On the Plane Pack debate... any Very Good web builders here?

FSIC Messageboard

SDOE General

profile | register | preferences | faq | search

UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone!

next newest topic | next oldest topic

Author	Topic: On the Plane Pack debate... any Very Good web builders here?
Nat Pilot	posted 09-24- 06:06 PM My great idea is a website built in the same vein as Microsofts Update site. It checks your install and gives you a list of whats out of date for you to download. when you make your choice it downloads and installs the things you need, where you need them. I.E. no more massive downloads! Do we have any web masters/html programers here that can handel making something like this? ~Nat~ ------------------ 7./JG3 "Naturlich" "SDOE... What and where would you like to fly today?" Nats FS-SDOE Site</B> IP: Logged
Tailslide Pilot	posted 09-24- 06:22 PM If someone can write some code to figure out whats installed in SDOE I can write some code to expand SDOE beeper to read a web page and compare whats installed with what is available and let people check off what they want to download/install. TS IP: Logged
Jerry Pilot	posted 09-24- 07:12 PM Haven't we had cases where a builder didn't want his creation posted anywhere but on his page? Wasn't Nations like that, or still is? Efforts have been made in the past to get everything located at a single site to make things easier for everyone, especially newbies. It has never worked. I like your update page idea Nat, but it requires 100% cooperation from all the builders. Good luck. (That's a sincere good luck, not a cynical one.) IP: Logged
Tailslide Pilot	posted 09-24- 07:42 PM No, it doesn't .. all it requires is someone to keep an up to date page with links to all the downloadable updates. Right now there are planes we can't play with online (roadtoad and panzer's) because they didn't want them to be included in the plane packs. I don't see how this would be different. TS ------------------ Patch It! www.airsims.com IP: Logged
Nat Pilot	posted 09-24- 07:52 PM Jerry, I in no way mean for this to be a general "coma and get it" page. it would only be updated at plane pack time, or similar. the difference essentialy is that instead of someone(s) building a plane pack, they would update the site with the new stuff. I hate the idea of a come ang get it page, it would wreak havoc. This type of thinig is simly a more effecient way of doing things and as I said, instead of releasing a plane pack, this site would be updated. I know ppl like to have their own aircraft on thier website, it's understandable.. but it never stopped them letting them be put in planes packs, so if this page could be built it shouldn't stop them with that either Still, it's all a case of if this page could be built, if it can be, we go step by step. IP: Logged
Jerry Pilot	posted 09-24- 09:30 PM Then your comparison to the MS Update page is wrong. The MS Update page is not just links to other sites that you have to go to for each update. It is a one stop page that tells you what updates you need and you download them from that page. You are talking about something like Spyder's SDOE Hot List but with an ability to tell you what you need. If this is doable why not just build on Spyder's Hot List rather than give us just one more place to go? IP: Logged
Jeeves Pilot	posted 09-24- 10:00 PM For the record (as a Nations Project team alumni)-- Nations was and will be again only available at the sites of those who helped put it together-- just to help those with sites get a little extra traffic...but after a short period of time-- it was and will be again- made available to anyone who wants to put it on their site....Werner will back me up on this....Werner? ------------------ Brought to you by the campaign for a better Dauntless! Jeeves =FC= IP: Logged
Nat Pilot	posted 09-24- 10:07 PM actually my breakdown is right, it does just what I said above, I didn't say it links to othersites. RTM IP: Logged
Tailslide Pilot	posted 09-24- 11:12 PM Ideally it would quietly check in the background every time you started SDOE and warn you if you are no longer online compatible, let you quickly download the new plane update and play. TS IP: Logged
Werner Molders Pilot	posted 09-24- 11:35 PM Right behind ya Jeeves! Thx for picking this one up, I've been pulling a double PR shift, the coord. team organization is somewhat different for V2 than it was for V1. Werner ------------------ Visit Abbeville Field Today! IP: Logged
Nat Pilot	posted 09-25- 01:11 AM Thats the idea Tail, once everything thats online standard is placed on the website it would be ideal to have a program that checks your installation against the online standard held on the main site, it would also mean that periodic updates would be popssible rather than complete packs.. ie when a new aircraft or whatever is deemed worthy on the online standard it culd be added to the site and easily installed by the checking prog on your system, it would stop people having the wrong aircraft online becuase it would inform you before hand that you're not standard on whatever aircraft. What this basicaly requires is an Online Standard web site, where the password to upload to it is held by MH or someone similar (someone that will always be around), and given out to the person updating the online standard site. Great idea Tail, all we need is how to implement these things.. sorry, I'm not a good programer or site builder, but the ideas are there IP: Logged
