ATS Multiplayer Discussion.

[Bandit & The Snowman]

@Drayman it's a question of matchmaking. Needs options where you can opt in to get requests from WoTr members, Steam friends etc.
Maybe they'll make a new category with "[Multiplayer] Friendships" on WoTr.

@Marcello Julio They can exclude any game feature though. Like AI or special transports. Speaking about the latter, of course I'd love ST to be a special kind of "convoy".

If mods are allowed. What kind of mods could be impossible, even if everyone participating has them activated and error free?

[flight50]

I think Steam friends is a good approach. Much better than random.

Mod wise, maps and sounds should be easy to allow. But default sounds should be able to kick in. Trucks...nah. If you don't have a certain truck, defaults should be random there. Forcing huge fps model hogs shouldn't apply. Use defaults. Internet speed should factor in as well. I am sure other smaller mods will be okay. Maps is the critical one. If TruckersMP has it, SCS has to at least match that.

[SmokeyWolf]

@flight50 I think modded trucks should be allowed. Not all trucks are FPS heavy.

[flight50]

I understand, not all are heavy but you can't separate the heavy ones from the ones that are not heavy. Every person will not have a good pc that tries to play MP. There has to be sometype of way. Some people with potato pc's will still try to play. If you make every person download truck a, b and c, and potato pc's have a heck of a time with truck b,

[murdoch82]

I dont want the need to sleep to go away in MP. So I just had a brilliant idea! Very simple too.
You have driving hours set by the host of the server. Say between 7 am and 7 pm, and everyone drives with in that. Fully adjustable, maybe even have it adjustable after each sleep with a little menu somewhere either when it comes up or in the exisiting options menus that then will be set for the next time driving hours end. In the big MMO style MP enviorment it could be set by the VTC, I imagine most people wanna drive during the day anyway.

Heck, I want better control over time and sleep in single player too without the need to use the console.

[flight50]

Hmmmm. You got my wheels spinning @murdoch82, lol. I love this site. So many great ideas to think about and people always have their little twist. Well I have one for MP but its probably more complicated programming wise but this is what I'd like to see MP go to:

• remove the limited rest spot trigger points for rest spots for the entire game. The entire rest area should be the trigger. So enlarge the trigger point to be the entire prefab

• when in MP mod, the game will know the amount of players. Once all players are in the rest area zone and all players shut down their engines for rest, that is when the host can allow sleep for all. If playing MP, its a given that they will be in convoy

• chat, instant messenger or cb. SCS has to offer this in MP mode

Now what if MP allows for contracts or quest/missions. Lets say SCS allows 5-6 people per MP session. If the host sets up a contract to deliver (x) amount of goods to 2-3 companies, we can run 2-3 convoys for that mission/quest. This would mean we need a co-host. There may not be 5-6 loads from the same company and go to the same company. So a 5-6 man convoy may not always be feasible. I can only see a 5-6 person convoy from mining sites, construction site, logging sites, oil/gas sites and probably farms. But I don't see 5-6 loads for convoy from something like Charged, 42 Print or Sea Horizon for examples. I recall wayyyy back on the June 27th 2018 stream when Pavel mentioned quest/missions. The topic was weather related but still, I can see mission/quest tied into MP which brings in a ton of options. Multi Drop, splitting doubles, trailer swapping, convoy, contracts, mission/quest, static seasons/weather (host chooses season), etc. What we get first can be very simple indeed though. Over time add more features and enhancements if SCS finds that people are flocking to this new mode of play. No point in going all out if no one is really using the new feature.

I think SCS can do a ton with MP if they open up the playbook. To get more people involved, they have to make it more enticing. MP should be able to tie into WoTr as well. Convoying in WoTR would make map mods obsolete though. You can have them loaded but you won't be able to get loads to or from them. So there is a limitation for WoT and MP but there could be some benefits to it still. If 1.41ob is around the corner, this could be a good week to get a blog on MP to explain it before the official ob blog. I think open beta comes within the next 2 weeks though. Perhaps end of this week and we have all of next week to get it. June should be a full month of beta testing. California phase 1, MP and compatibility update for Wyoming is all at stake here.

[MRX911]

I hope multiplayer still manages to combine the 2 systems in place in Single player : WoT related via External Contracts or Market with the bonus of perhaps having special goals for events or simply earn special WoT achievements. My main issue with this system is that even the towing service is disabled, so one of your convoy members gets his truck stuck and ruins the job for everybody? That would hurt but also incentivise communication.

Then, you have Cargo and Freight Market which is the regular jobs that you can do with less stress I guess.

Also, keep in mind WoT is till in Alpha so who knows if we'll see new features implemented with MP on the site? One thing I'm hoping for is VTC support with settings for company managers and drivers like a few skin/config templates they can create for their drivers to select.

One thing I love about this game is that you can get lost in all the possible implementations that we could see coming while keeping expectations reasonable.

[Rockatansky6]

About playing with friends, I only have one close friend who plays ETS2. But what would prevent us here from the forum from getting together sometimes to play online. Better than the mess of TruckersMP. I would love to meet more friends here on the forum, and travel with my Pete through the new California style "Convoy Movie"

[flight50]

Before I am all gung ho about MP, I really want to see that MP blog to know what to expect. VTC, yeahhhh I'm really liking that. Toss in mission/quest/contracts, yes Sir.....that's icing on the cake. Convoying is cool and all but that's not what will float my boat. I like to drive in a certain speed range. I don't want to hold anyone up nor do I want to feel pushed to rush thru the game. So it really depends on the details at stake. I didn't care for MP years back but its intriguing to think about now.

[FalleN_KinG]

^ When I got the game actually it was reversed, me and my friend wanted a game we could chill and kill time, whine not playing fps games and stuff so we resulted to Truckers MP, mind you I was on a new account but I took out a loan and got a new truck loaded into truckers mp and knew how to drive properly but as soon as i got out of the city a guy kept ramming my truck, out of fun i guess since he was laughing over the voice chat, and basically i had 100 damage in less than 30 sec of playtime it left a bitter first taste that is for sure. So we've been waiting for official mp for quite a while. Now we just play singleplayer mainly cause of trolls.