Data distribution ideas

[thelusiv]

It's a cool idea, and it seems like it'd work, but it'd be veeery complicated to implement correctly. Does the svn update in the C library give you any sort of downloading status? The command-line svn tool doesn't, and when downloading a large file, it might be frustrating to not have a percentage bar....

I'm not sure if this is provided, but I agree it's needed, some tracks are pretty big. I'd have to check out the API more.

Also, it seems to me like there would still be a need for a "full" package, so that people without internet connections or with slow connections could download all of the data on one computer, burn it to a CD, and take it home. Or, at least, download it for the entire day while doing something else instead of having to have VDrift open for the entire time it's downloading.

Good point, but I think we could also provide instructions on the wiki telling people how to check out the entire data set all at once, and then explain how to move it. Otherwise we're always going to end up with people who just automatically download the 200+ MB file before they test the game.

Thinking more about this, maybe there's not really much advantage to having this feature in-game. What about just having a minimal package plus a really nice web interface that allows people to browse and download select cars/tracks?

Good point, it doesn't necessarily have to be in-game, and that's a lot of time that the user has to wait while SDL hogs 100% CPU and all that. To have a nice web interface, this requires some kind of web site (someone has to write, maintain & manage it), which needs hosting (SF.net would be ideal but it's pretty slow especially for casual browsing), and will probably run into security issues.

So what if, instead of a web app, we provide the user with a simple PyGTK app that uses the Python bindings for the Subversion library (they are way easier to use than the C library after all) to get cars and tracks. That would remove the complexity from the game, make it super easy to write and port, and allow the user to download their cars and tracks in the background...plus, it would prevent them from getting more data than they can use if the data manager comes with the game. Also if they do find it works, then they could choose to download everything without having to have the game running in the background, and burn to a CD or whatever they like.

Oh and one more thing, which I didn't think about before...using GTK would avoid me having to write a bunch of new GUI code to support a data manager in-game, so that works out well too.