MultiPlayer

From ShortHike

Because of how SimulationTime is defined in ShortHike standard competitive multiplayer is pretty impossible. The probability of everyone wanting to accelerate time increases with the number of users, not a very good scenario.

Instead of competitive multiplayer ShortHike is designed to support collaborative editing. A campaign always belongs to a single player on a single computer but he can invite other players to "look over his shoulder", or to participate in the design of a station.

Let's take an example and assume I'm Fred who just started playing ShortHike a few moments ago. My fluxfield looks really misplaced and I have no idea how to fix it. Goblegooks don't help. I check out the channels and notice Wilma being online. So after some ho-hum I invite her over to look at my station. She immediately notices a bunch of stuff that needs realigning, shows me the first and lets me do the rest by myself. After a while I seem to be doing it nicely on my own and she gets back to working on her own station. Later on she invites me there to take a look on it.

So collaboration at the station level is the key. The reasoning behing this model of multiplayer is the idea that most people like to collaborate on a station building level. A competetitive multiplayer mode would be more focused on the economic simulation, which is outside our scope of concentrating on station design as the core.

• I found an interesting document on using a P2P system for hosting a multiplayer game. It seems to run along the same lines as what KP stated in the above.

P2P multiplayer (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~hhl/Papers/infocom04.pdf)