Different treatment of joining players
 

Robert's worries, part 2: When a DS is configured to run 8 on 8 bot matches and a player joins, a bot will be kicked for the player to join (at least the way he has his DS configured). So far, so good.
However, the bot gets kicked before the player has fully connected and joined a team. So it could happen that a T bot gets kicked to make room for the joining player. Now the player has finished loading the map and decides to play as CT. As a result, there would be 9 CT against 7 T.
Now we wondered if it would be possible to force joining players into spectator mode first and keep all bots as active players - until the player has chosen a team to play for. Now a bot could be kicked from that very team to keep the teams balanced... impossible, possible or nonsense?

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

This is good idea, but I see some inconveniance. Imagine this situation: There is 14 bots on the server (7 on 7) and mp_maxplayers 16. 2 people connected and they decided to stay as spectators. No one bot is kicked. In this situation no one player more can connect (not free slots). How to solve this? ;)

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

Yes, this is the obvious downside. Now the question is "how likely is that to happen?" I mean, if players join a game server, do they want to spectate or do they want to play? And as soon as they start playing, bots do get kicked, and player slots are freed. But of course, the problem can't be denied.

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

but what if the server was a custom map server?
most people don't wait infront of the computer while they're dling a map or something..
they'll go away and do something else..
then when they get in game they're still idle and if the server is famous and lots of people go then the server will be filled with spectators and bots playing..

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

well, a solution to that would be to leave kick on player join as it is, but to modify the balance code, so if a bot is kicked to balance the teams, another is added unless this would unbalance the teams the other way.

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

Heyyo,

YES, this has been a constant prob with my lan parties when autobalance prevents me buds from joining my team cause there's already too many bots n' players on my team.. so I have to manually kick bots from my team n' add them again later to even the teams out... it's a little tedious, for for DS's where sometimes there's no admins it's annoying...

For specators? I'm sure there's a plugin that allows you to set how many rounds they can specate before getting kicked... I'm trying to find the plugin that if you get tked you can make the tker explode in 10 seconds... lol, ohh that plugin's a work of karma on the tker. :P

I think the best way for managing bots it to manage bots with respect to open slots. You know? like, instead of min/max bots, I'd go by leave 2 slots open kindof thing, and you could change how many slots to try n' leave open. I believe this idea was discussed before... I should've searched the forums first, but I've already written too much to turn back. :P

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

I think there is only one good way - add a new cvar - autobalancebots - to prevent You against manually kick some bot from some team and then adding manually a new one. This should work automatically. Without any admin intervention. But if I remember good some speak about adding cvars - I don't remember exactly why, but sPlOrYgOn doesn't like the idea to adding new cvars...

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

Heyyo,

Lol, I think it's cause of all the extra work that goes into them. :P Also, I think he'd have to arrange the previously built code to prevent code overlapping (like at 1 part it's trying to add bots, another trying to remove the bots..) Cause I've already seen some code overlapping... Mine is after a mapchange, to a map with a small spawn count (eg. from de_dust to de_survivor), and I try to kick the spectating bots, n' it does kick one... but the rest instantly leap onto the terrorist team, lmao, sounds funny cause then it's 10 vs like 21... but with only 10 spawnpoints... your odds of living through spawn are 2nd to none cause it seems that players spawn before fakeclients... 8D

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

About these spectacing bots - we need more info to reproduce this. What do You have: min_bots, max_bots in podbot.cfg? How are You adding bots to the game (addbot commands in podbot.cfg or some fillserver or how)? When You starting the server what the value are You putting as max_players? Try also with R2B42 if You still can see exactly the same effect.

Re: Different treatment of joining players
 

Heyyo,

what I did is comment out the addbot lines, and I tend to start off onna map like de_dust n' de_dust2 n' set the maxplayers to about 32 and all all bots by fillserver in the podbotmenu. N' then, after that map ends, it switches to my mapcycle.txt, which is de_survivor, and since the max amount of players by team is smaller (I think 10 per team), the rest of the bots just stay in spectator mode... n' when I use the kickbot command from the podbot menu on autoselect, n' it kicks 1 spectating bot, n' the rest just instantly leap on the Terrorist team (might be the podbot admin's team, dunno, I tend to be terrorist).