Lobby Decisions - How to start a game?

Please cater for Australian players. Almost no-one else does D: and since the NBN has been downgraded we can't afford things to throttle our bandwidth. At best we can gently caress it.

state 3 sounds good

I kinda like the neutrinos initial idea, but I'll add to it as soon as I get to uni, before the lecture starts. If I start posting now I'm gonna be super late.

I think, regardless of the specific implementation, that ~30 before the game starts the lobby should require each player to click 'proceed' or something like that.

So after everybody is ready and what not, the host clicks start. This causes a dialogue box to appear in front of each player, with a sound and 30 sec countdown. If a player fails to click this in time, it kicks the player and returns to the lobby.

That way you dont have afks getting into the game.

As for the proposed state and changes to your proposal I think would work well:

30 second countdown while the server generates the planet(s). (reduce wait times)
Some sort of visual indicator as to how the planet is loading.
More ways to mix and match team armies and FFA modes.
Bring back the kick feature. (currently impossible to kick)
Bring back being able to see who is in the lobby, in addition to seeing who's in a slot.
Also, when spectator mode comes out, we will need a spectate category in the game list, so spectators can join already full games if needed.

Bring back secondary colors. I like the way burntcustard does it in his mod.
Can we get a dropdown menu for both commanders and colors?
Make the distinction between sharing an army and alliances more clear. Lots of noobs I run into think I'm not on their team for some reason.

I dont like auto kick functions. Too easy to forget and accidentally kick someone. Rather, let's have something that lets folks know how long someone has been afk.

I like the proposed state + some Age of Empires taunts.

Start the game already!

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-tauntmod-v1-1-0-62037-adds-aoe-ii-taunts.56026/

Lobby Loading
Once lobby loading has been reintegrated having the player see there own loading somehwere on the screen (presumable on top or next to the planets) so they can see how their doing. Also adding the loading statuses (same as type of situation as the circles from before) next to the player names/commanders/colors would be fantastic on determining when a game should start. Very simple information.

Ping
Can we also have ping on the player name bar? Somewhere next to the name?

Better Commander Selecting
A system in which when a player hovers their mouse over the commander icon, arrows appear on to of the the icon on either side. If a player clicks on either side they will cycle through the commanders in either direction. Double clicking the center of the icon cycles through them like it does now. (Could also make it random).

Countdown to Start
Gotta agree that no matter how the lobby is set up to start the game, there is some sort of countdown to when the game begins. Can be 30 seconds or ten seconds. Could also include some countdown tones as it counts the last 3-5 seconds.

Planet detials
Any chance that we can see the details of the planets in the lobby by hovering over them? A tooltip with all details of that planet could pop up, any details that would appear in the system editor.

This is so many levels of win.

Food, please.

Why would you want ping displayed if I might ask?

The reason I enquire is that I had terrible trouble trying to get games in Supreme Commander due to getting kicked quite often for having high ping (I live in New Zealand) despite having a good internet connection. I would get blamed for slowing down games when it was usually some ones crappy computer. Took all the fun out of the game for me.

Ping should not be public. In supcom, low pig for one player slowed down the whole game. PA uses a server, so bad ping only affects one person.

Ping only slows down the player individually, not everyone in game. Its not the same connection method that was used for Sup Com. I read it somewhere on a developer blog that Mavor might of wrote on.

Though I think its totally justified to kick someone out of the game for having a bad ping, especially because some games can't handle that sort of lag compensation and it destroys the experience for everyone (usually caused by poor network code).

But I don't think this problem will occur based on how the servers are set up. Being that no game will be hosted by players themselves (where this problem usually comes from). But separate servers. This is more to give information to the host and the individual players to track if something is wrong with their connection in conjunction to the server. I don't want to play in games where my ping is high and I can't play with anyone else. Such as me playing with someone in russia (I live in Canada).

