Presently the “Center on Moves” preference can be overridden by the module designer. And in fact defaults to “ALWAYS” meaning that modules by default always center on opponents moves and don’t allow players to turn that behavior off.
This creates known and frequent issues with 3+ player online games where everyone is supposed to be doing their moves at the same time. And of course the module designer often has to be contacted because they don’t know about the Global Option and how to turn it off, and/or individual players have to be taught how to “hack” their module with the Editor to enable the preference, etc. Let’s just say it shows up a lot in the forums as an issue, and it’s a “known and hated” feature among the 3+ player game online crowd.
And yet I can’t think of a single use case where it’s actually important for the Module Designer to be able to force one or the other preference onto the players. I could see maybe letting the module designer set the “better default” for the module so that the player’s preference for the module in question would initially go one way or the other. But that would just be a little cherry on top.
Completely sufficient would be:
(1) Disable the Global Options entry for Center-on-Moves
(2) Always display the Center-on-Moves preference in the preference window
(3) Always honor the player’s Center-on-Moves preference
The eeeeasiest fix would be just to intentionally break the GlobalOptions entry (leave it there, but ignore it and always display & honor the preference). About a 2-line fix.
A cleaner fix is some version of actually removing the option (or at least display of it) from the Global Options. With perhaps some slight tricksy stuff to keep any version of the old preference using the same preference as any that actually got set, and leave some dead entry in the class so that we don’t break any old modules, etc. I don’t think it will be rocket science, and I’d be happy to put together a PR if there’s buy-in.
Brian