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I don't understand


Ultimatefan

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I'm sorry if I sound like an entitled idiot, it's because I probably am.

 

I've been following the progress of PZ and IWBUMS for months now, I love it. To me it is probably the best co-op game in general, it's better than most other survival games in many ways. I bought the game last year but stopped playing when I realized that B41 wasn't coming to multiplayer for a while.

Why did I quit? Because every time B41 got an update playing with my friends felt ugly, worse and worse.

And I got more and more frustrated every update, don't get me wrong I love the game and everything the devs add is obviously an improvement but I only get to see them in singleplayer, thing is I'm not here for the SP experience, I want to play with 3 other people and have fun with my friends, I don't want to think everytime I play with them how this could be so much better in B41.

 

And the cherry on top is that Split-screen with steam exists. I get it, I'm no dev, I have no knowledge on how this stuff works and I wouldn't want to take time away from them, but still, I don't understand how co-op can exist but MP still isn't ready. Sure populated servers had and still have a lot more lag, but I'm willing to bet that given the chance even just to play with 5 other players most players would be happy but that's my bias.

We aren't expecting a flawless experience, it's early access, there are bugs, there may be unexplained lag but at least we get to choose more than one friend to play with (gamepad lmao).

 

Sorry for the rant, I love this game and you devs for making it

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Splitscreen doesn't require any server or net code to function. It's just making a clone of a character and putting them on a different screen, essentially.

 

Remote Play through Steam (which allows network play w/ split screen) also doesn't require any work on our part to work. All it's doing is sending keyboard/mouse/controller commands to another user's computer and transmitting a video of the game.

 

Integrating animations into the server and fixing the long over-due issues from build 40 prior takes an awful lot more work, because the game engine is huge at this point and the changes extensive. This needs to happen to have functional MP, regardless of the number of players. If we limited the server to 5 players, it'd still take essentially the same amount of work s targetting 64 or 128 because it's all the same server architecture. Improvements made to higher numbers of players also keep the server from using too many resources or crashing when you have few players.

 

To put it into perspective, we're not even to the point that MP is in Internal testing (most, if not all of, have not even played it). It's currently being built by GA and bug tested by them for the worst offenders. Once it stops breaking in obvious ways and everything necessary to progress further is implemented, then it moves to internal testing. Then it's moved to IWBUMS. Then after it's stress-tested by the public and we have eliminated most priority bugs, it goes fully public and build 41 is done.

 

So, in short, there's nothing playable right now. It's not about releasing a totally flawless build or unexplained lag (though that is very important for it to be put in the stable branch of the game). It's simply not done.

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33 minutes ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Splitscreen doesn't require any server or net code to function. It's just making a clone of a character and putting them on a different screen, essentially.

 

Remote Play through Steam (which allows network play w/ split screen) also doesn't require any work on our part to work. All it's doing is sending keyboard/mouse/controller commands to another user's computer and transmitting a video of the game.

 

Integrating animations into the server and fixing the long over-due issues from build 40 prior takes an awful lot more work, because the game engine is huge at this point and the changes extensive. This needs to happen to have functional MP, regardless of the number of players. If we limited the server to 5 players, it'd still take essentially the same amount of work s targetting 64 or 128 because it's all the same server architecture. Improvements made to higher numbers of players also keep the server from using too many resources or crashing when you have few players.

 

To put it into perspective, we're not even to the point that MP is in Internal testing (most, if not all of, have not even played it). It's currently being built by GA and bug tested by them for the worst offenders. Once it stops breaking in obvious ways and everything necessary to progress further is implemented, then it moves to internal testing. Then it's moved to IWBUMS. Then after it's stress-tested by the public and we have eliminated most priority bugs, it goes fully public and build 41 is done.

 

So, in short, there's nothing playable right now. It's not about releasing a totally flawless build or unexplained lag (though that is very important for it to be put in the stable branch of the game). It's simply not done.

Thanks a lot for the thoughtful answer. This gives me a lot of perspective which I didn't really understand before

I totally feel like an idiot now.

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Holy smokes - there IS a way to multi-play? Yeah, one other person but that seems way better than nothing. ...I'll have to be careful who I mention it to though, lol. Anyways, yeah, I'm all for stability. Having "chapters" or seasons or whatever be interrupted or outright ended because of server/game version issues sucks way more than waiting imo. Lol, I'm all traumatized. 

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