Multiplayer Game Play

[Jonathan]

Seeing CXL please don't make it a multiplayer.

Only make it a multiplayer once the single player has been totally finished for a year or so.

[croxis]

@catty, multicity play is not mandatory.  The only way someone can join is if you tell them how to join your personal game.  That being said, the design also allows you to play multiple cities at the same time on the same computer.  Theoretically with a powerful enough machine, and enough monitors, you could even play every city in a region

Seeing CXL please don't make it a multiplayer.

Only make it a multiplayer once the single player has been totally finished for a year or so.

That is an impossible mentality for the following reasons:

Open source projects are never finished.  They operate very differently than commercial closed source projects.  For example, with open source projects must release early, and release often.

Open source projects are community driven.  People will work on and add features that interest them.  It is up to the project leaders on what is added to the trunk (the current working code).

The code must be designed for multiplayer from the ground up, even if it isn't implemented to the end user.  To add multiplayer to a non-mp designed game usually requires substantial recoding and changing of game mechanics, introduces new bugs, and will take more labor to do than to put it in right away.

And why should I care if CitiesXL multiplayer is bad (I'm in the beta too by the way)?  This is a totally different game, you may as well be comparing civilization4 multiplayer with doom3 multiplayer.  It makes no sense.  It is like saying because Microsoft windows Vista bombed that people couldn't improve those features in Mac OSX or linux/bsd.  The blatant juvenile, conspiracy theory laden hyperbole and personal attacks on the beta forum is disgusting and a poor demonstration on the community's intellect.

That is all I am going to say on multiplayer in this topic as I want to focus discussion on region play implementation.  I will open another for multiplayer discussion.

[Jonathan]

Sorry I used the wrong words, by totally finished I mean the Single Player can be played, and is pretty stable. Not a Multiplayer with Single Player tacked on the side but the opposite.

[catty]

... the design also allows you to play multiple cities at the same time on the same computer.  Theoretically with a powerful enough machine, and enough monitors, you could even play every city in a region

And why should I care if CitiesXL multiplayer is bad (I'm in the beta too by the way)? 

ditto

[croxis]

Implementing multiplayer gameplay into a city simulator is not new.  SimCity 2000 did it with the Network Edition.  CitiesXl tried a different approach.  This is mine:

There are two approaches that I think can work together.

Multicity play:  Different players can be playing different cities at the same time. This can actually be done in a limited capacity with sc4 by putting a region into an svn repository.  This is expanded so different cities can be run at the same time.  The game master for the region (the person running the server) can also set it so a player can only play a certain number of cities, or certain people can only play certain cities, or leave it for a free for all.  Trade would be like sc4, although as different cities are played at different times and different speed, there will be no time limit for trade.  Work will need to be done to prevent griefing.

City play:  My personal gem I would love to do.  My current understanding of gameplay (which I agree with) is that instead of the player directly placing zones and roads, the player will have blueprint layers where they zone, build roads, etc.  When the player is happy with the design they commit construction and everything will begin construction.  This opens itself well to multiplayer.  Different players have different blueprints, and may only have access to specific tools or blueprint layers.  Players may either vote on blueprints, the mayor chooses, or a free for all.  This also opens itself to a lot of forum game possibilities similar to the democracy games for Civilization.

[tomkeus]

Players may either vote on blueprints, the mayor chooses, or a free for all.  This also opens itself to a lot of forum game possibilities similar to the democracy games for Civilization.

This is a very good idea.