Can we have a game lobby please!!

[ebro69]

It seem hard to meet people to play along with. When will a game lobby be included?

[Chthon]

I wish there was as well.  Perhaps it would also help to figure out who has connection issues when you start a game rather than trial and error.  After all, you could list everyone's ping there so you can know what kind of connection the game will have once started.

[Bognor]

I can't find the post, but Keith recently responded to a question just like this.  The problem is that a game might take 12 hours, of which maybe a few minutes tops is spent in the lobby.  That means the lobby would nearly always be a lonely place.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea.  In-game IRC we've made progress on, and we think that's superior to some kind of running-the-app-but-not-in-a-game-yet lobby for AIW

[Chthon]

I can't find the post, but Keith recently responded to a question just like this.  The problem is that a game might take 12 hours, of which maybe a few minutes tops is spent in the lobby.  That means the lobby would nearly always be a lonely place.

12 hours?  I often take 72 hours + on a map >.>  That's unpaused time mind you.

Still, a lobby is a place for meeting people who want to play with others.  Right now you have to know someone who plays, and hope they know someone else.

[Aklyon]

Well, you don't have to know a person, specifically. Theres forum threads in assorted places, and steam groups, and the main ai war steam group, among other things.

[Chthon]

Well, you don't have to know a person, specifically. Theres forum threads in assorted places, and steam groups, and the main ai war steam group, among other things.

When you are trying to convince others to play the game, forums for matchmaking doesn't sound like a good sell these days.  Steam groups too really.  Most players these days want everything within the game.  Heck, most people these days don't even know what IRC is, or why they'd want to use it over Skype.

This is what I'm talking about.  If you want to entertain people these days, having to figure out IP addresses, setting up port forwardings, and possibly a second service like Hamachi or Tunngle, turns into way too much work to just play with others.  It's hard to convince people it's worth it all.  After all, once you do all of this, then you have to learn the game which scares many of them.

Getting the IRC channel access within the game as a community chat can help some, but it still doesn't assist players in how to connect to others.  They still have to jump through too many hoops when they just want to play a game.  That is why they buy games, to play them and have fun, not to spend 15-30 mins per match trying to figure out why someone can't connect.  That turns into a big turn off, and many never get to know how awesome AI War is compared to other games considered to be iconic in the genre.

[Aklyon]

Well, Thees one good reason to use irc over skype: Irc doesn't make you clickthrough your fullscreen application if you get a call from someone.

[Chthon]

Well, Thees one good reason to use irc over skype: Irc doesn't make you clickthrough your fullscreen application if you get a call from someone.

Your preaching to the choir here.  My point is that newer players don't know this, or won't believe it.  They want to be able to play the game, and have the game do the match making, not some external source.

There is another strategy game that used to use the old Gamespy matchmaking services to connect players.  Sword of the Stars.  When the matchmaking services went down permanently, it actually saw a sharp decline in play, partly because of this.  They too had forums and stuff to do it outside the game.  It just becomes too much work for most people to use all of that though.

The whole point here is this is a niche game that will probably remain so simply because setting up a game is too much work for the average gamer.  A game lobby of some kind would help to alleviate that.  It would open it up to a new crowd potentially.  It may be too late for AI War, but it should be a lesson Arcen learns for future games at the very least.  Let the game do the work of setting up matches.  Don't make it an extra hurdle for players who want to get started.

[Toranth]

12 hours?  I often take 72 hours + on a map >.>  That's unpaused time mind you.

Sorry to go OT, but:

 

How?  You... But... That's...  I mean, HOW?!  In my current game, 100 stars, I didn't even capture my first planet till hour 12, and I'm still going to finish before 30 hours - despite building full Core Turret and Mini-Fortress beachheads on about 80 AI systems.  BTW, my realtime is about 8 hour behind my playtime, due to +10 refleet and Trader Goody build times.

[Cyborg]

This isn't the kind of game that lends itself to random matchmaking, usually. These games are long. IRC can only help things, but I think the forum is just as useful for finding people who have the commitment to play a campaign.

[keith.lamothe]

If you want to entertain people these days, having to figure out IP addresses, setting up port forwardings, and possibly a second service like Hamachi or Tunngle, turns into way too much work to just play with others.

And I understand that, but I can tell you from experience of having done in-game lobbies (or, at least, server browsers) for Tidalis, AVWW, and Valley2 that the only step you listed that we are actually able to help with is "figure out IP addresses".  We can have the server's advertisement include its IP address, and the player never has to look at it (when they click the connect button the game just uses the IP address it received in the server-advertisement record).

But if any port forwarding and/or VPN (Hamachi, etc) would be necessary, there's absolutely nothing we can do in the game code to remove the need for that, or really even remove any of the steps involved.  That's because the root reasons those things are necessary is to bypass the security measures of the players' respective networks.  If our game could silently and unilaterally bypass those security measures... well, they wouldn't be very secure, right?

One solution that _would_ work would be to incorporate steam's matchmaking, but that would only work for people playing the game through steam (not just a steam install, but steam itself would need to be running and the steam layer active in AIW).  And given the fussing we've seen over having Bionic be distributed through steam (even though you can play it without steam) I'm not sure that's a fruitful endeavor.

Even if it were, you'd still have the issue of discovering people out there to play with and figuring out if you wanted to play with them.  Which is where the in-game IRC thing would come in.

[chemical_art]

I think the IRC is the happy medium: It allows players, even of different games, to communicate. Which honestly is all AI Wars needs right now. It can get a bit lonely waiting for that CPA to finish itself. The drudgery of Hiamachi, etc, is fully annoying but I know of no simple way to override the necessity.

[LordSloth]

What would help me more is a 'performance test', of sorts, that does a quick check of CPU and recommends a ship cap/#players. Occasionally I host a game and one of the clients gets 10 FPS on normal ship caps. Admittedly, I should know better and just play co-op on low or ultra-low when dealing with two or more new faces. And the whole #of players scales things up as well.

So nothing I cannot do with proper screening and note-taking, but I'd be curious to see some kind of performance rating system (with clients being the focus, not the host).

Something like
A: 50,000 ships, 30 FPS or greater which seems around smooth play
B: 25,000 ships, 30 FPS or greater
C: 10,000 ships, 30 FPS or greater

or:
A: 5000 ship system battles

etc. I don't know which metric exactly would be most useful, but I'm thinking...
Every 500 ships in a system/5000 ships in the galaxy the player's computer can handle counts for 1 point.
That is, if the player can handle a game with 20,000 ships in the galaxy (2,000 in system, whatever is more important), then they get a score of 4. If the player can handle 50,000, then they get a score of 10. If they can handle 100,000, then a score of 20.

just kicking around the idea, but really that's because I somehow organized a newbie training game that ended up with over 400 AIP (without fallen spire or superweapons even), and that's more of my fault for letting us stick with a fairly defensive pair of AIs, and not reigning in some aggressive tendencies that showed up.

Honestly, the original plan was to ride closer to 200 AIP, and if we hadn't conquered over a quarter of the universe, we would have avoided most of the lag, and the 10,000+ patrols. Also, I really should ban Neinzul Enclave Starships in co-op, they're just a Bad Idea (TM). I love 'em, mind you, it's just they only hurt performance more when you already have enough ships that you can't fit everything into a full cap of assault transports  - and that's before the drones spawn and after you've already left all your MK1s behind.

Still, at least my hosting machine could keep the frame rates up, but we still had the 'waiting for player' that wasn't helped by the fact that the other two players were streaming the game at the same time.

[Aklyon]

You forgot to include Performance profiles in that setup.