Re: [Once development] Content Manager

[Bryan D. <duf...@um...>]

Before I make any comments, I'll just tell you about my current 
situation.  My schedule has changed quite a bit, but it should be 
settling now, so I'll have to time to work on the interface (and 
whatever else needs doing).  But unfortunately CS is borked (for me, is 
it for you guys?).  So I'm not really sure what to do since I can't test it.

Unfortunately now, the earliest I can work on Once (besides the 
weekends) is 6pm CST US.

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:

>Dom, 2005-04-17 às 11:20 +1000, Cir...@cs... escreveu:
>  
>
>>I'm currently fixing up the content manager and I'm getting all sorts
>>of problems while testing.
>>
>>1.  Content manager is not invoked until after the character joins the
>>world - this is pretty stupid because if the cache files don't exist,
>>we can't join the world.
>>
>>We need some coordination between client/server people for this.  What
>>needs to happen is that we have a state which exists before the player
>>actually joins - we sort out all missing files at this stage and then
>>the player actually joins the world.  If someone knows the structure
>>well enough to just inplement this, taht would be great.  At the
>>moment I'm concentrating on obvious bugs in the content manager itself
>>(and there are many).  It would be good if the content manager is no
>>longer directly related to an actual player - this is because in the
>>future we will probably decide to remove content manager from the
>>client.  Although the idea of updating missing files as they are
>>needed is an interesting idea, in practise it is a nuisance.  
>>    
>>
>
>there were some support to hold entities until all the new data was
>present, but it complicated a lot the code and didn't make much sense:
>we can delay the notification of entities until the data is downloaded
>in the client, and that's all.
>
>(this is not an isolated problem, all the rewriting that I was making
>lately has to do with this, the previous code did not take into account
>how CS and CEL really worked (in example, to update the property classes
>of the entities) and made easy and little modifications needed to
>require to change a lot of files and having the client broken for
>several days until all the whole structure was changed to match those
>simple changes.)
>
>if the content downloader works well we can let it there, so we are sure
>that everybody has the files up to date and that could avoid us some
>problems with inaccurate data.
>
>so my proposal is:
>
>- the content downloader should be run before the player joins, and just
>download everything not present or outdated
>  
>
Are you saying download *everything*?  Otherwise it's pretty obvious 
that we want to download only the missing and old files.  I know the 
content manager is way more complex than it needs to be, but last time I 
checked it worked pretty well, besides minor issues.  So, to make my 
point, it should be kept, but it needs to be rewritten.  We should also 
create a command line tool for people to run after they download the 
game, so it'll deduce the amount of downloading needed.

The purpose of the content manager -I thought- wasn't to update all your 
files, just a few files so you wouldn't have to exit the game.  A 
command-line (or small gui) tool, will download the majority of the files.

The other reason to keep the download manager around, is for the future, 
so we can download models and textures mid-game. 

>
>that's basically the way that it's already working now, a kind of
>updater automatically launched before playing; all other functionality
>(in-game updates and so on) is not important at this point of
>development and would only slow down the whole development itself
>(working on this instead of other important things that we really need).
>
>
>  
>
>>2.  When the client segfaults while transferring files (often due to
>>trying to move the character in a world which doesn't really exist
>>yet), the server becomes confused.  The next time the client attempts
>>to connect, the server fires an assert with this message:
>>    
>>
>
>there are some problems introduced in the last days related to this (new
>code for player statistics), and albeit bugs like that could be fixable
>(I couldn't look at it yet) I really need Bryan to implement the
>interface for character creation, to have this working well.
>
>
>regards.
>
>  
>
When are you on irc Manuel?  I now should have time to work on it, but  
everything is borked, so...

-Bryan