone would take hours for a 40 v 40...

While I wouldn't mind more than 6 players in a battle, I've always imagined/rationalized that a fleet battle might be dozens of ships vs dozens, but it's broken down into the squadron level. Space being so big and all, the Admiral says, "you 3 ships go take out those 3 ships" to those under his command... Has anyone ever experimented with something like VASSAL? I thought something like that could be set up for players to manauver their fleets around ad set up their skirmishes, but I never had the time to get beyond the "what if" phase.

As an aside, those "Paramount is evil, ADB rules!" memes don't fly with me. That "deal" that limits SFB computer stuff was as much SVC's doing as Parmount's, ultimately self-serving and controlling. Who's tagline here is "I'm sure glad I like SFB!"? IMHO, I gave up on SFB looong ago... my tag should be "I'm soo glad we have SFC!"

[FA Frey XC]

Don't loose hope, there is truly light at the end of the tunnel.



SFC runs on native windows 8 , gentlemen. Nothing we have to do to it, and we've damn near updated the codebase to V2010.

We've actually got a new engine if we want, there's a lot of stuff we're thinking about doing right now.

So ... don't give up just yet.

Regards,

[RazalYllib]

I knew there was an overwhelming compelling reason to reinstall the beast on an older P4 box that was recently "frankencomputer" to place in the dungeon for basement use. Actually the plan was to use that ancient piece of hardware to store audio/vid and play through the nice speaker matrix i have improvised to make the silence go away in the dungeon. Naturally, I dug the OP up and installed...yesterday.

Had to wipe that box and currently updateing windows then will put OP back up and wander over to DV and see if anything happening there.
I had to see if I still had the skills to play before I wiped...been gazzillion years.

R-KRB vs F-CAR....15mins laterish = scratch the Fed from existance....I almost forgot how to kill things....took awhile to get my sealegs, but it was most satisfying.

I was impressed with the op enhance pack and the mod chooser gadget....great job with it.

I was always used to manually configuring my current install - mod choose much easier.

[FA Frey XC]

I knew there was an overwhelming compelling reason to reinstall the beast on an older P4 box that was recently "frankencomputer" to place in the dungeon for basement use. Actually the plan was to use that ancient piece of hardware to store audio/vid and play through the nice speaker matrix i have improvised to make the silence go away in the dungeon. Naturally, I dug the OP up and installed...yesterday.

Had to wipe that box and currently updateing windows then will put OP back up and wander over to DV and see if anything happening there.
I had to see if I still had the skills to play before I wiped...been gazzillion years.

R-KRB vs F-CAR....15mins laterish = scratch the Fed from existance....I almost forgot how to kill things....took awhile to get my sealegs, but it was most satisfying.

I was impressed with the op enhance pack and the mod chooser gadget....great job with it.

I was always used to manually configuring my current install - mod choose much easier.

WB RazalYllib!!!!

[Tus-XC]

Don't loose hope, there is truly light at the end of the tunnel.



SFC runs on native windows 8 , gentlemen. Nothing we have to do to it, and we've damn near updated the codebase to V2010.

We've actually got a new engine if we want, there's a lot of stuff we're thinking about doing right now.

So ... don't give up just yet.

Regards,

Do ya'll know what was changed between 7 and 8 that made that possible if i might asK?  Did microsoft fix some of its backwards compatability?

[Strat]

Well whats he's saying is:

The problem that happened in SFC in Vista (the Dynaverse problem) was evident also in Win 7 and 8.

The fix that we have for the Dynaverse works in Vista and 7 and 8.

Also, there was fear the game would not work in Windows 8 due to DirectX changes. Well, so far on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, the game works fine- so we don't have to worry.

So any fix (for any problem) we make for Vista, will automatically work in Windows 7 and 8, with no additional effort.