What's the point of limiting the group size to 8?

I second this idea.

I recall it was an interface issue when it was first limited. Though that shouldn't be a problem anymore. Increasing it would be great.

The current group size will stay relatively the same, but there will be meta-groups or something, I think.

It was an imaginary interface issue when first introduced.
Even if there'll be other mechanisms later,
if it's not hard to remove the limit for now only it should be done i think.

There isn't much space in the HUD really, especially in 800x600.

Perhaps make a PDA attachment. The ones shown on the right can be of your chosing, (kinda like myspace)

Would make it easy for squads to be part of a much larger group.

"kinda like myspace"

I'm all of a sudden losing enthusiasm for this plan...

:p

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/17743#222539
photoshopped screenshot with 32 group members visible at the same time with 800x600.
There is enough space.
Plus, if it doesn't fit for someone... so what?
Just having people marked on radar and being able to use group chat would be improvement even if you could only see health of some of them.

Well, one issue that comes to mind is.. group size is now tied into voice chat. We're having some concerns with bandwidth usage of voice chat, and chat-channel size is a relevant function of that. If one person uses N bandwidth, they send it to us, and we relay it to the group, or N*8. If that were to be, instead, N*32, that might get a little scary for us, especially with a bunch of groups of that size (scalability problems with more players). I would rather voice chat were available to anyone in a group, rather than just like.. the first 8 people who enable it, or something, which then imposes a group size requirement. We're still working on the bandwidth thing, and may be able to improve things further.. just mentioning a few things that came to mind.

We still want, and plan to do group hierarchies, and permit people to link multiple groups together, while keeping the individual group limit the same. I guess this goes back to what I asked in the previous thread: what is the real need? We can do "white radar dots" and stuff for linked groups. We might be able to do some kind of health thing too, and then allow it to be enabled or disabled optionally.. not sure.

I had also hoped with group hierarchies that, say, each group has a leader, and then several groups could be under another group/leader. The top-level leader might be able to "broadcast" voice-chat to all members of sub-groups (but rate limited), and the leaders could talk to one another separately, and higher-level leaders could define targets for subordinate groups, that sort of thing. This functionality all starts to get a bit unwieldy if one has more than say.. 10 people per group.

Damn, voice chat. Guess that is a reason.
Oh well, we'll have to wait for the proper solution then.

Incarnate, it might not be a pretty solution, but you could have 'command groups', which broadcast to the sub-group leaders only, and those coordinate their group accordingly. This way, you could keep the size limit of 8 people, it just branches out.

tosh: that's basically what I was talking about. Group leaders would be able to communicate with one another separately. But aside from that, I would probably *also* want to permit the top level leader to broadcast to all subordinates, but.. maybe not very often, or something. Such a big benefit, allowing commands to be relayed quickly to everyone, rather than requiring the successive leaders to keep passing it down.. could be a huge win in combat. Just has to be weighed against bandwidth scalability and such.

Anyway, we're also headed towards totally not-voice-related order-passing game commands, so voice chat wouldn't be strictly necessary.. more like an easy adjunct. Any aspect of squad coordination and large-scale combat should be possible *without* voice chat.. I'm just trying to figure out how to make it as useful as possible without too much added risk.

I didn't mean to appear to steal your idea :)

I just thought, to save bandwidth, totally disallowing general broadcasting would be a solution, but I guess the drawbacks are too bad, and besides, a 'shortwave radio'-type receiver (yeah, I know that does not make sense in space ;) built into all ships for emergengcy broadcast would also make sense from a realistic point of view.

(I didn't think you had "stolen" it at all, just that I'm not explaining myself very well ;). Saving bandwidth is a big deal. Expanding voice chat is also a big deal. The key, like anything else in.. life?.. is finding the right balance between the two. I'm not sure where that is, yet. TS3 is still in development and we're still working with them to test and tune a lot of stuff, and figure out how we want to use it on our end.

Anyway, I guess that explains why I don't specifically want to increase the group limit right now. I'm all for feedback on how to most effectively use voice chat and other features within the context of multiple linked "squads" (I think I call them "flight wings" in my design docs, actually, haven't touched that area recently). But, that's probably best left to another, more dedicated thread.

what might be a better idea is allow the group leaders to 'group'

It would be interesting to know (in quantities) how much bandwidth can be saved by what method, sadly I lack the skills to calculate that (I don't know how much bandwidth x seconds of audio transmission costs at y kbps, e.g.). Do you already have some experience values?

That said, I guess using the broadcaster's bandwidth instead of having to relay it via your own server would probably leave the doors open to hacking attempts (if that would even work).

Yeah, you can hack over audio.

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