Thanks for the replies (and warm welcomes!)

The basic reason I'm exploring this idea is to find a creative solution to what I understand is a basic graphics problem in most game engines. The problem has to do with the size of a game level: If the level is too big, players begin experiencing severe artifacts as they move farther and farther from the mathematical center of the game world.

In a single player game, there are a lot of tricks you can play: You can break the world into chunks and load them as the player moves (Morrowind), you can secretly move the center of the world, or you can limit them with invisible barriers and terrain.

In multiplayer, unless you want multiple servers holding chunks of the world, players have to stick together. Most of the time I see this done with simple means, like teleporting (Halo).

Large outdoor environments and outer space pose nasty problems, particularly if you're not inclined to rewrite the core of most of the indie game engines out there. What do you do when when you want to go to Jupiter and I want to go to Mars, let alone Alpha Centauri? One player has to be the leader and the world has to be broken into chunks that the leader takes them to.

Are you referring to floating point resolution errors? I don't know of any other cause for artifacts that are inflicted by huge distance.

Floating point errors usually occur when you're applying tiny-value math operations on big numbers. Would it not be possible to center each player's machine on that player's own origin? If objects are interacting across machines, they are most definitely within close proximity, and any math being performed between them can be made relative.

We were just talking about you in another thread, actually. Good to see you again.

ChromeHounds allowed one of the players to be highly specialized as a sensor platform, so your radar could see around him, but not other places. That's more along the lines of the Chrystal Chronicles idea, of the one guy making a bubble of hospitable environment in an otherwise inhospitable one.

I like the idea of the one guy serving as a base of operations, like a carrier with fighters. You can have sorties out away from it, but range is limited by the need for supplies.

As a combination of the two ideas, could the "leader" be an object, like some kind of vehicle or uplink, that you have to "dock" to periodically to juice up weapons/sensors/life support?

Are you talking about having all the characters on the same screen, rendered by the same client? If not, most of the problems you describe would seem to vanish.

Each player has a coloured circle around them, which increases (by 15%) the mana or experience-gain-rate of other players around them.
Being inside another player's circle also increases the radius of your own circle by 15%.
So, three players together have a 1.15*1.15 modifier to their mana regen, experience-rate, and circle-radius :)

First thing that came to mind when I read your post was Warcraft III, and the auras some heroes have.

However Oluseyi seems to have a point, you would indeed remove some strategic element to the game. I read your justification for wanting them clumped together and I began wondering if you really need just one leader.
If you could promote several players to, for instance, heroes, they could have something, an aura of some kind, some helling spell, damage sharing, whatever, that would benefit specific types of players.
Like damage dealers might prefer damage enhancing abilities, ranged players might prefer speed/range enhancing abilities, damage dealers might even prefer healing abilities instead if they are running low on HP.

So the clumping would still be beneficial but there would be more groups clumped together. This would give a bit more strategical flexibility to the game, and still allow you, to a smaller extent, to clump players together.

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Original post by Kest Are you referring to floating point resolution errors?

Yes, I should have said it like that.

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Would it not be possible to center each player's machine on that player's own origin? If objects are interacting across machines, they are most definitely within close proximity, and any math being performed between them can be made relative.

I've heard of this approach, but I'm still researching about how much work it would be apply it to the game engine I'm using (which was built for FPS games on a single map). I don't yet know enough, but what I've read about so far makes me cringe. One paper surveyed people trying to create large worlds and talked about how they often implemented level loading or portal schemes because reengineering the game libraries available was too much work. The Dungeon Siege post mortem talks about breakign a huge world into chunks of terrain with their own world origin, but again reading the the trouble they had made me want to come up with a design solution (especially considering my pathetic math skills).

If you know more about this I'd be happy for more pointers.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage I like the idea of the one guy serving as a base of operations, like a carrier with fighters. You can have sorties out away from it, but range is limited by the need for supplies.

I think in open space this is by far the most promising idea. But do you think the gameplay for being the carrier is all that compelling? What do you do when everyone else is fighting? Do you have something like the old Allegiance game (never played but heard about it) where the fighers can't see the incoming threats, but the carrier can and so directs them?

A similar dynamic might be escorts protecting a trade ship. Few people like to play the support role it seems, everybody wants in on the action (although I have little MMO experience-- didn't I see you mention playing Eve? Is that your experience, that everybody wants to be the hero?)

