Sweaty Teamgame Player Requirement

During last Rainbow Cup Yudi and I spent about 4 hours in total trying to set up a lan game so we could do sandbox together. It didn't work. It's also generally obnoxious that we need to go launch private games through the bin .exe file and exchange replays through Discord in order to review plays.

I am aware that this was a big problem a lot of people also had during LotS as it is basically mythic knowledge that like a dozen or two people on FAF know about and it's kind of a necessity to be able to sandbox without having to worry about people knowing you are sandboxing or farming your replays.

Would it be possible to introduce some sort of button that at least allows replays to immediately desync that you can click in lobby? I know the suggestion was made to allow for replays to not be saved but it never seemed to go anywhere and I was curious if it would hopefully be easier to implement something like this.

If this is still unfeasible, would be nice if someone can make some baby's first lan host thread because the whole process is quite obnoxious and neither mine nor yudi's zoomer brains can handle it.

A potential issue with this could be people who want to breach FAF rules and check the option to prevent the replay from saving to reduce the risk of detection. If something like this was to be implemented I'd suggest linking it to the optional password that can be set when hosting a game (i.e. so you can only prevent a replay being saved if the lobby required a password to join).

I've hosted LAN parties and had a hell of a time getting everyone to play together due to the LAN difficulties. So frustrating to have people all drive to be together and spend more time fixing than playing.

FYI: As a potential alternative solution to private LAN games, you could just make a custom local new version of a map (that doesn't actually need changes beyond being a new version), share that custom version with your friends, and play together via FAF without others being able to watch the game as that custom version of the map is not uploaded to FAF.

(To make a new version of a map, you can open a map with the Ozonex editor, click save as new version from the drop-down menu, and save it.)

I will add special button to my client to launch patched game offline, or turn off replay streaming/saving if you are 1600+ ladder

Not saving the replay online if its private game with password makes sense. If you want to share it later with someone, you would have the local copy.

Turning off replays will only ever work if all parties opt-in to it. As soon as one participant is sending it, it will be available.
That makes it semi-safe for the moderation topic.

Binding it to password protected games alone is not a good idea, as this would negatively affect coop games.
So it would need to be for custom games only, maybe password protected custom games.

But now where to put this "button" (checkbox, whatever) for people joining such a game? The client needs to offer this selection to the joining users somehow.

Apart from that there is an undocumented way to turn off streaming replays.
If you have autologin you need to logout properly first.

In the login screen you double click on environment and then you select a different invalid port for the replay server (e.g. 9999). Then your client will not forward the replay server (will cause error logs though).
But again: this only makes a difference if all participants do this.

Ah yeah I forgot the client can change ports as well. That would be fine as a solution I think, I’ll just need to write something on properly doing it for tournament prep.

I have been using the port technique for over a year now and it has some drawbacks besides being harder to use then a simple checkbox. Even though the replay is not available others can still see the maps you played and practiced on which is not ideal.

@tagada said in Sweaty Teamgame Player Requirement:

Even though the replay is not available others can still see the maps you played and practiced on which is not ideal.

As soon as you run any game on the server, it will persist this metadata. Changing this screams for other bugs and dataloss.

If we really wanted to, we could add an option e.g. for game host to not save a replay. We'd have to do some coding (switch to new replay server, add rabbitmq to it, add some simple "don't record this replay" logic between lobby server and replay server), but if there is a lot of interest in it, why not.
Metadata is another thing entirely of course.