Trickle downloading the next map

Soylent_green

<div class="IPBDescription">A better way to handle custom map downloads</div>Nobody likes to wait for a map to download. But downloading at say 10 kB/s is not going to strain anyone's connection. Instead of waiting for map change to download a map the server(or download server if not the same as the game server) could trickle the next map out to clients, if they do not already have it, so that it is ready(or at least closer to it)on map change.

Servers that host a lot of custom map would benefit from this. After half an hour of playing on one map you have already acquired ~17 MB. That's almost 10 times the size of the tram .level file using good data compression; leaving some room to include custom models, textures and sounds.

Should get the game out of the door before considering implementing this because some implementation details are messy(you also want something like source's http fastdl server; preferably with resuming and interoperability so that the fastdl server can take over on map change if you have not completed the download of all files). But it seems like it would be a fairly valuable feature.

Raneman

Also, to support larger playercounts at once, they should share bits of the map between each other like a torrent. It would take lots of strain off the server and speed maps up so much.

player

NS2-maps seem to be around 10MB (+ 5MB overview) in size, anyone in a developed country (Australia notwithstanding) with a half-decent broadband connection can pull that off of a HTTP-server maybe even faster than the server can load it (so you won't have to wait ANY additional time). At this point I'd be happy if we get any auto-downloading at all. It may be a more interesting idea for larger stuff, perhaps total-modifications, but then you'd already need to have it in order to be on the server to begin with. Though I will say that I would like to see some kind of client-uploading functionality in Lua to get data transfered over from the server to the client in midgame, so that would certainly be a good place for some kind of data-streaming.

The torrent-idea is pretty bad, as you need to remember that upload-speed is something broadband-users often have very little of (think ADSL or cable), that could potentially skyrocket your ping (not to mention the privacy-issue, IPs shouldn't be known to other clients).