Play by P2P

[Sivran]

Or perhaps more simply, emule can do the same thing, easier.

Someone only need run an ed2k server (not even necessary really) and publish ed2k links for the savegame file(s). Anyone with emule could then click the link (or copy to clipboard) and emule would take over from there, grabbing the file from as many sources have even a piece of it and dropping it whereever the user specifies, like the \savegame directory, for example.

The torrent I think is actually more complicated.

Caveat: ANY p2p works better with its appropriate ports forwarded. Some users may not be able to do this for various reasons.

[Fyron]

I don't see how running Azureus is any more complicated than emule. It has a tracker page, people can go to it to get the torrents if they don't want to try to set up the RSS reader. For the players, it is literally identical. For the host, it is about equivalent, I think.

[Baron Munchausen]

This will still be a problem for people who don't have broadband. How about we pester MM to reduce the size of combat replay files?

[Fyron]

We did in the chat, and he said he'd contemplate ways of doing so.

[parabolize]

Compressing the cmb files more will help. The cmb file could also be chopped up into individual player files. But even if the cmb files get dropped to 1/10 the size users without broadband are still screwed.

[pujal]

All these ideas for mp floating around yet no one seems to want to host a game using them. Im really eager to try a mp game, but alas, where are they?

I guess ill try your azereus idea, since I use that.

[capnq]

Baron Munchausen said:
This will still be a problem for people who don't have broadband.

I thought the main purpose of torrents was to allow people without broadband to download large files. I couldn't have downloaded the Gold-to-Deluxe patch without it.

[Baron Munchausen]

With files that are not time sensitive this works fine. It doesn't much matter if I get a copy of the "Loose Change" 911 Documentary today or next week. No one is waiting for me to see it and respond. Turn files for an ongoing game is another matter entirely. Even with the ability to resume large files you don't get any faster performance than your modem can produce. 75 megabytes means a minimum of about 4 hours download time (with optimum performance) on a 56k link. With a '1 turn per day' game this might be manageable -- if you don't mind your line being tied up 4 hours a day. But any game moving faster than that is likely to be a problem. Playing multiple '1 turn per day' games is also unlikely to be possible, while it was before with SE IV.

[shinigami]

Simply put, multiplayer is not practical for most people until the filesize comes waaaay down. Hopefully, MM will follow through on what was said about it in the chat.

[NullAshton]

How about we simply pester him to add an option to REMOVE combat replays?

Or a simpler method would be to just run the combat again with the same random seed, thus having the exact same results...