Sitting in multiple colors in singleplayer

[Unreal_Ed]

I CANNOT believe it took me this long to think about this, but it would really be fantastic to be able to sit in multiple color's seats in singleplayer mode.

I make most of my mods in singleplayer mode (as i imagine most do), and it's always annoying to have to test interactions with turns in multiplayer or to have to switch colors all the time. Ideally, we could sit in multiple seats and use the turns while playing by ourselves, with our name appearing in every seat. We'd see the content of every hand we're seated in too, and maybe the camera would spin to the new color's place when we change turns.

I bet this could even be used well for singleplayer boardgames. And it might even be a good thing to allow for multiplayer too! (as long as there's an permission we can toggle off for letting players sit in multiple seats). I could easily see this being a very useful feature for designers playtesting their board games in TTS that don't have a full player count (this is quite common).

[Tragic]

just out of curiosity... how is that any different from using the black player or setting the hands to be visible to all?

[FoaS]

Isn't there a hotseat mode, too?

[Unreal_Ed]

@Tragic, for the hands part, it isn't, but that's not why i requested the feature. That said, it could make sense in some scenarios to have multiple hands of multiple colors. I personally want this feature for testing scripting interactions with turns.

@FoaS, omg you're right ! I completely forget that even exists ! It does work for some (probably most) of the stuff I wanted this feature for! That said, i am getting errors that I THINK are due to the fact that it can't retrieve a player's steam_name? Not sure, have to check more

[Unreal_Ed]

Confirmed that there's a bunch of weird stuff happening in hotseat mode that makes it not ideal for testing out scripting. For one, between each turn, there's a popup telling you who's turn it is, and that puts you as a spectator every time. That really screws the turn structure for scripting so it's not really workable much. A solution might be a toggle that lets players skip this box when creating a hotseat session.

[dzikakulka]

Colors aside from Grey are there to differentiate players. What you do need exactly? You can set teams for players so they share hidden zones and such.

[Unreal_Ed]

Again, this request is really not about hand zones but about testing scripting interactions between turns.....

I wrote the stuff about the hand zones because it came to mind as I was typing. I just want something to properly test out turns without having to create an online server and waiting for players to show up...

[dzikakulka]

How that would mesh with scripting then? If I'm in three color seats, what's my color in all scripting interactions? Which color picked up an object?

[Unreal_Ed]

Good point. I guess I pictured it like hotseat mode, where you actually "are" just 1 player in 1 seat at a time. Honestly, if not for those problems with it switching to Grey between each player's turns, Hotseat mode would solve most of my issues. A fix for that (by making that "player 2's turn" popup still be part of player 1's turn) would probably be everything I need.

Or you could designated a "main" color for scripting purposes, but that's far from elegant...

Edit: Plus, hotseat mode tends to have the turns functionality break. When you load a mod a couple times or hit "save and play" in scripting several times, the "End Turn" button disappears, and turning turns off-and-on-again doesn't bring it back, which is REALLY annoying !

[Unreal_Ed]

Another simple solution to some (not all) of the problems this would solve is making turns actually do something if it's just 1 person in singleplayer.

Right now, the End Turn button shows up but clearly there's no new turn that's registered since onPlayerTurnEnd and onPlayerTurnStart don't fire. You wouldn't get to see if color changes work but you could at least fire off those events, helping scripting.

[Mark]

TL;DR: Hotseat needs rework to help scripters.

Some suggestions:

• steam_name shows as {steam_name}_1, {steam_name}_2, {steam_name}_3 etc.
• steam_id shows as {steam_id}_1, {steam_id}_2, {steam_id}_3 etc.
• These numbers are in the order the Hotseat players were placed down. Ignore curly brackets.
• Allow us to change the colour of a Hotseat player, including moving them to spectator and then sitting them back down.
• Make .seated work properly with Hotseat players.
• I'm not sure if this is included already, but mute(), kick(), blindfold() etc. on a Hotseat player should only affect that one player. It will only start affecting you when you switch to that player.
• Allow us to add new Hotseat players into the game with the press of a button, as well as removing a Hotseat player.
• Add a way to test whether a game is being played in Hotseat mode, Single-player mode or Online mode.

[Unreal_Ed]

A good list. I'd also add that the mode starts off by asking players to sit, which is pretty annoying. It should offer the Games menu first and THEN ask about sitting. This is doubly frustrating because it'll choose a random table, and some of those don't have all the colors around the table, so once you get into the game, those players aren't sitting at colors featured in the mod you wanna play. Very idiosyncratic

[Mark]

A good list. I'd also add that the mode starts off by asking players to sit, which is pretty annoying. It should offer the Games menu first and THEN ask about sitting. This is doubly frustrating because it'll choose a random table, and some of those don't have all the colors around the table, so once you get into the game, those players aren't sitting at colors featured in the mod you wanna play. Very idiosyncratic

Yeah, but you don't have to select the colours immediately when you open Hotseat. You can open Games, load a game, then sit down at each colour.

[Unreal_Ed]

Yes I know, but it still shows a popup telling you to sit down before you can access anything, which is annoying

[MrStump]

Yeah, hotseat is a bit hacky right now. It puts you at a random table and has you assign colors, but on the game you want to play, it may have different colors. And re-assigning player colors can be kind of broken. And I haven't even tried it with the new turns integration.

Some improvements to hotseat mode would fill this need a bit better. But for now, largely speaking, hotseat works.