Auto-downloads?

[Datax]

Wow, it's been years since I've actually poked around this community. Amazing that y'all are still around. Great work on the patches; it's really impressive stuff,a nd it's great that a game that is over five years old can go toe-to-toe with all the modern ones.

It's occurred to me that adding a plugin auto-download feature to multiplayer games would really enliven the map-making community. Right now it's too hard to get a game together; The Mill isn't around anymore, and no one wants to go through the hassle of finding a particular plugin, downloading and installing it, and relaunching Myth; and even if they did, the game would have closed by then. Bandwidth isn't a problem anymore, and you could always prompt a player as he joined a game whether he wanted to download the plugin or not. Warcraft III does this pretty well, and as a result it's got a thriving custom map community.

Anyway, it's just a suggestion, and I think it would do a lot for the community.

[Eddaweaver]

Do you mean to download from the game's host?

[Orlando the Axe]

Datax, first off: Parking wars is awesome. Secondly, this game is much more than 5 years old, next year will be Myth's 10 year anniversary if you can believe it. Thirdly, that is a good idea and has been talked about before but I think the amount of coding it would take would be a pretty large endevor (though I'm no coder, maybe one of them could comment).

[vinylrake]

Wow, it's been years since I've actually poked around this community.

Welcome back - and dittos on the kudos for parking wars - AND Clue - I am not a big fan of actually _playing_ Clue: A Knife in the Dark (I can't seem to win), but you did a great job on the conversion - units, scenery, interior colormap - all really well done.

The plugin-download feature would be a nice addition, along with the additional coding issues there is the issue of WHERE to dl the plugin FROM. The dl urls listed in 90%+ of plugins that pop up when you try to join a game you don't have a plug for are inaccurate and most myth hosts aren't going to have anonymous ftp access enabled on their machines for anyone to download a map/plugin from. IF there were a single dl site that had everything it would be a lot easier, but I imagine the coding issues would nit be trivial.

You probably already know, but I'll mention it since you've been away for a while - one of the post-Bungie post-Take2 enhancements made to Myth II is to make plugins only load WHEN they are selected for a specific game not when you start up Myth - so you can have several hundred plugins in your myth II folder without Myth taking forever to start up. Players who like to play 3rd party maps can keep their plugins folder stuffed to overflowing with no gameplay or startup issues at all. It doesn't make it easier for people to get plugins on the fly, but it does make it easier for people to have lots of plugins.

As for a central repository, it's been talked about for a few years now, but "The Tain" - a mill-like uber file repository - is rumored to be in the works (again).

Also, there are no downloads at the site itself, but I've cataloged a couple of thousand maps and plugins and included (when known) links to sites where they can be downloaded at the Myth Map Atlas.

[The Elfoid]

Blades said he'd be adding it to Myth III when he produced The Mill 2. I wonder if he has any plans for that now that PlayMyth.net is apparently part of the Tain project. I doubt it, but it could take us somewhere.

[Thalander]

most myth hosts aren't going to have anonymous ftp access enabled on their machines for anyone to download a map/plugin from.

warcraft 3 accomplishes this without requiring the host to enable anonymous FTP outside the game, no? i too think that this feature would be one of the largest improvements that could be made to myth.

[Industry]

Didn't Myth used to check and auto-download patches when you logged into Bungie.net?

If so, then I assume that (unless its been pulled out of the code) each copy of Myth already has an anonymous ftp client. So, you'd need to add an anonymous ftp server, and change the way plugins are loaded since I'm pretty sure that currently it reads whats in the plugin folder on startup and doesn't update if files have been added or changed. At least, its been my experience that when I want to play a plug multiplayer that I don't have in my plugin folder I have to move it in there restart, and re-login.

Maybe a check box in preferences "Allow players to download plugins from my host."

[vinylrake]

Didn't Myth used to check and auto-download patches when you logged into Bungie.net?

I don't recall that but I don't think I started playing until Myth II 1.3 was already the one being shipped.

...So, you'd need to add an anonymous ftp server, ...

