[Colonol Dekker]

As any good freespace fan knows. Some campaigns come with one or two new ships and or music tracks, backgrounds and sound effects.
 
But i've recently downloaded a few which I put off until recently. The total sizes of which exceed over four hundred meg.
 
Upon having a peek in the .vp files of some it turns out there are duplicates of many Fighters and Caps from projects like the TVWP for example.
 
For someone with a capped bandwith limit this is a bit annoying.
 
Is there no way campaign makers can release a version for people who already own major campaigns in tandem with a standalone / core release?
 

[The E]

There is, but it would make mod management, as well as troubleshooting (not to mention designing the mod) needlessly difficult.

Let me clarify: If I find a mod that offers such a download option, they will be on their own in terms of support.

[Colonol Dekker]

I appreciate that entirely. It's just entirely frustrating. I've got three copies of the Shrike four copies of the Raynor and more.

[The E]

Oh, on some level, I really feel your pain. But the mod system we have just doesn't support this kind of redundacy/dependancy management well enough. Redesigning it to take this into account properly would probably be more trouble than its worth (after all, bandwidth is getting cheaper, and HD space even more so).

[Fury]

Dekker, you should feel anger towards your lame ISP rather than mods. Bandwidth limitations are a joke on this day and age.

[Nuke]

still its bad mod design to ship a mod with a bunch of duplicate or unused files. especially when it comes down to textures, which can quickly make the mod huge.

[The E]

It's only bad mod design if you duplicate data that is in your direct dependency tree. Duplicating textures or models from the mediavps? Bad.
Blue Planet having a Raynor and Dawn of Sol having a Raynor? Unfortunate, but not a big deal.

The issue you mention, nuke, is indeed bad design. But it's a different issue to what Dekker mentioned.

[headdie]

Is their some way to do a mod down loader.

What i am thinking is a file that is added to the mod which lists the resources including the mod which a program on the users computer can read.  the program compares the mod content with detected model, textures and other files that could be duplicated, only downloading whats needed and copying duplicated files from another source on the users PC into the correct location indicated in the mod structure.  to allow the utility to read ZIP, RAR and 7z i wouldn't have though would be hard.

Some sort of menu function displaying HLP supported mods might be an idea to include with it to make the system user friendly and cross comparability with conversions like WCS and TBP would increase its application.

[Droid803]

Do you know how complicated something like that would be?
It still wouldn't catch some things, for example, what The_E said about the Raynor in BP and DoS.
Yes, it's the same base mesh, but the two POFs have different texture paths and I believe I changed the turret firing arcs on the one in DoS. (Even if I didn't it is something I did do with some other models).

[chief1983]

Fury, bandwidth limits might seem absurd in some areas of the world, but there are some very draconian ISPs out there that are the major players in their countries (I'm looking at you, BigPond).  We can't just pretend everyone has uncapped 5mb minimum these days.

[Fury]

It's absurd yes, but even more so is to expect mod developers to take into account what other mods someone just might have, or not.

All a mod can count on, or require is retail FS2 and mediavps, that's it. If some assets are reused in another mod which someone might have downloaded, well tough, it's impossible to take into account every possible variation. Especially since a mod may have modified those assets further. It's a complete and utter nightmare and chaos to even try to pull of this kind of stunt.

Whoever is stuck with crappy ISP, should either switch if possible or direct their frustration at said ISP for lagging behind modern age.

[headdie]

It's absurd yes, but even more so is to expect mod developers to take into account what other mods someone just might have, or not.

All a mod can count on, or require is retail FS2 and mediavps, that's it. If some assets are reused in another mod which someone might have downloaded, well tough, it's impossible to take into account every possible variation. Especially since a mod may have modified those assets further. It's a complete and utter nightmare and chaos to even try to pull of this kind of stunt.

Whoever is stuck with crappy ISP, should either switch if possible or direct their frustration at said ISP for lagging behind modern age.

i will set my printer onto H3g then but not get my hopes up

[chief1983]

I'm not saying we should go out of our way about it, I'm just saying we can't make such assumptions.  Not arguing for anything like what was suggested.

[Thaeris]

I suppose an option for this scenario would be:

If you have a given ship set which is to be used by a mod or mods, include the model geometry in a separate VP called up by the multimod feature in the .ini file. For instance, you might have "SteveOsCapShips.vp" which might contain the standard Raynor, Titan, etc. Then you might have a set of Shivan ships, "ShivanPack1.vp". And the list would continue...

The problem with this method is standardizing the naming conventions as well as the .vp contents. This could work, and the only things the mod itself would need to carry would be any unique textures and tables. Apart from that, though, there's nothing really worth while in something like that. Enough people new to FSO seem to be confused about what they need as is, and this would only make it harder on them, I imagine.

I think it's probably better things stay as-is for now. Of course, if you have a shortage of hard drive space, you could always do something like this for yourself...

[Goober5000]

This would have the potential to turn into an epic nightmare.  Look at all the resources Microsoft and Sun have, as full-fledged companies, and yet they still ended up with DLL hell and JAR hell.  Anything we could come up with would be far worse.  And designing it would be a nightmare too: what would you do if one mod used a Shrike with one secondary bank, and another mod used a Shrike with two secondary banks?  No thanks.