World Progression and Constant Servers?

[strydevex]

I've had this on my mind for quite a while, but I haven't seen any other threads relating to this idea as of yet, so if this is common knowledge, I apologize. How will the worlds progress if the server is constantly running, or how will people know how much time has passed when joining?

 

The thought I've had with this is simply "Does the world continue on, whether you're there or not?". With seasons being an important part of the game, how will the affect players? If the server constantly runs, and a player feels that they aren't ready for winter when it arrives, would they be able to just drop out of the game and wait for winter to pass, the return to whatever other players have left of their base?

 

If anyone has any information, or for lack of information, ideas, I'd love to hear it!

[Zandor]

I'm assuming that the world pauses when there's no one there, but continues normally when there's at least one person on, so if you play from Day 1 to Day 6, then you go off for a week and people keep playing on the server while you aren't there, you could come back unchanged and it might be the middle of winter on day 20. In this case the people who were playing the whole time would hopefully help you and have extra resources so you don't freeze to death right away. Now, until i actually get a key for DST in my email, i don't really know anything at all, so this is purely speculative.

[strydevex]

Yeah, but in the same sense, you could have one big base with a lot of resources, then have all but a single player leave until winter ended, and continue progression

[Isosurface]

Interesting question. If the server time is different from the player time, not only you can skip the harder part of year, you can skip all sort of periodic hazards and events. For example, if I don't have enough burnable materials to survive a night, I can just quit at dusk and rejoin at dawn. Other hazards includes rain, full moon (Woodie), nightmare cycle.

 

Also, you can "accelerate" certain processes. For example, if I'm starving to death at my base, I can quickly plant seeds in my farms. Then I leave the server and allow vegetables to grow, and rejoin the server when the vegetables are ready for harvesting.

 

On the other hand, people can join a server at the wrong time (winter night) and die quick. The server should display its time/season, so people don't join at night and die instantly.

 

There are also processes that you don't want to "accelerate", such as beefalo and rocklobster population growth. Imagine coming back to a server and find it overrun by the rocklobsters ...

[MrNaxeros]

Leaving the game to pass through winter will be at a cost of other players as at least one must be on the server for the time to go... So let's say there are 5 people on the server and winter is about to come. 4 players left at dusk and there is only you... Would you survive winter alone when you relied on help of the others? This can either work on your advantage. You will get some blue gems, walking cane, Tam O' Shanter, duh even Deerclops eye. But honestly who would play alone on winter? I would just go play singleplayer.

[Tomer8009]

All of these abusive ways to work around the game sysyem are meaningless in a game luke this where cheating completely ruins the game, players will simply dont do it..

[MrNaxeros]

Players might not do it but it has another problem.

Here is the situation. You joined a brand new server on day 1. Let's say you got to day 5 with quite nice base, maybe with help of someone. You had to leave the game to do your stuff. Next time you log in you are in the middle of winter with no winter clothes, beard or even decent resources to make fire.

 

So... players might not skip harder times like winter or hounds attacks but might skip the opposite situations like in the example above.

[the truthseeker]

It is likely the only persistent world will be if players are constantly in it and it is never completely empty. Whether world settings/player mods will change this or allow otherwise, we will see.
 

Interesting question. If the server time is different from the player time, not only you can skip the harder part of year, you can skip all sort of periodic hazards and events. For example, if I don't have enough burnable materials to survive a night, I can just quit at dusk and rejoin at dawn. Other hazards includes rain, full moon (Woodie), nightmare cycle.
 
Also, you can "accelerate" certain processes. For example, if I'm starving to death at my base, I can quickly plant seeds in my farms. Then I leave the server and allow vegetables to grow, and rejoin the server when the vegetables are ready for harvesting.
 
On the other hand, people can join a server at the wrong time (winter night) and die quick. The server should display its time/season, so people don't join at night and die instantly.
 
There are also processes that you don't want to "accelerate", such as beefalo and rocklobster population growth. Imagine coming back to a server and find it overrun by the rocklobsters ...

   
It is not likely there will be any speeding up of growing items outside of things like fertilizers (or Glommer's Goop/the Bucket of Poop when RoG is implemented) you normally find in game. If the game is so unbalanced using standard rules that it cannot be maintained with Multiplayer, then Klei will deviate from the core rules in those instances.
 
And as posted in several early threads/devcasts, Klei wioll not add additional items in one multiplayer side that cannot be gotten in a single player side or vice versa (unless it seriously breaks game balance and must be excluded.) This is to preventing only one playing type getting rewards making "haves versus have nots" if you will.

[orian34]

Sorry if it is not, but i found obvious that the hoster of the server is choosing...When he host, gam is on, when he left(it's the main player...obvious, no?), it stops until he come back!

[RalphKastro]

that's the main reason why I thought multiplayer was a bad idea when it was announced...

[orian34]

that's the main reason why I thought multiplayer was a bad idea when it was announced...

