if you forgot about putting blitz in how did i get a game then?
https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=10025705

Just kidding. Thought your clan ID was 30, not 20. You guys are in the small/elite one. That one updates pretty fast, although I expanded it so not as fast as I said it does earlier. Timing it again.

i think it's kinda ok, you don't want to play, the game go away soon.

The bad thing is, you can be online (like now for me) but can0't play, beacuse you are just checking MD games and go offline in 2 min.

It sound like a good idea, but maybe need a little of tweak

This is really awesome! It's a shame that my first opponent just went offline :(

The only challenge is that this would only work with single-start templates because there's no way to programmatically add/remove players from games (using just the API) so if you have someone in slot A and they decline, you can't simply replace them.

Normally that would be the job of the game host, right? Is it possible with the API to designate one of the players as host/creator, so they could manage this themselves? Just a thought.

The bad thing is, you can be online (like now for me) but can0't play, beacuse you are just checking MD games and go offline in 2 min.

Yeah, I'm trying to see if there's any way to detect that sort of situation. Right now, I'm just having it delete the game (if it hasn't started yet) if either player has been seemingly offline for over 15 minutes. (WarLight doesn't give me any finer data or I'd set a much lower threshold).

This is behind a lot of wasted games and inefficiency (especially with wait time) right now, because I have to go through and find out who's actually interested. Maybe once an opt-in system is in place and people know about the games before they get invited, this might be a little bit easier to work with.

Another issue is that I'm currently not tracking game creation time- so if one people is busy (but still online/active in other games) and doesn't do anything for a while, their opponent is stuck without a replacement game until one of them goes offline. I can fix that trivially in the next test iteration though.

(Thanks for the feedback!)

Normally that would be the job of the game host, right? Is it possible with the API to designate one of the players as host/creator, so they could manage this themselves? Just a thought.

Sadly, no. It's just the creator (me) who's going to have to be host- which won't work unless I'm available to manually supervise the game.

The Warlight API is ludicriously limiting when it comes to actually doing things with the game. It's decent for reading (some) games but that's really about it. Pretty disappointing.

Edited 12/10/2015 07:54:20

The other annoying issue is boots. I'm seeing situations where people join, their partner doesn't notice, their partner joins, but they're gone/busy elsewhere by that point and end up getting booted.

Taking out 5min autoboot for sure in the next iteration. I hope practice games don't count for boot rate. :(

Edit: I think I can also resolve the slow detection of offline players with some careful multithreading. It'd be so much better if [NL] ARand0mPlayer got a new game as soon as it was possible to tell The Koala went offline. Maybe a new organizational paradigm would work better here.

Edited 12/10/2015 08:00:36