Possibility to add players during the game?

[RaphaelPI]

Hi,

I discovered boardgame.io 2 months ago and introduced it into my unfinished game (Slay The Spire like).
It's really nice, good job guys 😄

I use one player for each Monster that your hero is facing (total player = hero + number of monsters) and everything went perfectly before this problem:

• I want my players (hero and monsters) to be able to call some allies, so add new players in the game.

I currently use the solution you provided in #794 to eliminate a player from my game and it works cause the G.playOrder become a subset of ctx.playOrder.
But I don't have any solutions if I want to add one :(

Do you know if there is a way to do it?
Or maybe I have to change the way I'm using boardgame.io and only have 2 players (player and IA) ? Would be great if i won't have to do it that way 🙏

Thank you for your time

[delucis]

@RaphaelPI The only way I think you could achieve something similar currently would be to extend the #794 solution. Start the game with a pool of extra players, so you set numPlayers to some upper bound, but start with only some of those active. Then you could use those additional players later. (Players could also be recycled if they become inactive.) This would still be a hard limit, so if the game has a potentially exponential number of extra characters, this wouldn’t work and you might indeed need to switch to a “2-player” model like you suggest.

Having core methods to add and remove players seems like it would be a useful addition though!

[RaphaelPI]

Thanks @delucis for your response.

Yes, i think it might be the best option :)
My actual playOrder is an Array of uid, so I will have to refactor some stuff but defenitely less than the “2-player” model.

[devill]

There is now a draft PR and three issues that would make this possible, and the design
is very much still open if anyone here wants to push back on it.

#1326 (draft) is the groundwork. ctx gains an explicit players list, so the
framework has somewhere to record who is in a match instead of deriving it from
numPlayers at the start of every phase. On its own it adds no way to add or remove
anyone — it just makes one possible.

Then:

• Seating: core events to add and remove players during a match #1327 — events.seat / events.unseat, which is the actual answer to this issue
• Lobby lifecycle: give MatchData a status instead of inferring it from seat occupancy #1328 — the lobby needs a status field. It currently decides a match has started
  by checking that every seat has a name, which is never true for a table you can join
• Deprecate endTurn({ remove: true }) and document what numPlayers no longer means #1329 — tidy-up

@delucis, your suggestion here that core add and remove methods would be a useful
addition is essentially what #1327 proposes. The part that is not settled is how a game
gets to choose which seat a new player takes.