That's the part I am thinking some might object to. I mean sometimes it seems like 3/4 of the DSL/Cable players on playmyth can't host because they can't get around their firewall issues it's hard for me to imagine that an anonymous ftp host embedded in Myth2 would be a simple thing to implement. Not saying it wouldn't be a useful thing *if* there a central place to download maps and plugins from, just thinking outloud about the issues.

and change the way plugins are loaded since I'm pretty sure that currently it reads whats in the plugin folder on startup and doesn't update if files have been added or changed. At least, its been my experience that when I want to play a plug multiplayer that I don't have in my plugin folder I have to move it in there restart, and re-login.

Yeah, it seems that Myth only loads the actual plugin itself when a game starts that has the plugin active, but the LIST of available plugins and maps that myth uses to see if the player has the plugin must be assembled from the plugins folder at startup time.

Maybe a check box in preferences "Allow players to download plugins from my host."

Zipped or raw files? I can just see some poor host having his ping go into 4-5 digits as 10 players all start simultaneously downloading AVA or some similarly behemoth sized map/plugin/conversion. I imagine that could be managed by limiting the amount of resources the ftp server could use - but there sure are a lot of things to consider and work out.

I am sure the erstwhile and talented Myth 2 developers here will be up to the challenge.

[AblitERateOR]

yea and some plugins like avx2 are about 160mb large...

[The Elfoid]

Well having the OPTION of people downloading them would be fine. If you could pick how many people downloaded it would be good too.

[Wismuth]

The dl urls listed in 90%+ of plugins that pop up when you try to join a game you don't have a plug for are inaccurate

Because of that, how about we start to index plugins by some hash instead of a URL? When you're in the lobby, Myth already receives the hash of the plugin necessary to join each game (which it compares to hashes of what you've got in your plugins folder, that's how it can know whether to make the game look white or red). When you click on a red game, it could add a button in the pop-up labeled 'Try to find this plugin on the Internet'. If you click on that button, it would launch the computer default browser with the address

http://thetain.net/pluginsearch.php?hash=4e19cabf

where the hexadecimal code is the hash of the plugin. The page would be html with the name of the plugin, a link to the zip file and whatever else (user rating, user comments...). Let the user do the rest manually (unzipping to the plugins folder and relaunching myth). If a red game requires more than one plugin, have multiple buttons I guess.

"The Tain" - a mill-like uber file repository - is rumored to be in the works (again).

My idea requires the cooperation of both the Myth II executable and a website. If a mill-like uber file repository is in the works, then that's the perfect timing to think about this.

--------------------------------------
2nd generation of the concept. (Read this only in 2+ years! Really, just do what's above for now.)

Faced with a red game, Myth loads

http://thetain.net/pluginsearch.php?has ... pe=torrent

which is a .torrent file. Then it uses a built-in bittorrent client to load a .zip into a "zipped plugins" folder. When the download is complete, it extracts the plugins from the .zip and puts it into the "plugins" folder, and refreshes its database of what's in the plugin folder.

It doesn't have to be torrent, it could be an FTP client. Just trying to be modern and save The Tain some bandwidth here.

Actually if bandwidth is an issue, The Tain could be *just* a bittorrent tracker, and it would be up to the game host to have the zipped version in his "zipped plugins" folder and have Myth seed the plugin he's hosting to allow anyone in the lobby to get the plugin from him. i.e. "downloading from the host" idea (and from other people waiting for the game to start too, if they want).

[Thalander]

there could also be a kind of custom built in mini torrent feature among everyone currently connected to playmyth.net - if you're online, you seed.

[Zeph]

i wouldnt want to seed for hours, considering i have a bandwidth cap on my cable connection...

[Thalander]

While I'm at school I wouldn't want to see either, since I have a cap here. But (and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself) those who don't want to seed could disable that feature, and those who do want to seed could set a maximum upload cap for myth torrenting. Myth could keep track of who seeds the most and there could be a "Seederboard" to keep track of who seeds the most!

[CIK]

In game downloads is something that we are considering as part of The Tain project along with some unannounced stuff. Look for more info when we ship 1.6 & thetain goes beta.

As for Bungie.net, back in the day Bungie never did in game downloads/patches but they had put a lot of the pieces in place but for some reason never finished/used it.