Autopauze on empty game

[imus]

Something that I always wondered why you didn't use this but forgot to suggest.

It would probably be a good idea to automatically pause the games after a server restart until someone starts a company.
This would prevent some unfair advantage (for highscores) when someone can start in a later year without any competition. (For example #7 with monorail). Currently this is partially solved using an auto restart after an hour. That works good enough for the long goal games, but I think it's lacking on the short / micro games (especially #7).

Shouldn't be that hard to implement either, would it?
Some suggestions about when to pause exactly:

• On server restart => unpause when someone starts a company.
• same as previous but also when company reset and no other companies in game
• game paused whenever there are no clients online and no company in game
• same as previous but count AFK cients as being offline as well

[Andreas]

I like the idea, but what if we slightly simplify it to this:
Pause if there are no companies.

This way you do not need to worry about when companies get reset or about a player being afk or not. Also the game will still run if there is a company but no client (useful for long goals)

[Geert]

when i want to make 30 bil i wont be playing for 20 hours in a row. I will be afk/sleeping etc
i like my company to make money

[Knogle]

Very interesting idea, of course it's only useful when the server restarts (as mentioned), so time doesn't pass by while there are no companies.

I however disagree that AFK players would count as offline, I can only see this being useful when the server is empty, and only right after a restart, because if there's like a few years left till an automatic restart happens, it's no good if it's paused.. what if people are waiting to start a company after the server restarted.

Afaik, OpenTTD doesn't have a setting for this, but if should be fairly easy to do with a script, which is already included in xShunter.

[imus]

Ah right, didn't think of that situation I did give more options hoping to get some more feedback like this.

I fully agree with you guys to only pause when there are no companies.

[alex879ro]

I don`t know if the game can paused when there are no companies...I`ll take a look into this...or perhaps someone knows this..

If it can`t, then we would have to ask xOR for this...since a feature has to be coded in xShunter.

[naz]

Autopause exists on btpro servers, so it should be able to be applied here, xOR would be best to figure that out.

[imus]

I'm almost sure it's possible. On openttdcoop they can pause the game whenever there are 0 or 1 clients in the game. And I expect that checking the amount of companies shouldn't give the biggest problems either.

Then again, I didn't look at the code and don't really have the time to really try and learn the used language(s) and figure out how to do it  myself right now

So for me, this is just a suggestion that might be liked by a lot of players and that should be possible to implement if the programmers can find the time to do this I do know that you guys are already working hard on other things, so I'm not expecting this to be done any time soon either.

[Knogle]

It is quite possible, and fairly easy to do with a gamescript.