[Mobius]

I plan to. But not when it means that Razorkiss will get his site taken down due to bandwidth abuse.

Bear in mind that BtRL has had over 100,000 downloads by now. If only 1% of those attempted to download 2gigs worth of FS2 it would be a huge spike in bandwidth usage. Hence the need for a torrent. But it has to be one which is easy to use and we currently don't have one of those. Shivan's is too out of date at the moment.

We don't have alternate DLs?!? How is this possible?

[RazorsKiss]

Because finding people with 2GB+ of space, and enough bandwidth to handle over 2.5 TERABYTES of traffic per month isn't easy

I have the space, easily - the traffic?  That's a LOT, man.

[Mobius]

All FS2 files...compressed...are 2GB+?

Can we separate all files? You included Media VPs?

[RazorsKiss]

I have the retail files only, currently.

I had roughly 2.5 Terabytes downloaded from me, last month.

That's... wow.

With JUST the retail files.  If I had everything... that'd be more than insane.

Like karajorma said - a torrent would be better - but that would require seeders.

[Nuke]

im curious about what percentage of freespace data has been replaced by user created content. would be nice if you could play freespace without actually having or needing to download freespace. hard stuff to duplicate would be stuff like cutscenes, missions, animations and voice acting. if you have ambitious people doing mods for bsg and wc, why not do a total conversion for freespace about freespace. or at the very least come up with a partial dataset that has everything for freespace that there hasnt been a replacment made for.

[karajorma]

*points at Inferno*


Seriously though although we've replaced the ships, it's not worth replacing things like voice acting really. It wouldn't really be FS if we did.

[Mobius]

*points at Inferno*

Seriously though although we've replaced the ships, it's not worth replacing things like voice acting really. It wouldn't really be FS if we did.

But you can remove cutscenes, that can be DLed separately. People interested on FS can DL the game from normal sources, then visit Kosh's site for the cutscenes.

[karajorma]

That would be rather pointless though. There would still be data that was created by in the download.

Nuke is on about removing everything V created so that we can have a legal download of FS2 but I'm saying that without the content it wouldn't be FS2.

[Mobius]

The cutscenes can be DLed separately and they're not that necessary.

About Nuke...well...

[karajorma]

The cutscenes can be DLed separately and they're not that necessary.

I'm aware of that fact. It does not make your point make any more sense though.

[Mobius]

Do the packs you mentioned contain cutscenes? They're not as vital as the rest of a normal package. We can reduce the number of odds...it makes sense for me

[StarSlayer]

What about adding a showcase vid?  Does FS2Open have one?  I think it would be an easy, and quite effective way to increase awareness of all FS2Open offers.  I for one didn't realize FS2 had been improved until i found BTRL and eventually saw the the god awfully awesome Herc and Fenris models.  I seriously would love to see a compilation vid of the SCP/HLP improvements plus some of the Mods.  Adding such a trailer to all Mods and TCs seems the simplest solution

Or is this something like FSIII that's been kicked around the fire for a long time and become a sore subject

[Unknown Target]

An FSO demonstration video would be great, I agree.

[karajorma]

Both of Rake's Trailers were pretty cool (Wish he'd used ambient factor though).

The files are down now but I'm sure I have copies lying about somewhere.

[Nuke]

That would be rather pointless though. There would still be data that was created by in the download.

Nuke is on about removing everything V created so that we can have a legal download of FS2 but I'm saying that without the content it wouldn't be FS2.

and that would be correct. it wouldnt be freespace, it would me at most a cool homage to fs2 and and the very least, total abomination. but it would solve the problem with the legality of downloading freespace.

my alternative idea, which i dont think i made clear enough, is a partial repacking of retail freespace data, all the stuff that doesnt have a substitution the media vps, into a smaller download. files could be converted whenever possible to more acceptable formats (such as ogg or dds) so as to reduce file size. then the download for freespace is reduced to about a third of its original size and is more available to download and has less of a footprint on bandwidth.

[karajorma]

The problem with that is that while it would reduce the footprint it is a bugger to support.

The more different versions of FS2_Open there are out there. the harder it becomes to deal with problems with them. Right now we know that anyone running the game has got Retail FS2 with SCP on top of it. One you start not even being able to make that assumption things become harder. Especially if in a years time someone decides to put out another of these with an even smaller footprint.

And that's before we get to the fact that compiling such a VP without missing files that aren't in the SCP or including duplicates of those that are is a huge task and is unlikely to be bug free.

[Mobius]

Should we suggest, at least, to but the game from eBat, for example?

[Unknown Target]

We always suggest that you should get FSOpen if you like the TCs. It's up to them as to whether or not they want to get it (as they should be).