Now the only time this would hurt you is if on release, Uber allows players to set up games without servers, and run the simulation on their client machine for private matches. But then this would still work when your game is being slowed down by someone far away from you and you are going to have a crappy experience trying to play with them.

Ping should be made public. For the very reason that I don't want to play with someone who has a ping that is 1000, and the game slows down for them and I can't play competitively with them. I would like to see other players pings when I enter a server, and leave if I feel like I wouldn't play a fun game with them. Also a ping for the server would be nice to.

Pings in most games are there so you can play with people that have a strong connection to you and have a measurement for that. If you don't have a good connection with one server there is bound to be someone who is closer or has a better connection with you to play with. I don't see a problem with this system unless you continually have a bad connection to people who don't care enough to try to play with you. Not them being rude, but you probably don't know them and they don't care if they play with you.

And ping doesn't cause these problems. Its simply a measurement of the delay between
client-server-client is from one another. I would probably kick someone with bad connection problems anyway.

Ok so heres how i see it. If every one readies up the game starts in 5 seconds and begins as soon as everyone loads up (rather than as soon as you load up because some people load up faster than others). But the host can force start by redying up himself. When that happens the game locks the settings and starts preloading the hame then starts as soon as it is loaded up for everyone with the percentages of the slowers player showing up rather than a timer. Also when talking abut preliading: it would be nice if it could preload as soon as you enter the server and it shouldn't eat up so much cpu and ram that it basically locks the UI up like it did in beta.

A little off-topic, but wasn't it recently so that new games were hidden by default? Now it seems is loads the default template for all to see, and I would LOVE it if people would get their **** straight before publishing the game, and I leave because a 1v1 turned into a 3v1 team game against the AI. :-\

Has this been mentioned recently? Probably. Apologies in advance for not sufficiently scouring the forums.

My preferred way would be:

• Host has kick button
• Everyone has ready button
• Everyone including host can be kicked by majority vote
• If the host changes the game settings after you've hit ready, you go back to being 'not ready'

Simple, and the best way imo. Just the old way updated to reflect on-the-fly settings changes, and a way to negate afk/**** hosts.

Forced starts are never going to work. I think a better idea would be if the host had a 'kick-but-not-ban if you don't respond within 20 seconds' button, which when pressed applied to everyone. It would clean the room of afk players, allowing people who want to play to join quicker to get the game going. If the game is still open when an afk player comes back, they could rejoin.

In the previous lobby version, I felt like everything was perfect. There was a ready button. You guys added a kick option which eliminated the problem of lobby hijackers. If we go back to these basics at least, then I don't care what else you add to that, as anything else will just be all the better. You have to keep your bread and butter though. (Ready button and hosts being able to kick unresponsive players).

I really don't understand what problem a lot of these options are supposed to solve.

1. Players need to ready up. This is necessary because you don't provide all the information about the game in the game list, plus the settings could change, you may be sorting out who is in what team, etc.

2. Host can kick players. This removes AFK people, trolls, etc. A kick should stop them from rejoining for a period to prevent them just trolling the lobby by constantly rejoining.

3. If the host changes the settings then everyone is unreadied. This prevents hosts putting up popular settings to attract players and then changing them to their own preferences once they have a full room.

And that's all you need, it covers every circumstance and each option has a reason to exist.

Force start

What does this achieve precisely? Where a player is AFK it's duplicating the kick function, but is inferior because now one of your slots is filled with dead weight. If this is a team game the game is over before it's begun and players will probably quit out.

This also makes for a poor lobby experience because the host controls the quality of that experience. I hop in, filling the last slot and so he bangs on force ready because he's impatient to get the game going. But I haven't picked a colour, or a commander, and frankly I don't like the balance of these teams so think I'm going to leave. But whoops, I've been forced ready. So now you're adding in cancellation options to override the host who can then override my cancel. And for what? What problem is this solving?

The only kind of force start I see being useful is one where the game automatically launches when all players are ready rather than waiting on the host to click launch.