I have a couple of ideas for the future of online multiplayer in Arcade!
- I’d like to have a “persistent” session, where people can hop in and out using a code and for the room to not be deleted when the host leaves, but I get if not having dedicated servers would prevent this from being possible.
- I’d like to see something where there are multiple simulators - (a.) it could just be support for the radio extension that allows 2 simulators (but hopefully if this happens there will be support for 4 simulators in the radio extension - correct me if I’m wrong but I only saw the ability for 2 simulators in the radio extension. This way, people could scroll down to their simulator and play the game, but this would require extra code to sync the simulators’ games and performance may be slower. (b.) Another idea would be to sync it like the same game, and like the split-screen extension but with 160x120 for every screen and no visibility for other players’ screens. This would mean that the tilemap, sprite positions, and variables are the same for all games. This would require a new “back-end” reworking for some of MakeCode and would require coders to have some form of custom support for custom renderers besides tilemaps/basic sprites, but would be very easy for new coders making a multiplayer Jumpy Platformer. (c.) In my opinion, the best way to do it would be to have each game run separately but allow for “shared sprites/variables” that have the same value for all games in a session, and for it to be a (boolean) flag for every variables like “synced in multiplayer”. A system like could be difficult to achieve, but it may be worth it! This is an approach that is kind of a mix of the two previous approaches, but it would be an extremely flexible system, and easy for advanced game devs making custom renderers as well as just-starting-out game devs.