Multiplayer Alpha Phase

M.A.S.S. Builder gets a news update every Saturday as promised by the developers. I want to support the game any way I can, so I think I know what will be happening every Saturday evening going forward.

Today’s news is a ray of hope for the multiplayer crowd following the game.

Multiplayer Alpha Phase

Let’s get the biggest thing out there first, multiplayer. We speculated multiplayer as a whole to take at least 7 months and first wanted to make 0.9.0 be the long pause. However, we thought it would be best to get a smaller version, like a test version out first to check if we’re doing it right and that no critical problems are found by the time we announce full multiplayer compatibility.

I have no idea how one of my favorite dev teams managed to make the prospect of crash testing their netcode for them ‘fun,’ but here I am all giddy over the chance to do exactly that.

Multiplayer Alpha Phase is mainly to test things out. The aim is to first create a working lobby where players can join each other in a session. This is to check if there are any syncing or network issues, players seeing the same things or not, can others see their movements with less delay as possible, things like that.

That is the bare minimum, so expect some kind of empty space where you all can show off your M.A.S.S. units and run around with no objectives with other players in 0.9.0. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.

To end about Multiplayer, we know you might wonder on which kind of gameplay modes are we planning to create, what about balances, or player counts. We ask that you wait for more information when we are ready to reveal them later. Small steps at a time so we don’t trip.

The rest of the article goes over some hopes and expectations for the multiplayer alpha phase, as well as what’s definitely coming up in the following updates. They’re also planning to tackle the optimization issues that began to crop up in 0.8.0, which even I noticed. So it’s all good news.

Taking Pictures With Other Players

In one of the news articles within the last few weeks, probably the last mention of multiplayer testing, I suggested some kind of ‘method’ of doing poses in the lobby. The idea was to have a pseudo photomode–or even just the full photomode itself if it came right down to it–as a way of letting players pose and take screenshots together. I’m probably not the only one who brought this up; there’s a discord server for Sekai Project I rarely ever check discussions on.

Admittedly, the scope of anything between getting players an active camera manipulation tool and a photomode inside a multiplayer lobby/stage is fairly large, but taking screenshots is something we’re going to be doing anyway, hence my suggestion to just lean as deep into that as they can. Even if we don’t wind up with any tools like that, we’re still in for some major group posing in the future. I think one good compromise would be to go into a screenshot mode that locks out your controls wherever you’re standing but nets you a good camera and let’s you select from the preset poses picked in M.A.S.S. Builder’s normal photomode. Favorited ones could be set on a per M.A.S.S. basis for picking them quicker in the lobby. It would probably still be a lot of work, but that sounds a lot more reasonable than a full blown photomode.

Speaking of photos, I’d like to make a featured image for these news articles for P.R. to replace the current one. I’ll look into that sometime in February.