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Elite - Online?

Honestly it might be that the econet is not strong enough to support that much bandwidth and so is a non starter

Thinking to events such as the Econet lan part at the National computing centre in a few months time.

I was thinking about having mainly the trading element as the multiplayer part. battles might be a little to hard to run "online" unless everyone had a second processor.
 
If it were possible then this would be the guy to ask: https://www.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/the_local_bubble_of_universe.html

However I suspect the ‘local bubble’ player-centric universe might make it impossible even before you get to the hardware issues involved in multiplayer. Angus Duggan, the guy who made the phenomenal Elite-A suspects not

“ The coordinate system makes multi-player difficult to impossible, because it's ship-centric. IIRC, other objects are stored as relative polar coordinates from the ship, so a frame transformation would have been necessary between players. There's just not enough memory or processing power available at the default BBC B speeds. Nor a fast enough link. Econet uses too much valuable space, and I'd already done some dirty tricks with the overlays to use the 8271 NMI space (this is the reason that Elite-A has trouble with some emulators; it uses the 8271 disc ready indication to determine that the DFS has released the NMI space at &D00, and then re-uses that memory. If the emulator doesn't have that signal implemented, it will overwrite the NMI routine while it's in use.)”

 
nfraser01 said:
It barely fits in the BBC's RAM as it stands, adding networking and network gameplay would be a no-no... (at least on the BBC)
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But moving more of the "universe" to the server would enable just the active gameplay to happen. I am not expecting battles and things to happen, It was more the trading and things that could enable multi play in the game. - I would say that I am not even sure that data can be transfered while still displaying something that is being processed on the screen. - people dont want to spend half the loading time looking at a blank screen.
 
acorn_1401 said:
But moving more of the "universe" to the server would enable just the active gameplay to happen. I am not expecting battles and things to happen, It was more the trading and things that could enable multi play in the game. - I would say that I am not even sure that data can be transfered while still displaying something that is being processed on the screen. - people dont want to spend half the loading time looking at a blank screen.
Click to expand...
I believe the source code is available if you want to try :-)
 
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