How to ensure all players have entered the game

[Deathmatcher]

How can I ensure that, at the beginning of the game, all designated players have entered the game, before running things in a script?

For example, if I call HudMessageBold() in an ENTER or OPEN script of a cooperative game, is it guaranteed that the message is broadcast to all players that have joined the game with -join? Or is there a possibility that players are omitted because they are not technically in the game yet?

Now, I'm aware that for this particular simple example I could just use HudMessage() in an ENTER script and it would execute for each player. But what if things get more complex? For example imagine an ENTER script where I want to to show a skippable cutscene to all players, that contains HudMessageBold and other broadcasts.
If I couldn't rely on HudMessageBold() and other broadcasts being shown to all players at game start, I would need to fall back to HudMessage() and call that from an ACS_ExecuteAlways-script. But ACS_Terminate wouldn't work on this script, so the cutscene wouldn't be skippable.

Essentially, what I would like to do is some check like this:

Code: Select all

while (PlayerCount < HostPlayerCount) {
  delay(1);
}
// broadcast stuff to all players

Is there a best-practice, to achieve something like this? Or are the broadcasts much more robust than I think them to be? Does it maybe suffice to wait for a second before using them in an ENTER script?

[Kappes Buur]

I have not played a multiplayer game for ages, but from what I remember,
GZDoom, by its Peer-to-Peer nature, will not start until all players have
entered the game.

[Deathmatcher]

For all practical purposes this seems to work, as far as I can see. I'm still somewhat sceptical about assigning a TID to a player in an ENTER script and then refering to the TIDs of all the players in the ENTER script as well. I have feeling that I'm just narrowly avoiding a hidden race condition here. But testing shows that it works and it solves a lot of other problems for me, so I will stick to it for the time being.