Two player requests from the six-player night, one cause between them:
the lobby treated hosting as somewhere you GO, and a role you could only
have by being the machine that went there.
Hosting no longer leaves the setup page. HOST STEAM GAME claims the lobby
and stays put: the button becomes CLOSE LOBBY, joiners list under GAME
LENGTH as they arrive (callsign, vehicle, a cam tag, and WRONG BUILD where
launch would refuse - the reasons launch might say no, standing on the
same screen as the launch button), and the track, weather and length stay
changeable the whole time, republished to the members' rooms as they
change. LAUNCH GAME launches the whole room from right there, and after
the race the host lands back on the same page, lobby still open, roster
still live. The room screen still exists - for members, whose flow is
untouched.
Mechanically: RPL4Lobby_Host's create-then-run-the-room split into
HostOpen (create, publish, return) plus Pump/PublishSetup/RosterLines/
HostLaunch/Leave, with the owner-launch and leave blocks extracted from
the room's message loop so both screens call the same code. The menu gets
a timer that pumps Steam callbacks - nothing else pumps them with no room
running - and republishes dirty picks at most every 1.5s, because Steam
throttles chatty writers. One wrinkle: the lobby publishes through the
RPL4FrontEnd_* accessors, which read globals the menu only wrote on the
way OUT, so publishing from a live menu syncs them first or every publish
would carry the previous visit's picks.
And a member's Live Cam pick now works. It was host-only by design - the
pick published as member data and the room displayed it, but the egg
builder never read it, so a member who chose Live Cam raced their default
loadout instead (the "default Quark - red" Cyd was listed as). The pick
now rides the whole chain - lobby row, hosted-pilot table, egg entry as
hostType=1 / vehicle=camera - and the member machine sets its own cockpit
from its own pick at launch, before the renderers build, exactly as the
host and playback already did. One rule holds it together: SOMEBODY has
to race. If every pilot picks cam, every pick is stripped and the log
says so - a grid of cameras has nothing to point at, and is also the
shape known to hang the map load.
The playtest launch failures while a member had cam picked are not
directly explained - no logs were kept from those attempts - but the
half-implemented state they ran in (flag published, egg ignoring it) is
exactly the seam this closes, and the failure cannot recur in that form:
the pick is now either honoured everywhere or stripped everywhere.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5
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