God, we've been answering this thing hundreds of times this month. So many people saying, oh, cats are easy to do in multiplayer. But they really don't work. We set out a criteria that the cats have to be with the boat, not an add on, they have to be usable and veiwable to all players in the multiplayer session. None of these gauges that attach to aircraft and wind up giving you runtime errors or spawning boats with cats that only the user can see. That stuff doesn't fullfill our criteria.
Thats why we left the cats off in the initial update. We've had dozens of suggestions from people, most of them we've already explored and they simply weren't good enough. Our acceptance criteria is simple but the solution is not. But we are committed to find a good solution in the future.
The meatball is the same issue and I think we've done a good job making a very simple manual meatball. Again, I've never seen a meatball come close to working in a true multiplayer enviroment that all users in the session can see. Our system works fine with our boat as the FSN Alpha Carrier is built to be operated by a user in a multiplayer enviroment.
There's a crap load of people out there developing for FSX who are way smarter and have the financial backing to make cats and meatball work in a multiplayer enviroment viewable by all players...there's a reason why no ones been able to do it yet.
