Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: uk_john on January 08, 2010, 02:57:51 pm
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Your FSO installer may be great for a total install, but I had a working 3.6.9 and just asked for an upgrade of files, and now to say the game is buggered up is an understatement! I get font errors and Microsoft errors and god knows what! This means a total reinstall! Thanks for making it sooooo easy!!!! Grrrr!
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Your FSO installer may be great for a total install, but I had a working 3.6.9 and just asked for an upgrade of files, and now to say the game is buggered up is an understatement! I get font errors and Microsoft errors and god knows what! This means a total reinstall! Thanks for making it sooooo easy!!!! Grrrr!
If you have problems using Turey's FSO Installer, please post in the FreeSpace Open Installer thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=42854.0) at General FreeSpace Discussion. Problems with the Installer aren't directly related to the SCP staff, as far as I know.
If you have general installation problems, post at the support board (and read the troubleshooting FAQ to find out what info we need in order to help you).
In any case, "installing" 3.6.10 Final should definitely NOT break anything, unless you're doing it wrong.
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All you have to do is drop in a new executable and new MediaVPs. The installer shouldn't be necessary.
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Personally, I'd recommend upgrading the mediavps as well....
Still, I'd like to know just *how* the installer "messed up" here. "I get errors" is just about the worst call for help imaginable.
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All you have to do is drop in a new executable and new MediaVPs. The installer shouldn't be necessary.
The installer never was necessary. It's for people who are too busy with life to get it done the old-fashioned and proper way.
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All you have to do is drop in a new executable and new MediaVPs. The installer shouldn't be necessary.
The installer never was necessary. It's for people who are too busy with life to get it done the old-fashioned and proper way.
Thanks for the clarification. :rolleyes:
A hands-off automated installer is an expected element of any polished bit of software. Newcomers should not be expected to hand-assemble their installations, no matter the technical benefits. The SCP team is, so far as I know, currently working on a way to help make installation more automated.
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How many installers are there for FSO anyway? I'm sure Turey wasn't the only one who made an installer for it.
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hip63, and it's an offline installer.
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ShivanSPS's upgrade pack
A hands-off automated installer is an expected element of any polished bit of software. Newcomers should not be expected to hand-assemble their installations, no matter the technical benefits. The SCP team is, so far as I know, currently working on a way to help make installation more automated.
Turey's Installer is a bit difficult in this respect. It doesn't "install" as much as it "downloads", and since the dowloaded components seem to be scattered throughout the Internet, there's always the possibility that something is not downloaded and the less experienced users have a hard time figuring out what went wrong. ShivanSPS's pack and hip63's installer are better in this case, since they are offline installers: if you can download the entire pack, you'll know that it contains everything it promises and I've understood that at least hip63's version is rather user-friendly as well.
Some extra difficulty comes from the nature of FSO. It is constantly improved and new versions are released. Add the fact that some older mods have issues with new builds (and vice versa). As a result it is rather difficult to make an installer or somesuch that would provide the end user with a flawlessly working piece of software. In this respect, Turey's Installer would be better, as it doesn't contain any game data, but instead downloads it from the Internet.
If you ask me, some things that would be excellent in, say, Turey's Installer include
- the ability to succesfully check if newer versions of at least FSO, the Launcher and the MediaVPs are available
- a question box during the updating process that asks whether the user wants to keep the old components or remove them during the update
- the ability to check the integrity of at least FSO, the Launcher and the MediaVPs
- the ability to detect OpenAL and offer to download it if it is not found or is old/flawed.
I'm definitely not saying any of these things are easy/fast to implement, just saying that they should be a part of any self-respecting handsoff installer.
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There're things in the pipeline (wrt installers & updaters), but they're a little bit off at the moment - they're not the easiest things in the world to write!
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There're things in the pipeline (wrt installers & updaters), but they're a little bit off at the moment - they're not the easiest things in the world to write!
I've just completed a project that is functionally very similar to an Online FS2 Open installer and updater at w*rk, but the current UI is inappropriate as the project is for a very different usage case. (And the UI isn't permitted to go outside the company, while the backend can)
- As it stands right now the app would work if I change the constants to point to the right remote and local URLs.
So, do we have the requirements for an online installer/updater, and a place to download the actual data from?
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I think it would be best if the installer would pull a file with download locations for the mods from somewhere (Just like the current installer does).
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I think of FSMods when I see your post above this one, E. :nervous:
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It just needs to be somewhere where people can edit it easily without having to go through a single bottleneck.
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It just needs to be somewhere where people can edit it easily without having to go through a single bottleneck.
How about a set of pages on the FreeSpace Wiki?
One 'Title' page that includes direct external links to the 'core' files and links to a page for each Mod.
Each Mod page includes direct external links to the relevant files for that Mod.
A common header is used for the section of the page that is relevant to the installer/updater.
The installer/updater can then spider that section of those pages.
- Any HTML pages outside of the Wiki are ignored (to keep everything in one place), all other non-executable files directly linked are downloaded.
One big advantage of this approach is that it automatically provides somewhere we can point people to to get all the files for a manual installation.
- Careful use of Wiki templates for the 'installer' section would make it simple to add new Mods.
