Exits in Multiplayer (rules of Lix, ideas for future format)

[Simon]

School quiz! This is about the rules of multiplayer Lix. Consider a 4-team game, with teams red, yellow, green, blue. A red lix enters an exit.

Question 1: The exit shows the team colors of red and yellow. Who gets points for the red lix?

Question 2: The exit shows the team colors of green and blue. Who gets points for the red lix?

Question 3: Is Simon happy about this? Why?

Question 4: What design do you think he will propose instead?

Question 5: Why is wrong to implement the design that you think Simon will propose, and what should he implement instead?

Answers to Q1 and Q2

Exit has red and yellow, red lix enters: The red team gets 1 point. The other teams (yellow, green, blue) get nothing.

Exit has green and blue, red lix enters: The green team gets 1 point, and the blue team gets 1 point, too. The other teams (red, yellow) get nothing.

Questions 3-5 don't get a spoiler immediately. I will eventually write down my ideas. But I'd rather not stir the pot before I've seen other people's opinions. There will be no failing grade here; everybody who answers will pass the course.

-- Simon

[Simon]

I'm unhappy with both the multi-team exit scoring (see "answers to Q1 and Q2") and with the overtime system.

One team. Exits should belong to one team, not to multiple teams. When a lix (of any team) enters, the exit's owning team should get a point, period. You should match exits to seats (A, B, C, ...) in the editor. If you play a 7-player map with 3 players, the four exits for seats DEFG should be removed. (In 0.10 physics, only the 7th exit gets removed, and the intended ABCDEFG becomes ABCABC.)

Goal flags. Exits with multiple players are predominant in race maps, i.e., in maps with an overtime of 0 seconds. It's common to have a single exit that all players use. I want to replace this kind of exit with a goal flag. The goal flag should belong to all teams, you can't assign it to any single team. And it should be a new type of tile (like hatch, goal, triggered trap, ...) so that it is obviously different from an exit. If one of your lixes touches the goal flag, you win, and there will be no overtime.

Very few maps use, e.g., 2 exits for 6 players, and rely on how ACE use one exit and BDF use the second exit. I want to remove this. It's not a big loss and the gain in simplicity will be worth it. This example map can easily become a 2-team map (it already has 2 exits) instead of a 6-team map.

-- Simon

[Silken Healer]

To preface this, I'm sorry if I say something wrong, as I'm not exactly sure how entrances/exists/seats/player counts work in Lix, but I've tried to look it up the best I can.

Very few maps use, e.g., 2 exits for 6 players, and rely on how ACE use one exit and BDF use the second exit. I want to remove this. It's not a big loss and the gain in simplicity will be worth it. This example map can easily become a 2-team map (it already has 2 exits) instead of a 6-team map.

So, if you remove this, then what will happen if you try to do to that after you remove it? Will it just give an error message?

[Simon]

"Try to do that" would then mean: You select 6 for the intended number of players, you'll have seats ABCDEF available for assigning seats to hatches/exits. In the editor, you must assign exactly one seat to each exit. When you place an exit, editor will preassign a seat to that exit; you can always change the seat assignment for that exit, but you can't leave the exit without a seat assignment. Now you place only 2 exits. You can assign A, A to the two exits and keep 5 players without exit. Or you assign D, E and keep 4 players (ABCF) without exit.

I don't know if/how Lix should reject such a map when it's selected in the multiplayer browser. Even now, it's legal to play a map without exits. Interesting design problem. In a pinch, it's okay to allow no exits, that's simplest, and it assumes that authors will see it and fix it.

Existing maps should remain loadable in that future Lix. They are in the 0.10 level file format which doesn't feature exit-to-seat assignment, therefore we need a rule for importing these levels into the new system where each exit has exactly one seat assigned to it. The obvious choice is: When we load a level, we look at the intended number of players, and we distribute the seats round-robin at level load time.

-- Simon