Nat Pilot	posted 09-25- 01:20 AM Jerry, sorry, for a clearer explination of the site workings. You would enter the site and your SDOE installation would be checked against the current online standard. Next you would be given a list of what aircraft/updates your system requires to bring it up to standard. Options would be: A list of the individual aircraft you have that are out of date, you should be able to select each aircraft individualy for download. You should also have the option for a complete upgrade to the current online standard, this means only the things you requierd will be installed, not aircraft that are uptodate on your machine. This allows for people that don't fly online much to have a choice of full upgrade, or just single aircraft, which I think is a better way to attract users since I'm sure the size of the plane packs is a major put off, I know this for a fact as I've read this type of message on notice boards in tthe past and had to go in and actually recommend the pack. Now, the OS web site WONT have links to other peoples websites for download. The way the deal works is that lets sya Spin whos has volunteerd to try abd put 5,4 together. Instead of building up a par file, he would do like now and gather everything thats new, but instead of building a parfile, it would be uploaded to the OS website, upgrading the online standard there, and this is where all the upgrades would be downloaded from. hope the clarifies the idea ~Nat~ IP: Logged
Jerry Pilot	posted 09-25- 11:03 AM Yes, thanks a lot! Your concept of individual plane folders rather than par files is also good. Gives us more flexibility in downloading what we want and for adding updates. Since the folders override the par files why have both? Those of us with limited HD space would appreciate that. I don't fly online but the idea discussed in another thread of using just missions that contain online standard planes and objects makes a lot of sense too. IP: Logged
JG300x_Hartmann Pilot	posted 09-25- 12:01 PM As of right now Doug (the Admin of Combatsim.com) and I are working together to put all of the aircraft available for EAW on the net. It would run off of a database and would be searchable, updateable, etc. by the public. As for searching your harddrive to see if your game is updated, that would take either a Visual Basic, Visual C++, or C++ program. This program would search your harddrive and compare the results to the website standards. This type of thing is not possible with web programming. The only thing that you can put on a users harddrive is a cookie. And that cookie can't do anything but store variables.... ------------------ jg300_hartmann@juno.com IP: Logged
Snickers Pilot	posted 09-25- 12:22 PM Ahhhhhhh but what if the variables stored in the cookies were the plane type and date downloaded? Then you should be able to check the cookies and see if a new version was available. Snickers IP: Logged
spin Pilot	posted 09-25- 12:25 PM Nat, I think this has a lot of potential. Aside from the programming for this (which I'm less skilled at than you), the concept likely could work where a database file maintained on a person's local machine contains all of the necessary information relating to the SDOE files present on that person's machine. For example, parfiles (we still have'em), aircraft files and related info esp. loadouts, airfoils, startup.ppf, ground objects (not required for compatibility but for consistency), one could even add missions to this (wouldn't it be nice to not have to send missions every time you start a game). The info on each file would need to be filename, datemodified, filesize and other discriminating properties. The thing I haven't figured out is how to create the database by looking up the required properties from the folders and files. I expect this can be done in c++ or visual basic but I don't know how yet. This database would then compare itself to an online standard page and inform the user of incompatibilities. Like you said, the program would need to give the user flexibility to download selected components (especially for plane builders) or all required to restore to standard. I would make a second suggestion on this and that it look for correct source zip files in a user defined location on the local machine (I have everything I've ever downloaded tucked away in zip files so I don't have to repeat downloads). The program may also need to rename existing files that don't need to be replaced (rather than deleting them) but shouldn't be present and are therefore creating a conflict. The webpage to compare it to would have identical information and the correct links to source files to allow an auto update. [This message has been edited by spin (edited 09-25-2000).] IP: Logged
