You recognized the problem? If "Grand Ages: Medieval" needs some Galaxy-libraries you need to install it also as requirement like PhysX. Do you need PhysX to be activated? No, but it is part of the software. And if you need Galaxy to be installed for API-relevance, what do you call that?

The discussion you were commenting on was about Victor Vran and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.

Really? Have a look on earlier comments:

Really? Have a look at the comments you were replying to.

Yes, that was the topic of the thread, but that's not what you were replying to.

Sorry, I was trying to point it out without being a dick before but you're still not reading things properly and then trying to imply that instead I haven't read it properly.

d2t's suggestion of a firewall was to do with nightcraw1er.488's complaint about Victor Vran and Van Helsing connecting to the internet by themselves. This had nothing to do with Galaxy. You didn't read properly when you first replied and then you decide to quote a completely different post to back yourself up. Your reply to d2t was completely irrelevant to what they were talking about, presumably because you replied without getting the context.

This is a red herring. One could use this same argument for absolutely anything they want GOG to sell or to not sell just to further their own agenda. The fact is that GOG does sell games that have LAN multiplayer and they also sell games that don't have it, and that it is up to the game developer whether or not they will provide LAN multiplayer or not. It is also fact that GOG was not founded requiring all games to have LAN multiplayer so there is no basis for this to be a mandatory requirement and it is extremely unlikely after having 1200+ games in the catalogue that they will wake up tomorrow and remove all games that have no LAN multiplayer nor that they will ban new games from coming here that lack LAN multiplayer. People can speculate about it and demand it all they want, but then there's reality staring right back saying "no precedence, not a chance, keep dreaming".

Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, people who care should do something that actually can make a difference as I suggested, stop whining about it and talk to the developers - the only people who can actually do something. Alternatively if someone feels some kind of ideological fundamentalist religion about it, stop shopping at GOG entirely "for the cause".

Merely arguing about it and mincing words here may or may not sound clever but it will accomplish absolutely nothing of substance.

I don't care what it is doing or why, it is doing it behind the scenes without informing the user, it was only because the firewall picked it up that I knew about it. This is unacceptable in any form, ok its for news this time so you say, maybe it should check some others things and send that over as we seem to be happy with applications doing whatever they want apparently. Not all of us want everything connected to the web all the time.

Sure, but it's still a different architecture than with a central server and requires a lot of extra effort and testing. And if you really want to make sure players don't get too frustrated you absolutely need to include failsave mechanisms and at least somewhat limit potential exploits (the necessity of trust you mentioned is a given but one error in the system and suddenly there's unintentional exploits, ruining the game even if nobody intended to cheat or hack). Not to mention that with what you're describing there will inevitably lead to conflicts between file versions and suddenly you're dealing with the kinds of issues that version control software is about. Not a trivial matter at all, at least depending on the complexity and nature of the game. If numbers only keep growing, okay, just merge everything by summing things up, but once things like loot or world states are involved things get really messy (often even with a central server).

Really? :P That's why I used it, referring to your argument "There's no law" in your previous post. :)

That's not the point. With Galaxy GOG provides a new multiplayer platform. This thread is about games which (start to) use that platform.

Sure. The same has already been said about DRM free games.

Of course developers also have to do a bit of work. But it's GOG which provides a new multiplayer platform. They should do the first step and provide an API for LAN or P2P play on that platform which developers can use. As far as I can see even Valve does it on Steam.

If it only would be about some kind of ideology it would be easy to ignore it. Unfortunately it's about my paid games which still should work even when some servers provided by GOG or anybody else cease to work.

To the title of this post. Of course not.

It's not that complicated. No merge is needed. It's the same as when you continue to play from an older save file in a single player game. You create a new time line which is independent. Merging it back into a time line from another save file is not needed and doesn't even make sense. And failsafe mechanisms are also needed when you have a separate server.
For the few games with persistent worlds it of course makes more sense to provide a dedicated server for the game so that it's easier to know where the game states are saved. But this server always can be run by one of the players, it must not create a dependency on a central service.
I'm not against a central server, which makes it easier to find other players and other games. I only want to have a fall back mechanism which still works when this central service has stopped to work and which also would allow players to organize local multiplayer games without having Internet access.

If Galaxy's APIs are intended to cover all aspects of the network functionality for multiplayer then it makes sense that it could/would/should be used for LAN multiplayer also because there's no black magic in doing that of course. If GOG felt strongly enough to encourage developers to support LAN mode in multiplayer that would be great, but trying to force LAN mode on all games would only scare away some developers/publishers who otherwise would have no problem with coming here. I'm all for GOG encouraging developers to provide LAN multiplayer though as that's my primary mode of multiplayer.

That makes sense but for all we know Galaxy may do that already. AFAIK, they haven't yet published any APIs publicly so the only way to know is to be a developer under NDA or wait until it goes public in the future. I'm going to assume that it does this rather than assume it will not do it though.

I agree with you 100% about that and in the perfect world that is exactly what I want too. Some individual developers still care enough to put LAN play in their games and I appreciate and prefer that, but there are games that do not have LAN multiplayer which I still want to own for the single player game, and perhaps for online multiplayer also. I would much rather buy that game DRM-free on GOG.com than to not have any other option other than Steam. An effort to try to deny such games on GOG because they don't support LAN multiplayer (and it might not even make sense for a particular game to have LAN mode anyway), denies everyone the chance to buy a DRM-free game here who is interested only in single player or online multiplayer. It's kind of like banning pork products from schools because certain groups of people don't wat to eat pork so they don't think anyone else should be able to decide to eat pork either.

Encouraging developers to support LAN mode may result in more developers including a LAN mode, however leaving it up to the developers to decide instead of forcing it on them means that every individual gamer is empowered to decide whether or not to support the game and/or company on a person by person basis by buying or not buying the game rather than GOG deciding for everyone unilaterally. It's a slippery slope that once crossed gives precedence for other people to tack their favourite annoyance onto one at a time until the maze of "you can do this" and "you can't do that" version of gaming political correctness turns into a minefield that no game company wants to bother trying to wade through and stops bothering caring about GOG.

I'd rather not see such a scenario come to fruition and leave it up to individual consumers to make their own minds up individually rather than a vocal minority trying to convince GOG via lynch mob. So I support strongly LAN multiplayer for all games that it makes sense, but I also support the developers deciding for themselves and not at gunpoint or by lynch mob.

There are dozens of games I've bought here that do not have LAN multiplayer and which might not exist here at all if it was a mandatory requirement. Some of those games I don't even care about multiplayer. If I couldn't have bought them here my only alternative would be to buy it on Steam probably with DRM and end up with a solution that is less good for me as a consumer. I firmly believe if gamers want the gaming industry to provide certain features or to avoid practices considered anti-consumer, then people should simply vote with their wallets and make their voices directly heard to the developers/publishers themselves first hand if they really want to make a difference and care that much about it. Doing it through a third party like GOG whom is also the small guy in the room doesn't really improve the situation and IMHO makes it worse.

Mind you, I'm not particularly worried about it because I don't think GOG would be likely to entertain such a notion seriously anyway.

That's a good point, especially for games where single player mode is the main mode and multiplayer is only an add-on. Maybe you're right and the time isn't ripe for such a requirement.

Nevertheless we should keep pushing game developers and GOG to provide unrestricted multiplayer modes for all their multiplayer games.