[karajorma]

Originally posted by Stealth
eh. no one's perfect

Also two things

1) remember, i've had mine up for a while... just they've been down during the time the server was down.
2) so far I think i'm the only one hosting all three full ISOs, right?  like, if someone's CD2 breaks, they can just download it or something.

even if i'm not, the more redundancy we have, the better, right?

I agree about redundancy and that you were first but the other two ISO downloads are both all three ISOs (I'm refering to ZmaN's FTP and Freespacezone which ironically enough are both temporarily down at the moment).  

MP's download isn't the ISOs and misses stuff like the mve versions of the movies. But if you're only playing FS2_Open it's probably the best one to get.

I just find it funny that although it's been over a year since swooh went down it's only in the last few months that about 4 different ways to download the game have appeared

[Stealth]

naaa swooh went down less than a year ago.  i remember pulling the plug on it.  i can get you an exact date, but i'm sure it was less than a year

 hey, the more we have, the better... plus swooh's now on a 20 Mbit fiber line, that's redundant 3 ways  should be a lot faster than before

[karajorma]

Are we allowed to pimp the FS2 download everywhere we can or should we keep it secret to preserve bandwidth like we have to with MatthewPapa's download?

[Stealth]

well if someone wants it, link them to it i guess

FS1's up there too... for a limited time.  or until i get sued...

EDIT:  i guess pimp it to an extent.  just don't post on some largely-read site "FS2 download for free!!!111".  but anyone who's interested, let them know.  if bandwidth becomes a problem, we'll figure something out then

[karajorma]

I ask so I know whether to advertise the download in my FAQ.

I guess that counts as anyone who wants it

[Stealth]

yeah that's fine, as long as you don't like, put a link on yahoo.com or something

[BlackDove]

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/39309975/m/115003814731/p/1

It's not me.

Don't look at me.

Though. Man says he wants you to rape it. I like to honor wishes like those.

[Stealth]

i second that.

hehe.  they're arguing about the EULA .  although i only read the first page, someone ought to go let them know what's up

[karajorma]

Check the last page I did

Well a little

[General Freak]

My friend downloaded all the files, and he says they are corrupted. I dunno if a re-download would solve the problem, as I already have FS2 and can't bother to download all that and test them out.

[MatthewPapa]

well the download has worked fine for pleanty of others so my suggestion would be to retry downloading the files. it probably just got a little screwed up on the way to your friends computer, things like that happen every so often on the www

[Stealth]

should we perhaps provide MD5 checksums for all our downloads?

[karajorma]

I'd suggest using Par2 instead of MD5. With a couple of extra parity files you could repair minor corruption without forcing the user to download the entire archive again.

[Stealth]

not familiar with that

I just downloaded one of the ISOs at an average of 700 Kilobytes per second.  took about 13 minutes.

[karajorma]

Explaination of what a par file is here and a link to QuickPar the best program for making and using them.

Par2 files are quite small (~10 to 50Kb) but in addition to allowing you to check the integrity of the file or files (You can check multiple files with a single par2 file) you can make files which allow you to repair damage.

Par2 is pretty much the way almost every large binary on Usenet is verified since you have a large number of files and a good possibility of one or more of them being corrupt there.


If you can spare the bandwidth for redownloads and the users don't mind then it's hardly worth it though That said anyone on a 56k connection would probably prefer to download a few 1 to 10MB par files than the entire 700MB iso


If you want I could probably knock up a bunch of Par files and a guide to using them for you.

[Stealth]

without reading all the explanations, i'm assuming it's kind of like RAR archives, right?  where the file's split into a number of smaller files, based on the size of the archive?

[karajorma]

The file you're protecting can be in whatever form you want so you wouldn't have to touch the .iso files at all.

In addition to the .iso you put up a few (relatively small) extra files. The first of these is the Filename.par2 file which when you double click on it analyses the .iso and tells you how many blocks it needs to repair it. The repair files are also generated ahead of time from an uncorrupted .iso and will look something like this

Filename+01.par2
Filename+02.par2
Filename+04.par2
Filename+08.par2
Filename+08.par2
Filename+08.par2
Filename+08.par2

The number following the plus sign is the number of blocks that par file will repair. The idea is that you download only the files you need to add up to the number of blocks you need to repair. If I'd download the .Iso and it told me that it needed 10 blocks to repair I'd download one of the +08.par2 files and the +02.par2 file. When I double click on either of these quickpar runs and repairs the .iso for me.

The repair files vary in size from about 1Meg to about 10MB depending on how many of them you want. For about 3-4 Megs of space on your server you could probably repair most errors since most of them are probably just a few KBs of corruption anyway.

[Stealth]

you don't say!

so you add up how many blocks you need it to correct.  wow.

yeah OK i'll look into that.  even though i have absolutely no idea how that works

[karajorma]

I've never tried Par2 with anything the size of an ISO but I have managed to repair someone's corrupt VPs from the FTP using them and we're talking about something similar in size there.

[m2258734a]

Hello,
   I am new to this forum, but a fan of this game and I really appreciate the hard work you guys have done to make a great game even better. But I have a problem with the movies that I downloaded on this thread. Either I am not putting them in the proper place or something else, but each time a movie is supposed to play, the game goes back to windows, and in the top left corner of the screen an extremely tiny movie begins to play. I do not know if anyone has asked or answered this question, but how can I fix this? Thank you for your time.

Matt