Nat Pilot	posted 09-25- 12:58 PM thats right Spin, I know this wouldn't be a quick thing to do, but like I said, in the future the size of a Parfile will be silly. When you use Microsoft update the first thing that happens is you download a small program, obviously a checker prog, which runs, checks your install, then compairs it against what updates it has, so yes, we would need a prog. None of this is an easy thing to do I know, but if we have the talent here to crack this it would be the best way to go. IP: Logged
Elric Pilot	posted 09-25- 02:36 PM TS said : quote: If someone can write some code to figure out whats installed in SDOE I can write some code to expand SDOE beeper to read a web page and compare whats installed with what is available and let people check off what they want to download/install. You mean, like some Delphi classes to read parfiles? ;-) Personally I would write something that would http get a csv file from the above mentioned website containing data such as FilePath,SizeInBytes,Checksum,FileDate,MajorVersion, MinorVersion,RequiredForOnlineStandard,FtpPath,Description and then scan the fighersquadron directories. The website can be maintained by anyone. Just edit the csv in excel to keep the downloads uptodate or such like. We should use parfiles because they speed up loading times, keep things tidy and will reduce on mis-matches. A couple of par files are easier to handle than lots of seperate files. Keep seperate files for beta aircraft not for a planepack... Comments? ~Elric IP: Logged
Nat Pilot	posted 09-25- 04:42 PM but Elric, lets say in 12 months we have 80 aircraft total for the new plane pack, but actualy only 10 of them are new or new versions.. now because we have do download a parfiole containging every single aircraft for SDOE it means we have a massive download instead of a small one.. sorry but thats stupid. IP: Logged
weasel Pilot	posted 09-25- 06:25 PM I like the way this is going. Here is my 2 cents. Have 2 different routines. 1. A routine that is on your system that checks your Fighter Squadron files and creates a list of planes with their dates. It then places a cookie in your cookie folder. 2. A routine on your web server that holds the current standard. It reads the cookie on your hard disk when you log on to its site. From there it will make its evaluation and creat a file to download that just contains what you need. weasel IP: Logged
spin Pilot	posted 09-25- 07:27 PM Nat, On parfiles, Let's not write them off Nat, I agree that the downloads can't get bigger (or more frequent at the same size) and there may be a bug in bigmunger - but they offer the benefits that elric mentions. When we get to 80 planes I believe downloads will not need to be large at all. Here's why: My first assumption is that MH finishes a patch (please, please, please) or we adopt build 65 online (many use it offline now - myself included) . If you don't think this will happen well - ignore the rest of this message. Parfiles can't continue to get bigger anyway, they get impractical and difficult to manage. What has to happen (and hopefully soon) is conversion to the OpenPlane folder concept included in the beta patch version. What is enabled here is an incredibly easy way of keeping your SDOE updated. Basically parfiles could be one or two updates loaded into your "OpenPlane" folder and appropriately enabled in your options section. More significantly a developer could release a new beta plane as a parfile, you could install it in this section and activate it or deactivate it at will (without messing with filenames and moving folders). This overcomes the traditional limit on the number of parfiles to work with. The catch is (to my understanding and I wait to be corrected) that the files in the openplane folder have to be parfiles. It would be really easy to check for compatibility to - just check for the appropriate folder in the OpenPlane section and rewrite the sdemons.ini file to enable the new addon (a few other checks needed as well). Spin IP: Logged
Tailslide Pilot	posted 09-25- 07:50 PM I wouldn't base any plans on the patch coming out EVER ------------------ Patch It! www.airsims.com IP: Logged
Tailslide Pilot	posted 09-25- 07:54 PM >You mean, like some Delphi classes to read parfiles? ;-) I was thinking more something to scan the directory for a list of files and calculate a checksum to make sure they are all present and valid. I could write some software to grab the zips for each addon, generate a list of files with full paths and a checksum, then a routine could scan the directory and compare checksums to see if they match.. if not, out of date and time to download that update. The problem with par files is I fear that the bug in SDOE related to reading them may be causing some of the crashes I see.. plus the fact we have almost all the .par files used as it is and it would prevent being able to have new addons come out as they are available. TS ------------------ Patch It! www.airsims.com IP: Logged
JG300x_Hartmann Pilot	posted 09-25- 08:13 PM Cookies cannot do anything on the users computer.... They are meant to store variables from a website so that the download time is faster and things like your password on this board. ------------------ jg300_hartmann@juno.com IP: Logged
