Tournament mode, again

[nifrek]

[EDIT] This post originally contained ideas about a "Tournament mode" with fancy stuff. It was over complicated so I edited the post to make it easier to understand, with the bare minimum of what I was suggesting. This feature would be a good start and could eventually be used for a full tournament mode. [/EDIT]

Suggestion:
Have a server setting unrelated to "maxplayers" that sets a maximum number of "active players", that is, a maximum number of players that can join a team. Once the maximum number of "active players" is filled, remaining spectators cannot join a team and have to remain in "observer mode".

This feature would make it possible, for example, to connect to a duel server even if there are already 2 players connected. If both "active players" spots are taken, someone connecting to the server would not be able to enter the game and ruin an on-going match, but would be able observe the match.

Problems:
The biggest problem with this is of course "cheating", which would make this feature unavailable for ladder servers, with good reason, unless the feature can be voted on or off ("maxplayers 2" when set to "off"? If there are more than 2 players at that time on the server, what would happen?).

Still using duel servers as example, another problem would be that when the 2 active players are ready to play the match, there is no way to prevent an observer to steal a spot once the map restarts, because when a map starts, by default everyone is an observer and have to pick a team to enter the game. To resolve this problem, server would need to remember who were the active players after map restart, some kind of "lockteams" command.

That's about it.

[nifrek]

BTW, would be nice of some of you replied with a simple "I approve" even if you cannot help or have nothing to add. Or even "I disapprove" if don't. Everyone I talked to about it seemed to agree this would be a great feature, but none of them actually replied to give their opinion in the old thread. I'm starting to think I only imagined those people.

[k0jak]

i approve, i asked for this a long time ago.

[Sless]

nice idea - approving that also !

[Psychcf]

approving.

maybe authentication of some sort?

[GreEn`mArine]

Yeah, I'd love that, too.

I'd also love to get 100 Million USD from Bill Gates.

[divVerent]

Actually, I want to add some secure authentication, I just do not know how to do it without violating software patents. Embedding OpenSSL (and letting them take the risk) is out of question, OpenSSL is simply too big and adding yet another DLL makes maintaining the Windows and OS X builds even harder. It is hard enough as is because the vorbis DLL is so hard to compile (We still need someone to compile a new version of them for our next release).

The idea would be an optional registration with email address. Each address can only be used once to register a nick in one month. Each nick can only get registered once at all. If you register, you get a file mailed that is a "key pair" for your nickname. If you have such a key file and your nickname matches, the client sends the public key to the server - which is digitally signed by Alientrap, so the server can find out if the key file is genuine. Once a client has sent a key to the server, all communication is encrypted by it - that way, it is ensured, that the client actually has the matching private key. In the end, we have here a protocol that authenticates a nickname without requiring a separate authentication server - so the game still works well without that server. If a player then plays with an unregistered nick, an "UNREGISTERED" sign gets prepended to his nickname. Only way to get rid of that sign would be registering the nickname.

That way, nobody would be forced to enter his email address anyway, but we'd have a good way to secure your nickname against imposters. Ladders and other serious competitions however could require a registered nickname, to ensure that the right one plays in a duel.

[k0jak]

What nifrek said about nexuiz could be a great TDM game, but not enough maps suitable for tdm at all, is very, very true.

Hopefully with some time this can be changed.

[nifrek]

Since Darkplaces is based on QW engine I was wondering, isn't there a way to use the code of it's spectator mode? In QW you type "spectator 1" in console and reconnect and you are then using a maxspectators spot instead of a maxplayers spot. I don't think it's a different port or anything, I'm not sure tho. I downloaded qw source but I can't find anything about it yet. There's a spectator.c file in the qc files but I think it's mostly related to what happens when a spectator connects (where he spawns, messages like "spectator someplayer connected", stuff like that). I don't know programming but that's what I can make out of it, and the code seems well commented.

[KadaverJack]

Since Darkplaces is based on QW engine I was wondering, isn't there a way to use the code of it's spectator mode?

dp is based on GLQuake (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Quake_-_family_tree.svg), QW support was added about a year ago but afaik only the client side, so dp can't be used as QW server.