Game Reconnection

[titi]

If a player got disconnected from a multiplayer game, there is currently no chance to continue the game ....

A first thing what we will maybe have (soon?) is the replacement of the player with a CPU player.

But it would of course be nice if a player can reconnect....
What chances/ideas do we have to implement something like this?

A first small attempt might be to freeze the game and wait for the player for a while. So he can reconnect if only his internet connection dropped but the game is still running and in the right state. Some kind of waiting for Lagged players with reconnect.

Do you have other/more ideas concerning this?

[ultifd]

Hmm, I always thought of this before, but I also always wondered...
Is it even possible to "re-connect" to a existing game? (And we really need to fix everything single thing in megaglest before again adding new features, new things keep popping up as you know...) And I personally think it would be bad to have CPU(s) replace disconnected people.

[titi]

Yes, first fix all things!
This is only some kind of brainstorming about what can be done later.
I personally like the idea with the cpu-replacement. Its better than not replacing the player.....

And I think a reconnect is possible. its just that everything must be freezed on server and remaining clients while waiting for a reconnect of the player.
So everyone waits ( for a minute or so ) if the player reconnects or not...... Not really good, but everything else is really a lot of work.

For all other kinds of "reconnect" a complete state of the game must be send to the reconnecting client, so that he can continue the game, but this is really a lot of work and not worth it at the moment I think. Before starting with something like this we first need a fully working savegame....

But as I said its just meant as some kind of brainstroming what can be done in the future and what maybe can easily be added.

[ultifd]

I see, so this is just Brainstorming for now. Hmm... not much to think about, if we have the two ways for this. The thinking is just about the code...which is the hard part I guess... Hmm...

[tomreyn]

I think replacing disconnected human players by AI is a good idea - if it is an option (which can be deselected when setting up a new game).

I also like the idea of making it possible to reconnect to a runnng game when you got disconnected. It does seem technically challenging to me, though. All the network games I know don't offer this feature, so I wonder whether they have their reasons or whether just nobody came up with this good suggestion, yet. And I wonder whether this would introduce new problems (yet another opportunity to cheat).

[treba]

the possability to save games, in this case multiplayer games, would also be a great help.