[Nuke]

last week i brought my laptop to school in order to play a game of freespace online, i completly forgot the pain in the ass it was to wait for enough people to show up to get a descent game together. i wonder if it would be possible to have a game that is open, so users can join or exit while the game is in progress, instead of having to get in during the forming phase.

you could have a team vs team mission that has 4 wings. 2 on each team with a wing of bombers and a wing of assaulf fighters. each team would then have 4 slots for players on eash team, you have 12 players but only 8 can be flying at any time, while the other 4 are in a virtual docking bay. as ships get blown up a new slot opens for people in the docking bay, the pilot that died then goes to the end of the line untill a slot opens up for them.

when a slot open the player gets a loadout screen that lets him pick a ship and then he can eighter launch or pass his turn to the next player.

players may join or leave the game at will while the game is running, if a shortage of players occures, then ai ships will be spawned to take their place.

[Stunaep]

That was actually done in FS1 TvT, so it should be possible. Of course, FS2_Source doesn't have the PXO code....

[EdrickV]

Multiplayer things like that would have to wait till there is a full PXO replacement in fs2_open. (Which could take a while.) I would have thought that FS2 missions would be "open" by default though. (But I never did much FS2 online play, my connections were bad enough with FS1.)

[Inquisitor]

They specifically removed in-game joins when they released FS2. Made a big stink, lots of discussion on why.

Not sure this has to wait, just needs somone who can look at the multiplayer code. PXO isn't required.

[Ulala]

Sounds like an excellent idea. Something that would make online play a little easier. I always spend more time than I prefer trying to get in or start an online fs2 game... usually they were already running... this would solve that problem and I think make online play more appealing.

[Inquisitor]

There were some (then very) good reasons they removed this.

I'd have to dig deep to pull them out. Anyone less senile than me (I am looking at Icefire or Thunder or even DaveB himself) care to refresh our memories?

[Ulala]

Oh ok, well in that case, working on making the very good reasons not quite as good might be something to shoot for instead.

[Zaxzon]

Well with the joining in game, it really would slow down the server. The person would have to do all the map, ship, weapon, and in game state loading while the game was going on. Thus dragging down the servers bandwidth and making everything lag-a-riffic™. Well, that is what I remember at least.

[Solatar]

But don't forget, many more people have better connections now than in 1999 when the game was released.

[EdrickV]

Originally posted by Hades
But don't forget, many more people have better connections now than in 1999 when the game was released.

Not everyone's connections are better. Heck, when it comes to playing games my connection seems to be worse. (Due to moving a few years ago and thus having to change access numbers.) And I've got 2 56k modems to try. My no name brand internal modem has a habit of acting really strangely at times and can't seem to keep a 56k connection overnight. (It gets dropped to about 28.8 for some reason.) And my external USR X2 modem doesn't always seem to get a 56k connection since I have no X2 numbers and the access numbers don't seem to support V.90 very well. Also, keep in mind that fs2_open, the way it's going, isn't quite the same game FS2 was. It's got a lot more features and I'm sure it's system requirements would end up being higher then the original's. I'm also not sure how well the netcode works with all these new features. The netcode's been needing someone to go over it with a fine tooth comb and see what can be done to improve it.

[Nuke]

there is no such thing as a name brand modem. anyone who works in a pc manufacture facility will tell you this. at the whopping bulk price of about 6$ a modem, its much easyer to install a new modem than to go on a driver hunt. i find the pctel chipset to work best under winxp, because xp has internal support for that chipset. most modems that we get, even retail boxed stuff shows no company logos or links to web pages where you may find support (unless you can read chineese). nics are probibly second in the bad list. im stil waiting on stuff like io2 and serial ata to make my job much easyer.