Spectator Slots Anytime Soon?

I know we can just spawn in and delete the Commander, but doing so creates some uneven spawns.

It's more exaggerated on large matches, like 9 way FFAs. One or two players have an entire area of unclaimed metal spots because that's where a player was supposed to be.

Anyway this could be implemented anytime soon?

On my phone, but if memory serves there's some commented out code in the lobby for spectators. Not sure if it's hooked up to anything though.

Commented out code somewhere doesn't really say that much though.

It wouldn't be the first time we got access to a feature early just by uncommenting something its in either the lobby or create game screens. Ill take a look shortly.

It'd be really nice to have spectator slots.

I can't test now (at work), but try uncommenting PA\media\ui\alpha\new_game\new_game.html, lines 239 - 244:

Code:

  <!--
  <a data-bind="click_sound: 'default', rollover_sound: 'default'">
  <input type="button" value="ADD SPECTATOR" class="btn_std" data-bind="click: addSpectator, enable: showAddArmy"/>
  </a>
  <a data-bind="click_sound: 'default', rollover_sound: 'default'">
  <input type="button" value="REMOVE SPECTATOR" class="btn_std" data-bind="click: removeSpectator, enable: showRemoveSpectator" />
  </a>
  -->

You'd also need to modify lobby.html, otherwise if there are spectator slots you won't see them in the lobby.

I can confirm that a month or two ago there was few reports that players joined game that started and then had ability to watch it, but wasn't present in player list. So I support something like that was possible even while ago.

Nice. Not having a spectator muck up the spawns would be really helpful.

I tested out what happens when the code is comments are removed: The game has a "Add spectator" and "Remove Spectator" Button that add/removes "SPECTATOR" lines in new_game. These are gathered and send to the backend. However no matter what I did the backend seemed to simply ignore them: The lobby did not get any information about them.

At least that's how it looks like after maybe 10 minutes of investigating.

Sounds like the servers don't support it yet. That's a bummer.

Somehow expected. If it were that easy to put it in Uber would have done so already.

Yupp. I was hopeful though.

Actually they might have this functionality in, but disable it with last time when they're limit player number. Spectators will use more bandwidth than normal players (I think obviously why) so they'll even bigger problem for server-side 20 players FFA.

Darn you for using reason and thinking about everything.

I just want the spectator slots!

Isn't bandwidth the smallest concern for the servers? I thought the "not more than 10 players" thing is more about RAM. Actually I am pretty sure of it. The servers have 1GBit/s (I think?). Considering a server with 8 games with 10 players each (worst case) that would be 12.5 mbit/s per player. The bandwidth-induced lags start at 400kb/s I think, so I think the bandwidth limit per player is lower than 8mbit/s. So a few extra slots for observers sound like not much of a problem bandwidth-wise.
Dunno about how pure observers effect things like memory usage though.

Even so a far more logical thing would have been to just allow 10 slots in the game, so i.e. a 2v2 with 2 observers would not be a problem, no matter how you look at it. So my guess is still on the spectator-mode just not being functional at all.

No, it's same problem like everything else. When you need SLA and stable servers bandwidth cost money like CPU/RAM. There is way to get cheap servers with cheap bandwidth, but it's not best solutions when you need guaranteed level of service.

As long as I know Amazon EC2 instances have 250mbps by default.

I sure somebody from Uber mentioned they have strict limit like 2mbps per player.

250mbit/s? Ah well yeah that explains it that.
Still no reason not to allow a maximum of 10 slots of any type. Yes an observer slot might use more bandwidth, but people observe by deleting themselves anyway.

Only for things I understand. There so many gameplay/balance/ladder/etc issues I'm not competent with, so I want to believe there enough people who's better than me on those topics.

Probably I'm lied to you, here is a bit more actual numbers:
http://epamcloud.blogspot.ru/2013/03/testing-amazon-ec2-network-speed.html
As you see it's depends on server region a lot. Still I can say for sure that when you're hosted on EC2 you share bandwidth with other virtual machines on same hardware, so it's can be quite different.

We'll never know that for sure. I just made my guess why spectators disabled right now.