The core question is determining when something has been updated.
- Unfortunately not all servers include the Last-Modified header, and not all servers respect the If-Modified-Since GET header so I don't think we can rely on them.
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That's relatively easy. If you include version info in those sections of the page the installer is reading, and copy that information locally, you can determine whether something is out of date or not.
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That's relatively easy. If you include version info in those sections of the page the installer is reading, and copy that information locally, you can determine whether something is out of date or not.
True enough - it's just that it's something extra for the Mod maintainer to remember to do, and I don't like that.
Unfortunately I don't see an easy way around it for servers that don't support those headers.
- Moderators, it's probably time for a topic split.
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- Moderators, it's probably time for a topic split.
Agreed and done. I'm not exactly sure where this discussion should be so I'll just leave it here for the time being.
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A quick question for the people who've been here the longest:
What are the most common causes of installation failure to date?
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Files becoming dated in the presence of newer files.
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A quick question for the people who've been here the longest:
What are the most common causes of installation failure to date?
With Turey's, the fact that noone was around to maintain it for a rather long period of time was the main source of failure. Thus we had lots of unhappy people who got borked mediavps when the were using the installer.
And since noone had the keys to the location where the installer looked for information on what to install, it took a long time until it was fixed.
With manual installs, the main source for errors is people who are not bothering to read the instructions.
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The "Installer" as such also needs support for: MD5 archive and decompress checking, 7z support and the ability to utilize resuming if the server supports it.
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How about a set of pages on the FreeSpace Wiki?
There is a security issue with using the wiki that might be worth bringing up. It would not be hard for someone to alter the wiki to point at malware instead of FS2_Open and given that few of us ever have any reason to use the installer it might take a while before someone noticed exactly why so many users were having issues.
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Wiki pages can be protected to allow only moderators and admins to have editing rights
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/me is looking through Tureys installer code :)
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Wiki pages can be protected to allow only moderators and admins to have editing rights
Quoted for truth. If you have an account on Wikipedia, see if you can edit the Main Page. :)
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A quick question for the people who've been here the longest:
What are the most common causes of installation failure to date?
As mentioned, Turey wasn't around to maintain the site for ages. So the links to "recent" FSO builds, which were hosted on his FTP, were never changed. Now that the SCP has access, this (theoretically) is no longer a problem.
A more insidious problem is with user reliability. Each user is in charge of maintaining the links to his own downloads, but very few of them keep up with it. So you could have the problem where for a while the Installer didn't contain the mediaVP patch, even though the mediaVP team was perfectly capable of adding it.
And then you have situations like Blaise Russel, who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. Eventually, his site went dead, along with all the links to his campaigns.
There is a security issue with using the wiki that might be worth bringing up. It would not be hard for someone to alter the wiki to point at malware instead of FS2_Open and given that few of us ever have any reason to use the installer it might take a while before someone noticed exactly why so many users were having issues.
Agree 100%. Now, I would like to think that the moderators (both wiki and forum) respond quickly to reported spambots, but regardless a wiki page should not be used for this on principle.
...and which leads me to a possible contradiction. If we (including me) don't like the idea of using the wiki to provide external links used by the FSO Installer, then why are we allowing external links to project sites? :confused:
/me is looking through Tureys installer code :)
That should prove interesting. :D
/me makes popcorn
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...and which leads me to a possible contradiction. If we (including me) don't like the idea of using the wiki to provide external links used by the FSO Installer, then why are we allowing external links to project sites? :confused:
I'm looking at this from a social engineering point of view. If you click on wiki link and an exe started downloading you'd be very suspicious of it (except for links to the builds we would wonder why there was an exe here).
On the other hand if you've run Turey's installer and find a new .exe in your tools folder, you're almost certainly going to click on it to find out what it is. I'll bet even most of us veterans would fall for that one.
While I don't consider security to be a big issue at the moment it might one day be one. Using a protected page would probably solve most of that issue though.
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There should be a list of sites that we can trust and link to in FSWiki.
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Couple of 'security' things that should be included anyway:
1) Executables can *only* be downloaded as Core files. If an executable is not on the core files list, it will not be downloaded.
- If it's part of an archive it gets silently erased on decompressing.
2) Core Files page should be locked, and only editable by the moderator team.
The core files page will not change often - on release of a new FS2Open version, and when a new Mod gets added to the list - so that's a relatively small task.
Mod pages are more difficult, are there is the two-edged sword of either locking them (so more work for the mod team), or leaving them open (more likely to get defaced)
As to compression support:
gzip, pkzip (normal DOS/Windows ZIP) and 7z are all supportable under Windows at least, although I'm not sure how portable.
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How about a set of pages on the FreeSpace Wiki?
There is a security issue with using the wiki that might be worth bringing up. It would not be hard for someone to alter the wiki to point at malware instead of FS2_Open and given that few of us ever have any reason to use the installer it might take a while before someone noticed exactly why so many users were having issues.
It's easy to keep track of recent changes and investigate the links that have been recently added, especially by newly registered users. There's no need to restrict the page to moderators only.
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can executables be stored on svn? and if so would it be possible for the installer to include a lightweight svn client so it can get the latest executable?
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There's easier ways to manage latest builds than that.