WarMUX

Hi all !

I have already posted in the french section but... you aren't very talkative !
So, I post here and I hope I will have more reply ^^.

I contribute (a little) in the SuperTuxKart development and I think that wormux developers wanted to have an addons system (for maps and persos ?). I am trying to do an addons menu for STK which has the same project and I made a site to share karts and tracks : http://stkaddons.tuxfamily.org. The PHP code will be rewritten soon (because it is a bit dirty ^^) and maybe we could use the same code to make an addon system for Wormux ?

So, I create this thread, even if I can't say many things...


Before starting to rewrite all the code, I would like to know if Wormux developers are interested and if there is special things for Wormux ?

Have a nice day !

xapantu

I've replied over the french forum that we are currently low on human resources, so we probably won't contribute much to the actual code.

I think there is only one typical Wormux requirement: Wormux displays a preview when selecting a map. Imagine a net game where one user (the host) has an addon map that another player does not have. The later must be able to first get this preview (before the actual data is required). Because we don't know how downloading data is bad for those users:
- no upload of massive data should occur (instead refer to the addon server)
- no preemptive download of massive data should occur
- preview data is still ok as a necessary evil; forcing synch with addon server might be the simplest way

, but when I was thinking about the map addons, I thought the
following were important:
- versioning:
. The (xml?) description of some data should allow update to its content
. The maps may need to be versioned to determine up-to-date status
- validation:
. For online play, we use checksums to validate if 2 people have the exact same map
. There are maps that may come from external sources, ie without all the packaging of the addon system; that
must be taken into account
- Packaging:
. As previously said, allowing to identify an addon map through present files, or managing versioning is important
. How transparent should that be for the user? ie, automatical download of the needed data when it becomes
necessary?

This is not a much thought-after analysis but rather some food for thought.

xapantu:

I think so too, hoping that the changes to support network sync won't force to change too many things.

Quotation:

Seems ok as an intermediate implementation step indeed. I don't know if you have already released official/supported versions with that file format.

Reasons to version things is that with them, any version of Xapantu knows whether:
- it is able to understand the xml file
- it can handle the track/kart format; particularly important as otherwise, the zip will have to be downloaded, unpacked, the compatibility checked, and if not, the data removed.

Anyway, I'm not sure we have this in Wormux either anyway.

Quotation:

So you reject manual installation of files? In Wormux, as long as there's a file/folder, we try to parse it and if valid, add it to the list of maps. Maybe it's a bad design choice on our side, but as soon as your xml file has a problem, you're toast.

Christophe

ah, no, it's ok then. In our case, we would probably install addon maps to an user folder, but this xml is sufficient to distinguish between manual and addon install.