It’s a very handy feature to have since not everyone makes it from the start to the end. Is this something you are considering?
FWIW, I’ve been able to join in-progress manual PBEM games where the players send each other the hotseat save game file in turn. It just involved loading the save file, switching an AI over to human and adding a password in the lobby then resaving.
Very happy to help beta/playtest if you need it.
Thanks for the work to create the PYDT service - much appreciated!
It’s not supported at the moment, the main problem is that I think it will work in the scenario you describe (slot has never been filled by a human before), but it won’t work if a player leaves the game, and a different player fills the slot because of a bug in Civ 6 (see the Turn Timer thread in this category).
I wish that Firaxis would fix that bug (but I’ve got no way to contact them), then we could implement things like this and the Turn Timer. In the meantime, I think I could put a flag on the slot as to if there has ever been a Human player in that slot, and if not, allow joining.
Thanks for replying. Yeah, I can see the parallels with the timer bug you’ve reported. Boo. Let’s hope they fix that. The “always been AI” flag idea is a nice addition in the meantime - especially as the community here grows, you could well have games start and then people show up looking to jump in (I know I do that a lot with GMR games and would do it here too).
If you had that I’d also suggest having a general “game invites” somewhere in the forums that hosts could advertize for slots, or players could request games.
I’ve got this functionality ready to release, but i’m a bit hesitant of how to deploy it. I’m assuming that some people might not want people joining their game, so I’m leaning towards having to have the owner of the game explicitly change a setting to allow players joining after the game starts. Thoughts?
I agree this needs some thought in the presentation / process. I would say there are two different ways people will want to use this (and I have used both in GMR)…
In some cases the owner will be happy with anyone joining an open slot. For this they need a way to advertise their game to prospective joiners. Two different ways to do this are to (a) have a way to have it on the Open Games list, or (b) to have an official area in the forum where hosts can openly solicit joiners.
There should be an invite-only way to allow people to bring specific people into the game. This could supplement the forum, or be in response to some out-of-band communication where the host wants to allow a certain recipient to join. Perhaps in combination with the PYDT game password feature.
Hope this helps & thanks for your work and continued evolution of the platform.
Thanks for your comments, @Acechante and @g0mezg0mez. I just deployed the code a couple minutes ago, if you want users to be able to join your in-progress game, you’ll need to go to the Game Details tab of the game, click Edit Game Parameters and check the Allow Users To Join After Start checkbox.