Post 19 Jan 2014, 00:17 by Lewin
There's a few problems with that:
1. The players of the game need to allow and trust the spectator. Otherwise the spectator might be a friend of one of the players who will tell them what their enemies are doing. So allowing "everyone who wants" to spectate your games is a really bad idea.
2. Joining while a game is in progress is technically difficult in our engine. It's not impossible, it would just take quite a bit of work (the process would have to be: save the game, transfer save to the joiner, joiner loads the save, joiner receives and quickly simulates the events he missed during transfer/loading time)
I think a better way to do this would be to give the host a "return to lobby" button which automatically saves the game and instantly places the game back in the lobby. Then you can allow new people to join who will download the save (they can replace leavers too) and then click start and the game continues. This actually wouldn't require too much work to implement, and it might finally solve the issue of leavers (assuming people are happy to join and take somebody else's place in the save). It would also make "rehosting" very easy (after returning to the lobby you wouldn't have to continue the same game, you could start a different one).
Do you think that's a good idea?