[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#14522) Hotseat mode

["Andreas Røsdal" <andrearo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=14522 >

Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa wrote:
> Getting down to brass tacks, adding hotseat mode is a nice bullet point item,
> but I do not think it is very useful. Well, not for any modern desktop anyway.
> You can simply run two clients, one per player, and switch between them via
> multitasking. 
I have played several hotseat games using multiple clients before, and 
as you say it does work. However, what I wanted to address with this 
patch is to improve the *quality* of hotseat games where the current 
solution has problems:

-Automating the switching between players between phases. It's not very 
user-friendly using multiple clients to switch between many full-screen 
clients, also each player can have multiple city dialogs floating around 
etc.

-Prevent revealing of information, by separating player phases with a 
dedicated screen. This is the standard way in all hotseat games I've 
played. There is no simple way to multitask between multiple clients 
without seeing the map on both of them. There is also /take and /observe 
which reveal the map unwanted.

-Handle the timeout properly for hotseat games:  With multiple clients, 
the timeout starts counting down immediately in each new phase. This is 
improved in the patch, by starting to count down the timeout after the 
user has clicked OK in the screen between phases, giving each player the 
same amount of time to play.

-Diplomacy etc. is currently not designed to handle hotseat games.


Andreas R.