Skirmish - Allowing Playing with Fewer than Listed Player Numbers

[WhiteTreePaladin]

I think it would be really nice for skirmish maps to allow fewer than the max number of players. You can currently unassign players, but that leaves a do-nothing player rather than an empty base. The BFME series allowed this on skirmish maps.

BFME also made the starting bases visible on the map preview image and you could assign the starting point for each player if you didn't like the default starting positions. A player number was displayed on top of the starting position icon and directly clicking on those icons on the preview image cycled through the remaining player numbers. We can indirectly do this in 0 A.D. by rearranging the players, but it requires trial-and-error to see where everyone actually ends up.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 hours ago, WhiteTreePaladin said:

I think it would be really nice for skirmish maps to allow fewer than the max number of players. You can currently unassign players, but that leaves a do-nothing player rather than an empty base. The BFME series allowed this on skirmish maps.

 

I think this is a must. If a skirmish player is unassigned, then the skirmish objects should go to null and disappear from the map altogether. Their abandoned/open starting position on the map would just be a nice expansion point the other players might race to claim.

[fcxSanya]

On 9/6/2017 at 8:02 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I think this is a must. If a skirmish player is unassigned, then the skirmish objects should go to null and disappear from the map altogether. Their abandoned/open starting position on the map would just be a nice expansion point the other players might race to claim.

We have a ticket for it: #1306 .
I tried to glance at the related code the previous time it was brought up, but didn't find how to fix this quickly enough and didn't return to it afterwards.
Player assignments are managed in gui scripts (in gamesetup.js in particular), while entities initialization is performed in MapReader.cpp (see CXMLReader::ReadEntities). Map loading is obviously ha ppening after the gamesetup, but I'm not sure whether the MapReader has access to the player assignments (it has some 'LoadPlayerSettings' which goes into simulation2, which may or may not have the relevant data).

On 9/5/2017 at 11:06 PM, WhiteTreePaladin said:

BFME also made the starting bases visible on the map preview image and you could assign the starting point for each player if you didn't like the default starting positions. A player number was displayed on top of the starting position icon and directly clicking on those icons on the preview image cycled through the remaining player numbers. We can indirectly do this in 0 A.D. by rearranging the players, but it requires trial-and-error to see where everyone actually ends up.

This is more complicated. Our previews are arbitrary images rather than minimap-like schemas. I guess we may implement an additional optional 'schema' (or 'placements') element for maps consisting of an image and metadata (player locations on the image), which preferrable should be autogenerated by Atlas. This schema then will be displayed in the gamesetup somewhere besides the regular preview.