Data distribution ideas

[thelusiv]

Yeah I think a standalone app does make more sense than my original idea. I also like your idea of ratings/reviews.

On the topic of mods...we need to work on our car parts system, and get it working again. It would make some sense to manage parts/mods through the data management app we're talking about. That is, it should at least download the parts available for each car (by the way, I think we should nuke the old data/carparts/ way of storing car parts, and make a parts/ directory under each directory in data/cars/ instead).

Other "long term" kind of ideas to think about the bigger picture here...If we're already managing cars & tracks in this app, the next logical step is to make it so that you can edit cars & tracks. Earlier on I had the idea to write a PyGTK track editor as well, why not go ahead and combine these apps into one - or at least two that can work together. Likewise, it would be very helpful to have a car editor, which could also be used to create car parts.

So the best way to tackle this is probably to split it up and set up goals. First we need to start out with the base data management features using the Subversion API, and set up the new data repository. I think this is a reasonable goal for the next release. After that we can work on improving the data manager. First milestone feature set and a few use cases:

* Get a list of directories in the data repository under tracks and cars
* Provide the user with a list of available cars and tracks
* If the user selects a data item, preview it (Just description is OK for now)
* Under the preview pane provide button for Download (which will be greyed out if it's already downloaded)
* Another button here should be the Delete function - users should be able to remove data they don't use or like to free up disk space
* The program should be able to read/write VDrift's .config format - we need to write a .config Python module that's easy to use (this should not be hard)
* I'd like to avoid this program having its own configuration file. It would be nice if it just "discovers" everything whenever it starts up.

Basic data to display about cars:
* Name of car
* Author
* Max HP
* Weight
* Short description

Right now there is an about.txt file with each car (more or less). I'd like to either move this all into the .car file or make a separate .config file to store this and other information. Keeping the file separate is probably the best idea, so that the whole .car file doesn't have to be downloaded just to get preview info about the car.

Tracks will be similar but different kinds of info:
* Name of track
* Author
* Length
* Location
* Short description
* Perhaps number of turns...?

That's all the ideas I can come up with for tonight...