Can you explain your sight?(i'm doing it in the cool and artistic way(gentilhomme oblige!) called the debate)

[RalphKastro]

Can you explain your sight?(i'm doing it in the cool and artistic way(gentilhomme oblige!) called the debate)

(I'm hoping I understood what you meant correctly... My English vocabulary is far from perfect... please be patient if I got your question entirely wrong)

Well, one of the biggest problems I spotted after my "NOO THEY LIED TO US" and "oh cool, multiplayer, let's see how they're going to do it(AND WHINE ABOUT IT)" was specifically this. There are many problems created just by having the world running on a Multiplayer server as, 1)food spoils quite quickly, and much faster than anybody can sleep, wake up, work/study, do the chores and turn on the computer. 2)seasons and other time related events(Deerclops, Hounds, full moon) are very important to the player, and missing them and having your base destroyed/a long wait for that walking cane can be really frustrating. 3)players might destroy your base with just some hammers while you're offline and you can't do anything about it.(and let's not even mention all those annoying little things added in RoG)

And even though your solution seems to help a bit, it still fails when there's, for example, a player offline but the host is still on, or on public servers, where there's no real host and the server is on 24/7

[rezecib]

TL;DR: I think they're focusing on Terraria-like server workings now. 24/7 persistent servers are a bag of worms, but you can go hands-off or change the rules up a lot to try to preserve the gameplay, but how to do that is really unclear.

 

 

I imagine that if 24/7 persistent servers are to be a thing, it's either going to be a very different experience from single-player Don't Starve, or there are going to have to be significantly different rules for how they operate.

 

I think (but I guess this is just an impression, not substantiated by specific statements) that they're focusing on making the game work for worlds that behave more like single-player worlds. The idea being that you have a group of friends you want to play with, and when you're playing together the world is progressing, then you stop and the world stops progressing. This would probably be implemented by using the host to determine activity/progression: e.g. the host goes into their saves, they pick a world, and it boots up (maybe with a waiting period for other players to join). Other players can join or leave at any point. This is how a Terraria server works, for example.

 

I'm not sure about how to approach 24/7 persistent servers. I think you can definitely take the hands-off approach, and not bother trying to deal with the exploits/loopholes/pitfalls that have been discussed here (planting seeds on the brink of starvation, disconnecting and then reconnecting when the crops are grown). It doesn't have the same crispness that Don't Starve normally has, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. For pitfalls, it might be nice if the server warned connecting players ("winter", "at night", etc), but even without that, players could just disconnect when they see they've connected at a bad time.

 

As for how you'd go about changing the rules to make 24/7 persistent server gameplay make sense... That's a tough nut to crack. Other survival games sometimes have a "sleeper" setting where disconnecting causes your player character to lie down and sleep, rather than just disappearing and being suspended. This could make sense for 24/7 persistent worlds, but the sleep state would have to have special rules, such as much lower hunger drain (maybe 75 per 12 hours?), immunity to night/weather, and perhaps inability to be targeted by enemies. The main problem is where this is a strategically advantageous state over playing normally (you don't want to incentivize disconnecting as a means of playing the game...). Something that might help prevent that is force the sleep state to last for at least an in-game-day (8 minutes). This would prevent you from using it to skip nights, for example. But then again, I'm not sure strategy will really be a consideration, seeing as every 24 hours is ~2.57 in game years. So if you consider where someone's playing every day for the same four-hour period or something, they're experiencing 30 game days while playing, followed by 150 game days while they're offline. This would make the in-game seasons rotate by 10 days between every real-world day. Which... more than anything, just seems awkward. If you take another approach and try to change season lengths to make more sense for these 24/7 servers, then it's unclear where you'd go. Do you make each season a full real-world day (180 in-game days)? That makes the most sense externally, but internal to the game it punishes you if you have more time than usual and want to keep playing for, say 6 hours (because it's the weekend!).

 

All the other survival games with persistent servers I can think of don't have significant passage-of-time stresses, usually just day/night and hunger/thirst, which are suspended while you're off. So looking for inspiration from other games doesn't seem to help much.

 

I guess I don't know. 24/7 persistent servers don't really make much sense to me. They could exist, but they'd be weird, either because they didn't change anything and just ran with the implications, or because they changed a lot and now they're just really different fundamentally.

[orian34]

(I'm hoping I understood what you meant correctly... My English vocabulary is far from perfect... please be patient if I got your question entirely wrong)

Well, one of the biggest problems I spotted after my "NOO THEY LIED TO US" and "oh cool, multiplayer, let's see how they're going to do it(AND WHINE ABOUT IT)" was specifically this. There are many problems created just by having the world running on a Multiplayer server as, 1)food spoils quite quickly, and much faster than anybody can sleep, wake up, work/study, do the chores and turn on the computer. 2)seasons and other time related events(Deerclops, Hounds, full moon) are very important to the player, and missing them and having your base destroyed/a long wait for that walking cane can be really frustrating. 3)players might destroy your base with just some hammers while you're offline and you can't do anything about it.(and let's not even mention all those annoying little things added in RoG)

And even though your solution seems to help a bit, it still fails when there's, for example, a player offline but the host is still on, or on public servers, where there's no real host and the server is on 24/7

You are right, but for the hoster part, it's easy to talk and choose time when it's hosted(i mean, if the host plays alone, go singleplayer!)...But we got off-topic! PM if you want say more(or not)...