Hope for working multiplayer?

NMS Voyagers
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Others are mentioning issues too in the Expedition 19 thread: Is there any hope for multiplayer to not scare off players?

I watched a streamer under ideal circumstances: He had previous experience with NMS (not a naive newb, he knew it’s “a bit buggy”), they knew how to group up and join the same session, he had nice cooperative people to play and chat with, he was very much into building ships and bases, he said the corvette announcement brought him back in. He even had a feeling of success when he used the corvette to pick up another player mid-fall.

And multiplayer desync was so disruptive, that, after 2.5h of actively trying, they quit…

He couldn’t edit the corvette, he couldn’t see his friends in the same geo (they were invisible and left a t-posing shell behind), his friends couldn’t see his corvette or him, mission markers were missing or unclear, of course corvettes were double-parked, they didn’t see the same environment (daylight/weather), he got unhelpful “derelict freighter” markers (“additional security required, scanning x sec”) that didn’t let him open the inner door for no reason… They could only play together by not playing together, each doing the milestones by themselves. :person_shrugging:

They said they have tried a lot of modded multiplayer before, and called this the worst (since it’s not even a hacky mod, it’s official!), with “no quality control”. For them, it was clearly frustrating, and for us, the stream audience, it was no fun to watch. (So they switched to something else.) I don’t expect them to give NMS a fourth chance.

Is there not any way to salvage this? We’re obviously beyond the point of submitting bug reports, those have been the same bugs for years.

I know that a single-player game cannot be turned into a multiplayer game, without having to rewrite everything. I had originally hoped that HG’s custom game engine was at least based on a multiplayer paradigm from the start, and they had just deactivated it at first? But apparently not, it’s still single-player with something “worse than a third-party hacked mod” supplying the p2p syncing…?

Are they at least rewriting the netcode for Light No Fire? :pleading_face:

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The problem will always be that this was an engine built with asynchronous multiplayer in mind with synchronous MP stitched on later.

I would say it is safe to assume that the LNF engine is similar to the NMS engine with the major difference being it was built up with synchronous MP in mind, you would have to assume as such.

It’s unfortunate they eventually had a bad experience, did they try restarting or is that a faux pas for streaming?

It seemed to be going well at first, sounded like a few ghosts in the machine accumulated.

Most certainly hyperbole when they say it’s worse than games with modded MP since I’ve certainly experienced much worse, but that seems to be the only way in which you can critique something online when part of “the game” is getting your comments noticed or input validated. Hyperbole or go home :stuck_out_tongue:

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I can understand the frustration. I can’t think of another MP game where using MP is so much trouble.

The MP is complex in NMS.

First, you can be in MP with people all around you but unable to build together.

Second, you can walk up to someone and join their group. You can build together and travel together but it is not an option I have used much except for Nexus missions.

Third, you can use something like the Steam friends list where you send an invite to join your game thru Steam.

The last option is the best for a true MP experience.

In the end, NMS actually has the best MP experience because if the people around you become idiots, you can easily turn off Network and poof! You are all alone.

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I confess to being a little puzzled. Before the release of the Voyagers update, Hello Games were actually paying influencers to promote No Man’s Sky. They were trying their best to get their player numbers up, so as many people as possible would experience the update.

Then when the update was released, it quickly became apparent that it was virtually untested. It had bugs that even a brief and cursory play test should have picked up. I can only think of two possibilities: either they didn’t test it before release; or they did test it - they knew about the bugs, and released it anyway.

I can’t understand the logic of either choice - particularly if you’ve been making a special effort, and spending money, to get as many people as possible to see the thing? Surely you’d want it to be as good as you could make it?

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Considering that LNF will be on just one planet, maybe what they really wanted to see was the impact on the game of so many players at once.

If so, they got what they wanted.

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I found a lot of the bugs were introduced after the first or second patch as I had a perfectly calm experience up until maybe the second or third day of the expedition

The first two days I had zero issues with the pilots of invisible corvettes appearing en masse inside my own and others. This was also the update that made the sun disappear on Xbox or close to it.

It was also around this time one of the experimental patches was rolled back because it introduced a major bug (or it was hotfixed pretty quick I can’t recall exactly).

It seems in their effort to have everything fixed before the expedition, they may have introduced some major ones that went unnoticed before pushing it through.

The only bugs I encountered until that patch that caused a lot more to appear during expedition, were the invisible collisions and the usual texture streaming issues.

I’m just glad I got the hitchhiking milestone done before the patch made everyone visible, hearing the reports from some of you trying to do it with that bug sounded like mayhem.

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I visited the Anomaly after the newest experimental patch. Ships are definitely spawning better however, I still saw players disconnected from their ships at least when I first entered. It then seemed like some players vanished.

I wonder exactly how they are working this out. Is the Atlas choosing which ships to display and then the owners or the other way around?

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@AdaRynin I Changed the category for this topic to NMS Voyagers

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I think when we consider a really basic part of the game like Dogfighting against NPCs - how the existence and pathing of the enemy ships is determined entirely by your own client (as best as I can tell) - we can see the kind of challenges they’re up against in retroactively introducing synced play. Weather falls under the same umbrella, as well as Frigate Fly-bys.

Multiplayer instances appear to be ad-hoc so determining a single source of truth for all players in an instance (who could be ambient MP or friend-group/mission-group MP and can leave, join, or change MP type at any time) seems to me like a… Very Complex Problem.

Any multiplay that revolves around deterministic data (scanning for world objects mostly) is pretty smooth.