weasel Pilot	posted 09-28- 12:30 PM If you will read my post it, it does not say that the cookie will do anything. It just contains the files that you have in the Fighter Squadron folder. That would be the list of 'stored variables'. This would just be a method of using cookies in a manner that they were not origionally intended. I would prefer to be selective in the files that I share over the internet instead of having a program poke around in my hard drive untill it finds what it is looking for. For that matter, isn't there already software that creates cookies? Maybe we could send it to the server... weasel IP: Logged
Lothar Pilot	posted 09-28- 01:53 PM The way Microsoft does this is by using an ActiveX control on the web page. This is essentially a Visual Basic or C++ program running on your computer, that can talk to the Microsoft server. It can read your harddrive, write files, send emails, in general do whatever it wants. Obviously this is a huge security hole. I believe it is set up so that if you go to such a web page it asks you if you trust it. If you say "yes", the web page can have its way with your computer This sounds like a pretty complicated project to me. Another idea is to write a VB application that runs on your local machine. It gets a current manifest from a web server, a list of the current versions of all the planes. Then it checks your harddrive for those planes. If it finds older versions, it deletes them and downloads the newer version. IP: Logged
SchaF Pilot	posted 09-28- 01:57 PM hmm..i agree with lothar except the last thingie..the proggy should'nt dl it for u..it should just post the urls og homepages where this planes are..so makers can get some more hits on their page..but it sure is kewl idea.. ------------------ SchaF bailed out! ;) IP: Logged
Snickers Pilot	posted 09-28- 02:25 PM Ever notice that if you have been looking for a house, the advertising on the pages suddenly starts showing adds for mortgages? Its my understanding they can do this because they read the cookies you have and adjust the ads accordingly.... If this is correct, you should be able to read the SDOE cookies (what plane/versions have been downloaded) check the variables in the cookie against the current list and then let the user know there is a new version available.... Either allow them to dl now or give them the URL of the author depending on what the plane is... According to Netscape's document, Persistent Client State HTTP Cookies, cookies "are a general mechanism which server side connections (such as CGI scripts) can use to both store and retrieve information on the client side of the connection." Please note is says store AND retrieve. I think the best solution (barring a patch) would be a hybrid. There would be PAR files, but when new planes come out, the could be painlessly added. The person who maintains the server can build stats on number and frequency of hits. At a certain level, (maybe only once or twice a year) the PAR files are re-done (cookies need to be generated for this too). The point is, you can download only the new planes, AND have that be standard without rebuilding PAR files. I think I agree with Mighty in the other thread regarding plane conflicts and troubleshooting as a good reason to keep PAR files around. You WEB types, try the following link: http://javascript.about.com/compute/javascript/cs/cookietutorials/index.htm ------------------ Snickers =FC= [This message has been edited by Snickers (edited 09-28-2000).] IP: Logged
Lothar Pilot	posted 09-28- 02:48 PM Cookies are small bits of data that a website can store on your computer. Your browser will only give a website cookie data if the requesting website is the same one that set the cookie in the first place. In other words, Amazon can't read a cookie set by Buy.com (Ad networks have ways around this by hosting all thier banner ads in the same domain, such as buy.doubleclick.com and amazon.doubleclick.com, but that is beyond this discussion). The biggest problem with using cookies is that they can only contain information that the website knows. They could tell you if you went to a plane's download page, but not if you installed it, or deleted it, or downloaded it to a zip disk and the disk crashed, or anything else. In fact, they couldn't even tell you if the download was complete. IP: Logged
Snickers Pilot	posted 09-28- 03:14 PM Lothar - No arguement with anything you said. For the purposes of this discussion, the web site writing the cookie is also the wbsite reading the cookie. The intent (unless I am mistaken) is to do an automatic check and let people know it there is a change. It is still up to the user to install the plane correctly. Anything more would require more intelligence than the cookie system provides. Again though, I don't think the original thrust was to accomplish more than this. Nat, please correct me if I am wrong.... ------------------ Snickers =FC= IP: Logged

All times are CT (US)	next newest topic \| next oldest topic
Administrative Options: Close Topic \| Archive/Move \| Delete Topic
	Hop to:

Contact Us | Fighter Squadron Information Center