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As a combination of the two ideas, could the "leader" be an object, like some kind of vehicle or uplink, that you have to "dock" to periodically to juice up weapons/sensors/life support?

I'm digging on the carrier idea, but maybe the object is something one player has that repairs, refuels and provides sight to other players. You can only have one of these magical devices for whatever reason (ironic how much game design turns on having a good excuse for something).

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Are you talking about having all the characters on the same screen, rendered by the same client? If not, most of the problems you describe would seem to vanish.

Can you explain this more? From what I understand, the server for the engine I'm using keeps track of the whole simulation in one worldbox, which has a fixed origin. Clients ask the server for where everything is, including their own avatar.

For a space game, if you wanted players to roam vast distances separately you'd have to subdivide that worldbox into cells and limit the view distance, but then also manage the boundaries and merge the subdivisions. Alternately, you could fix the player at the center and move everything around their avatar, but I have no idea how expensive that would be. And this says nothing for one player being on a planet and the other in space.

Even beyond this, there's the design problem of just how much fun it is to be playing cooperatively when the environment is so large you don't even see each other. Do you really need each other at that point? Why even play together?

I missed you, Wavinator.

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Original post by Wavinator I think in open space this is by far the most promising idea. But do you think the gameplay for being the carrier is all that compelling? What do you do when everyone else is fighting? Do you have something like the old Allegiance game (never played but heard about it) where the fighers can't see the incoming threats, but the carrier can and so directs them?

I never played Allegiance either, so I hope someone knowledgable can weigh in, but that sounds like a really interesting dynamic. Maybe not everyone would be into it, but you only need one guy to play that role per group. The closest parallel I can think of from my experience is the Battlefield franchise. Being the commander in Battlefield is usually a fun and rewarding time, even though I often spend a whole round laying behind some sandbags.

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A similar dynamic might be escorts protecting a trade ship. Few people like to play the support role it seems, everybody wants in on the action (although I have little MMO experience-- didn't I see you mention playing Eve? Is that your experience, that everybody wants to be the hero?)

EvE's not a great example, since the game's balance makes "support" and "escort" roles almost impossible to perform. But you're right, most online players, even in a persistent world that's as "grown up" as EvE tends to be, are glory hounds. But if you make it fun, I bet you can convince people to take a less glamorous road to success.

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something one player has that repairs, refuels and provides sight to other players.

That's very appealing, especially if that unit has limited combat capabilities. But what heppens when he dies? Is it checkmate? Can someone else take up the device and assume that role?

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From what I understand, the server for the engine I'm using keeps track of the whole simulation in one worldbox, which has a fixed origin. Clients ask the server for where everything is, including their own avatar.

I lack the technical expertise to really make a point here. It seems to me that if the server is tracking all activity throughout the map, and the client is showing only a limited field of the map, that the server could be taught to provide absolute location data to the client, which could then superimpose that information onto a locally stored avatar-centric terrain map.

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Even beyond this, there's the design problem of just how much fun it is to be playing cooperatively when the environment is so large you don't even see each other. Do you really need each other at that point? Why even play together?

That's an interesting problem. If you're going for a persistent world, then it's worth it to have the fruits of your labor left behind for others, even if you never meet. If not, then there's really no reason for non-social play to occur in the same space.

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Original post by Wavinator The Dungeon Siege post mortem talks about breaking a huge world into chunks of terrain with their own world origin, but again reading the the trouble they had made me want to come up with a design solution (especially considering my pathetic math skills).

My own math skills are average at best. Breaking the world up into individual coordinate sectors was my first guess at a solution. For an example, a world could be split into 4 sectors:

S, coordinates
--------------
1: 0,0
2: 0,1000
3: 1000,0
4: 1000,1000

So to render a tree with coordinates 5,10 in sector 2, you just add the sector's coordinates to it to reach 5,1010. It would also be a breeze to perform math between two or more objects in a single sector (you just ignore the sector coordinates entirely). But when objects interact over a border between two sectors, you would need to subtract one sector's coordinates from the other, and add the result to one of the object's coordinates. And when objects pass through sector borders, you would need to modify their local space coordinates, and depending on the game, that one thing alone could become very messy.

It's still far easier said than done. Every bit of game data that relies on object coordinates would need to consider and handle all possibilities. There are probably better solutions to be found.

The strongest and most natural way to make players follow the leader is to restrict the way they can perform the game actions. So for example, when a non-leader player wanders around by himself, he can't take any quests from NPCs. He can fight creatures, but he can't do much more.