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Unfortunately, it’s built into the basic structure of No Man’s Sky that voxels cannot interrogate other voxels. The procedural natuure of the game precludes it - if they did, every voxel would have to communicate with every other voxel, leading to exponential complexity. So they don’t.

Of course, the fact that they don’t creates its own problems for landscape and environment generation.

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Ah sorry I meant more like POIs. Finding salvage, fossils etc. That stuff syncs well, and if you do get a pal on your Corvette then having a pilot and a spotter makes for a fun, actually collaborative time.

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It’s been a while since I tried - but there used to be considerable variance in weather and time of day. So for me it could be mid-day sunshine, but for my companion it was dark, and blowing a killing storm. Most confusing.

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And there used to be an issue if you were on your starter planet. You were given a handicap which kept sentinels suppressed even if it was an aggressive sentinel planet but for anyone who joined you, they were constantly attacked by sentinels you couldn’t even see

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That is not entirely correct. They cannot interrogate each other during terrain generation yes, they can interrogate each other at a later stage when actually constructing the mesh. Need to, even, otherwise they can’t calculate their own triangles.

However, terrain and placed objects are not the problem here. They’re the most consistent thing in the game (ok, not sure how many differences are introduced by the scarcity settings). For those, you have a single source of truth. Except they can be modified, so you need to gather all modifications from all instance members and apply a union of them to the current state of each player.

And that’s where the trouble starts, because it means that you don’t really know what things will look like until you decided on all the players in the instance. If a player drops in through joining, it’s not really a problem. If two people meet organically it’s more difficult, but usually you can join them early enough before they notice each others modifications.

Things really start to go wonky when there’s a lot of players leaving and joining in the same location. now you have to start merging instances, and with all the modifications each player is able of doing, that sounds like a nightmare…

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Many times I enter another player base built on the ground and I cannot get thru because the base is full of terrain. Sometimes the other player does not see this terrain but many times it seems I bring the terrain with me. They will exclaim it wasn’t there earlier.

This is why I build most of my bases off the ground

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Hmmm… there’s another rub… bases are its own thing again. And how do you decide what terrain modifications a player did are part of the base, so the base gets displayed correctly when the player is not around, and what terrain modifications are carried with them by the other player, so to speak, so they can be displayed when another player gets near that one? And then, of course, there’s the added complexity of another player being able to modify the base…

It sounds simple enough in theory, but there’s a lot of edge cases hiding in there! This kind of thing is really a lot simpler if you have one central state to modify…

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In the past, when building a base, I found that laying floor panels would automatically smooth and flatten the ground under them. For me, this is no longer happening. When I lay a floor, the original terrain shows through, and is only flattened if I go over it afterwards with the terrain manipulator.

I had thought this might be some minor bug, an irritation, but of little consequence. Now I’m wondering whether it’s a deliberate attempt to standardise multiplayer experience.

Of course, as game development has progressed, less and less of it has become genuinely “procedural”. The more interesting features, like NPC structures and ruins have always been plug-in pre-drawn maps (albeit assembled from procedural parts), but now they’ve been added to by such features as floating islands, volcanoes, and the like.

When seeing other player’s bases, we should all be seeing the one standard version - the one that’s been uploaded - and that should include the terrain within the base build limit. It should work just like volcanoes - everybody sees the same volcano. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be happening.

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I do like how the de sync fits into the lore, we are after all separate iterations of the same simulation blurring together as the boundaries break.

Because of this I kinda smile when a new player enters the system and suddenly my weather/time of day syncs to theirs.

The bugs are just part of the lore :wink: or the lore has been set up to take into account the inevitable de sync bugs due to the nature of the engines foundation and the use of proc gen.

Either way I embrace it all as part and parcel of the experience, more so than with other games due to how it kinda adds to the immersion of a dying machine and an encroaching black hole.

I wish more let’s players/streamers soaked in the lore enough to spin it this way to their audience. Whether that would help perception or not is a mixed bag of some will love it and some will loathe it or call it a cop out. For me it’s a simple question of, do I want to exist in misery or do I want to enjoy my time here? :blush:

As for terrain weirdness at bases, I do think this has something to do with your own local cache of terrain edits or what local player terrain edits the system decided to fill your cache with. Similar to how, if you’ve built a lot of bases or gotten close to your build limit, you will actually see less player bases in the same system as another player whose built very little.

I’m not sure if the above is still true, I think the total base cache goes a bit above 16,000 parts to account for you still being able to see other bases even if you’ve hit your own cap, but I can’t recall the exact number either. It was somewhere around 18-20,000. If this has changed in recent years please let me know.

As with everyone else whose been at this as long as we have, I’ve done all my base building in recent years with avoiding terrain edits as best I can if not entirely. Just because of it’s inconsistencies and the amount of hidden trackers associated with player edits.

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19

I had not thought of this even though I noticed it often in expeditions.

I don’t cry over the bugs much because they all fit the lore. As long as I can play and haven’t hit a black screen because the Atlas melted down or erased that iteration, I’m okay with all the weirdness

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Over the years, I have restarted the game hundreds of times. Sometimes I only played a few days, sometimes I went on for months. It’s only since I was able to launch expeditions from the anomaly, and keep everything in one place, that I’ve settled on a single main save.

In all those abandoned games, to which I no longer have access, I built bases. Some of them were huge bases - and there must have been thousands of them.

Presumably, they’re still floating around out there somewhere. Presumably they’re still linked to my account, even though I haven’t had access to them for years - I can’t delete them, I can’t even find them, the save games no longer exist.

So what does this do to my base parts count?

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