Simultaneous games?

RoiEX

Hi everyone,

I'm here to ask you for your personal preferences which will influence if a pending code change will go through or not.

When you're using the lobby, do you ever play multiple games at the same time?

Let me give you some background on the question. Whenever you're joining a game in the lobby the game is actually starting itself a second time with some special flags causing it to immediately connect to the server. Because of this we have quite some logic that handles this special case to prevent showing the standard login screen, perform update checks and so on.
Because of this you're currently able to join multiple games simultaneously leaving you with multiple home screens once you quit them if I recall correctly.
My proposed change that simplifies the logic (making it easier to maintain and write test for in the future) would change this behaviour so it becomes more similar to starting games without the lobby.

So what does this change for you? Basically in order to play a second or third game in parallel, you'd have to start a second instance of TripleA manually.

So if this is a rather unusual usecase for most of you, I'd proceed with this change, otherwise I'll try to come up with an alternative.

beelee

@roiex I don't really play on the lobby anymore but I do remember people in the past in multiple games. @Cernel and @SilverBullet probably know if the impact would be good or bad.

Is the benefit mostly easier to maintain the code then from a labor perspective ?

Cernel

@roiex What is going to happen if one joins the lobby, double clicks on a hosted game in progress and thereafter double clicks an other one?

RoiEX

@cernel Good question, I assume it will override the first double click, but not sure.
Let's collect some edge cases that could cause problems and I'll try them out

RoiEX

@beelee This change on its own isn't the huge change I originally hoped for unfortunately (hosting a game in lobby still uses this mechanism and it doesn't look like it's as easy to change), however from a code perspective it's a step in the right direction because it removes code that is hard to test.

Ideally this won't be noticed at all (because it is rarely used), and it's just a minor inconvenient to spin up a new triplea instance, but we honestly don't know so we're asking the community.

LaFayette

I can say it is somewhat common to observe a game (or two) while waiting in a staging window or the lobby for a game of your own to start.

@RoiEX it would be good to know a couple things as well specifically regarding the updated behavior:
A) would the lobby window closes when connecting to a game? Currently it does not, would this change?
B ) assuming the lobby window stays open, what would happen if a user did try to connect to a second game

We can maybe pull stats from DB for how often a player connects to multiple games, I don't think it is rare per-say. It is a question though whether the "hassle" to fire up another TripleA instance manually, login to lobby again, all to join a second or a third game would be a major annoyance.