Asynchronous multiplayer change or mod

Tom

Rancher
My family was discussing the problems with multiplayer, all related to the common clock, when my son started asking questions to evaluate whether the clocks of all the players could be asynchronous. After some discussion, I was struck that it could be a revolutionary improvement to the multiplayer experience as base code or as a mod.

HOW IT WOULD LOOK:
  1. You would see your playmates synchronously. They would freeze (stand still) when they were in cut scenes, inventory/pause, or asleep. This seems technically obvious.
  2. You would not see the same villagers your playmates see. This seems technically obvious.
  3. You might enter a map or floor at noon your time and find your playmate already there who entered at 8 p.m. their time. You might swap items in chests or fight monsters together at different local in-game times. This seems to already be solved in the code with respect to monsters and floors being generated by the first arriver.
  4. You might finish your day before your playmate gets out of bed.
BENEFITS:
  1. No problem with long cut scenes, minigames, or inventory pauses.
  2. No need to synchronize pauses.
COSTS:
  1. No shared "time of day" or "end of day".
  2. ?
Has this already been done?
 
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Odin

Moderator
Staff member
I think some players may find this setup confusing as they'd expect things to line up. I can't think of another game that's set up in this way besides something like a MMO where you aren't playing with most of the other people online and when you do it's often in specific areas that are synchronous.

Maybe if the game paused the multiplayer clock when any player was in a cutscene the issue of time running out could be alleviated?
 
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Tom

Rancher
I think it would be almost completely transparent to players. Think about it. You already can go to bed at a different time than other players, and they just have to wait to begin the next day until you go to sleep. You already can't tell whether it's dark or light for the other players.

There is one significant difference, and it amounts to a cheat that is kind of cool. A player whose day is almost gone can ask another player to please go to the store, find a villager, or get a fish for them in a pinch.

Maybe if the game paused the multiplayer clock when any player was in a cutscene the issue of time running out could be alleviated?
My family discussed this, and we all decided that would be too inconvenient and disruptive to the game. On the other hand, if play continued while the Clock Was paused, that would also amount to another cheat for multiplayer mode that would simply change the character of play. On that vein, would you pause the clock when people are reeling fish in and when they look at their inventory? I think my family asked all these questions and concluded it was better not to follow that line of strategy.
 
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