Multiorb
Project home: MultiOrb at AIBS |
History
Following on from Toni Ylisirniö's work, MultiOrb was an attempt to automate the multiplayer aspects of IRCMFD.
The same caveats surrounding time acceleration in IRCMFD existed, but an extended supported vessel list, the removal of the requirement to manually update, the support for landed craft and untended communual spacestations whilst retaining backwards compatibility with IRCMFD telemetry moved this into the category of a second-generation multiplayer project.
Whilst problems still existed with network lag (a positional update delay of half a second in LEO corresponds to nearly four kilometers of positional error!), MultiOrb combined IRCMFD's relative positioning reports with a parallel global-position report to allow two closely separated vessels to still appear on others' machines.
Current status
As MultiOrb progressed limitations with the (easily debugable) high-level protocol system employed became aparent. Other solutions were tried to simplify and reduce data transfer, but development came to a logical conclusion in early 2004 as the procedural model was proved incapable improving much further.
See also
Multiplayer -- an overview of multiplayer addons for Orbiter