I really think that the best method would be to have the lobby server act as a bittorrent tracker, and all the lobby clients act as bittorrent clients. Each map would become its own torrent, downloadable seperately. When you download a map, everyone with sharing turned on in the lobby will help you download the map. It becomes everyone's best interest to have sharing on, because games will start sooner.

Additionally, the maps can be on a server, which seeds and also offers ftp download, in case bt doesn't work for someone. This would drastically cut down on server load, while simultaneously preventing a site outage from shutting down map downloads. BT is the best method for this, as even incomplete maps will be uploaded, making the whole system run faster.

Since I have dial up, it wouldn't effect me very much, but yah, this is an excellent idea.

This sounds like an excellent Idea but there would have to be an upload limit set based on internet speed like for people with dial-up they can only upload maybe half a kb without noticing a significant speed difference. While cable users can upload probably 30kb without noticing a difference.

Sounds complicated, albiet a good idea. Some ammount of filesharing would definately ease up the strain of map downloads anyways.

Sounds like a good idea, but it should be turn-off able.

Why do we need a poll for deciding such things?

Makes it easier to see what users want?

we just need more mirrors IMO

Users want just about everything anyway, it's still up to us to decide :)
And if it's worth the effort, we would have picked it anyway.

Sharing would be automatic, when you go in-game it disables so that you do not lag the game down. FU would act as a seeder so that all maps can be downloaded completely without having to beg other players for help.

Torrenting would also add better file checking and reduce corrupt downloads which some seem to experience.

Naturally one should be able to disable the sharing in options. Making it mandatory would just not work with current isp caps, asymmetrical lines and all the shit that makes p2p difficult today. Unless you have fibre or vdsl you are just not going to be able to share as much as you download without hassle.

what about those of us on networks? Other people's computers crawl becausee you're using all the upload bandwidth.

I really do not think that p2p is the way to go. The cons are seeming too far outweigh the pro's.

Umm, if you have FU act as a seeder, then the net effect is the same - if your NAT prevents you from serving the BT files, then at the very least you're accessing peers as well as FU (plus, even blocked users can share directly with the peers they're leeching from). For users set up for BT, then you get the full power of a Torrent. If FU is a seeder, then the worst-case performance is the same as HTTP. So no matter what it's an improvement. The only problem happens with people for whom BitTorrent does not work _at all_ - and in those cases the network is probably so restrictive that it won't work with Spring itself either.

ok that makes sense. As you said with FU as a "super seeder" that should help a bit.

No offense but isn't the whole point of the dev forum to give users a chance...

And you guys can't think of everything

You should be able to throttle your uploads (if you don't want all your bandwidth to get used when you're idling in the lobby).

I think a torrent system would be complicated. I think mirrors is the way to go.

If this is at all possible... I agree.

Perhaps the game host/players in the battleroom can dolly out the files... the user can join a game and wait while the host/other players stream the stuff to them?

This is true, but frankly the whole poll thing is still totally irrellevent. People vote before reading the thread and considering the real pro's and cons. Some good ideas are voted against because people vote before they realize that the poster has already adressed all the problems that are concerned about, and some terrible ideas are voted for simply because they serve a function to the certain user that is bad for spring in general. Like no speedmetal days. The only votes that really need to count are those of the people who care enough to vocalize thier side of the issue anyways, other then that we can easily see what people think if we start asking around about it.

The point of dev forum is to discuss development.