Changes to map votes

[Lefinch]

If that's possible, I would be a HUGE advocate of moving the map vote as reasonably close (I understand compiling is still a thing and surprise shuttle calls, so I guess the key here is if you can reliably compile the map during the shuttle cycle? It seems like it to me but I've not timed it)

Everything Zamujasa said, this would also eliminate exactly one (entirely personal) pet peeve: Everyone votes for Oshan in the smaller hours of the American-time evening/Europe time morning only 30% of people actually end up playing it and there's no engineers and, again entirely to me: It's foul and does Oshan an injustice. Personal rant over.

Back on subject: When the round starts you're trying to do a job. You've got a load of fresh tasks and things potentially happening, for most roles (not all) your busiest time is right at the start. Map voting isn't exactly a colossal task but its a nice little bonus to have a tiny bit more time to "consider it" especially in regards to how the population's looking a good 80 minutes after play's begun. Speaking again as someone who plays a lot when the population goes from 70 to 20 in the space of a round on weekdays: might be nice to have that considered in regards to both choices and map pop threshholds.

[Glamurio]

i think it'd be worth investing more time into moving map votes to the end of the round if possible, either by doing it once the shuttle takes off (giving 60s vote time, then ~120 compile time) or at the end of a round and just delaying the timer until it's done.

other servers have much higher pre- and post-round delays (i think monke's start timer is 5 minutes? goon's is 3) and there's definitely a bit more room to space those out.

if you really wanna go ham, put a voting booth in the afterlife bar. spawn a portal from the afterlife bar to centcom during the extended setup, so that people can respawn and go mess around.

i still think there's way more value in boosting map vote turnout than there is in handling corner cases, and a big problem w/ it is just that the results of the vote are the next shift's problem, in 60-90 minutes

Yeah, been advocating for that for a while. It's very unorthodox to vote at round-start, I think a lot of people get distracted with chatting + getting a coffee + setting up characters, and then all of a sudden it's too late to vote. If people are still in-game as a character post-game, they're much more likely to vote, since the game is over, even more so when a voting pop-up shows up. Why's that not the case, by the by? Like, an automated pop-up that shows up when voting starts. People forget the text messages, but they won't forget if it pops up in their face. That's like, standard, everywhere, in every game.

[Zamujasa]

goon's map voting at round start is just how the ci and game systems are set up.

tg derivatives do all of their map loading at round start. they're built and load with an empty map, and then it's loaded in. iirc, this is partially because tg did a whole lot of refactoring around object init that goon hasn't gotten around to yet.

goon has to build it in at compile-time, which is why there are options in the files to switch which map it is. this is reflected in the ci/build system: the map vote triggers a new build of the server, with the config switched to the new map. (the server is also rebuilt whenever new code changes come in through git.)

what this effectively means is that tg loads its map when the server starts: everyone joins, and while they're getting up, setting up their character, etc, the map is being initialized and loaded. monke round starts are about 300 seconds, or five minutes -- ours are 180 seconds (3 minutes).

goon has to do all of that before the server can start. unfortunately, that means it has to have time to build. before byond 515, compile times were about 120-180 seconds, depending on computer speed. byond 515 sped it up a lot, down to about 40-90 seconds.

~

the problems:

there has to be enough time after the map vote resolves to build and deploy the server

once the map vote is over, you have to wait for the server to build and deploy. if you don't, you'll end up with a stale copy, usually the current round's. (back when the testmerge was in, there wasn't any mechanism that told the game that the build was finished, so it was a complete guess... that didn't work most of the time. shortly after that, the feature to notify the game that the build was done was fixed.)

but you also have to account for problems. if you say "eh, 100 seconds should be enough time for the process to finish", what do you do when it doesn't? if it fails to build, or is still in progress, you have to have a backup plan. maybe you wait another 30 seconds in "sudden death" (where you end immediately), maybe you wait a bit longer, who knows.


you don't know when the round will end

typically rounds end after the shuttle is called, it travels to the station, boards, and then leaves. in cases like this, it's easy: maybe fire off the map vote when the shuttle takes off, so you have a minute or so to vote and then extra time to do the build.

...but not all rounds happen like this. some end immediately, like nuke or rev. in that case, where do you put the voting time? do you just extend the round-end timer?


...

my original plan (not really written out anywhere, too ambitious and i figured it would be too controversial):

- map vote moved to the end of the round. you get 30 seconds to pick a map.
- a voting booth is added at centcom, near the art area. voting booths get big "VOTE!!!" counters like the nuke does during active map votes.
- a portal opens from the afterlife bar to centcom, near the voting booth. this allows people who died to go vote, view the art at centcom, and otherwise participate in end-of-round festivities. the game's over, who cares?
- the round end timer becomes 150: 30 seconds of map vote, 120 seconds of build time. it waits for up to 60 seconds if the build didn't finish yet, otherwise it gives up and restarts.
- also, everyone can hear deadchat after the game is over. this isn't related, but i would have added it by now if i was still a coder.


people are rather used to goon's 60 second end-of-rounds, but i think we have a lot of room to increase that, especially if we make the end of a round actually fun and not just "everyone gets to mope on the shuttle for a minute because they get teleported if they leave" (see also this suggestion).


basically:
round end timer: 150 seconds
vote starts after round ends, and lasts 30 seconds (est ~110s build time)

thanks. wyci

[Frank_Stein]

i think it'd be worth investing more time into moving map votes to the end of the round if possible, either by doing it once the shuttle takes off (giving 60s vote time, then ~120 compile time) or at the end of a round and just delaying the timer until it's done.

My mind goes to like, fighting over the shuttles steering wheel to drive it to the next map

[Lefinch]

"DON'T MAKE ME TURN THIS SHUTTLE AROUND AND DO THE SAME MAP AGAIN"

[Zamujasa]

emag the shuttle console to send it to (a chunk of) some other map instead of centcom and also set the next map vote, just to be horrible

[Mouse]

finally, i can drive us to disney world

[freedo5]

Driving into atlas at 60 pop

But on a more serious note, i see that it might be a complicated issue, but what if map votes just started earlier and gave a couple of alerts? Like 180 seconds of lobby time for the and a couple of visible alerts, maybe one every 80 seconds.
I forget to vote for maps sometimes simply because i don't notice the alert and only see the vote ended thingie.