Newer BA version, pr-downloader, user widgets

[qray]

So I wanted to try out a newer BA version than 9.46 to get an impression of what the changes are/do. Few problems on the way:

With pr-downloader --download-game ba:stable I get the latest version (9.52 as of now). How do I get older versions? ba:9.51 ba:951 and ba:V9.51 didn't work.
Or even better: is there an easy way to get a list of available version tags?

Second thing I noticed: my user widgets are not loaded. I checked: the options seem to allow them. With 9.46 there was no problem. Is this related to any change made?

Thanks for any help

[qray]

BTW:
How do I delete stuff that was downloaded with pr-downloader? For this it would of course also be helpful to have an easy way to get a list of what was downloaded...

Can I create a sdz of a newer version of BA? If I want to try things on my machine it would be sometimes helpful to put it in an *.sdd folder and play around a bit.

Since I read in another thread about the now missing sdz:

... and Rapid is a far better method of distribution. That fact isn't up for debate.

I am sure there must be ways to do this. I just didn't find any helpful documentation on it.

[Silentwings]

I am sure there must be ways to do this.

Yes - what was done (for the past 4-5 years) was to put BA onto rapid and also upload the sdz to Spring Files for manual usage.

[qray]

So there is no easy way to get an sdz from pr-downloader? And on github there are no tags or so (or am I just too stupid to find them?) so no way to download a specific version (as Ba9.50 ...).

[nixtux]

There is a way checkout makezip https://springrts.com/wiki/RapidTools , but there is no need, as .sdz for ba are here http://ba.repo.springrts.com/builds/

[qray]

Thanks, that info helps

Now I just have to get my user widgets running again...

...and find out how to delete stuff with pr-downloader
"pr-downloader --delete ba:stable" didn't remove v9.52

[Floris]

ba uses a different widget folder name now: Widgets_BA

The reason is that if you play different spring games, you can have different custom widgets for each one.

[qray]

Thanks! Works now

[Forboding Angel]

pr-downloader --download-game ba:<version>

So lets say you wanted 9.48:

pr-downloader --download-game ba:Balanced Annihilation V9.48

[qray]

If I use this I get this output:

Code: Select all

[Info] Found 27 repos in /home/ray/.spring/rapid/repos.springrts.com/repos.gz

[Error] ../../tools/pr-downloader/src/main.cpp:160:main(): No game found for ba:Balanced
[Error] ../../tools/pr-downloader/src/main.cpp:188:main(): No file found for Annihilation
[Error] ../../tools/pr-downloader/src/main.cpp:188:main(): No file found for V9.48
[Info] Download complete!

Somehow the tool always says "Download complete" in the end no matter what I do or what happens

[gajop]

Have you tried using just the game full name, without the prefix?

Code: Select all

pr-downloader --download-game "Balanced Annihilation V9.48"

Probably don't even need --download-game

[dansan]

If I use this I get this output:

Code: Select all

[Info] Found 27 repos in /home/ray/.spring/rapid/repos.springrts.com/repos.gz

[Error] ../../tools/pr-downloader/src/main.cpp:160:main(): No game found for ba:Balanced
[Error] ../../tools/pr-downloader/src/main.cpp:188:main(): No file found for Annihilation
[Error] ../../tools/pr-downloader/src/main.cpp:188:main(): No file found for V9.48
[Info] Download complete!

Somehow the tool always says "Download complete" in the end no matter what I do or what happens :-)

You didn't quote the name, so it ended up being three names ("ba:Balanced" and "Annihilation" and "V9.48"). Put quotes around it all:

Code: Select all

"ba:Balanced Annihilation V9.48"

[qray]

Code: Select all

pr-downloader --download-game "Balanced Annihilation V9.48"

OK, this worked Thanks! Quotes are needed. With "ba:" in front it didn't work.


BTW:
Deleting like in using "pr-downloader --delete "Balanced Annihilation V9.48"" doesn't work. Game still appears in the lobby selection.
Is there any way to get rid of old versions? After a while, they clutter up the selection box quite a bit

[Forboding Angel]

A quick and dirty way is to just wipe out the files in the packages folder.

[qray]

To sum up my experience with pr-downloader so far:

• Getting a list of available release versions is not trivial: After I got of this thread the info that helped to interpret the lines in versions.gz, I can crawl now through the long list there and understood what to look for.
• A standard task like downloading a specific version is not obvious and not documented (at least I didn't get it from the available documentation). Well, you could say it is now in this thread
• A standard task like getting rid of your old version history seems to require to delete all files and then re-download the games and other files in versions you want from scratch
• Once you understood how to use it it works, but IMHO the average user will be lost. Well, me and my friends didn't even notice that there are new versions until I accidentally spotted the thread by Ares
• Very minor point: download is quite slow compared to springfiles mirror

So, I can't agree that it is "far better" than springfiles download for all use cases (and after this experience the sentence "That fact isn't up for debate" sounds to me a lot like a sentence parents say to their kids when they run out of arguments and just want things their way).
Rapid surely has its use cases where it beats file download and I can see that it can become the tool of choice. But AFAICS it's not yet. I will for now stick to http://ba.repo.springrts.com/builds/ (thanks nixtux).
Good thing is that the dependency download works. With maps I always had problems until I gave up...


Thanks again to Floris. Today I spotted the line in the changelog with the changed widget folder. Have missed it before, my fault.


One thing I noticed with the newer BA versions: if you start a game (for testing) with just 1 player springlobby crashes badly. So always make sure to add a NullAI

[gajop]

Pr-downloader command line is mostly intended to be used by developers and power users.
Generally players should expect the download to happen automatically through their lobby client when they join a battle or through automated updates.
The command line is lacking, even compared to the older Python implementation (https://github.com/tvo/rapid) that had better search, install and uninstall procedures.

One of the reason rapid is better are subsequent downloads, which are much smaller as it only downloads the difference: art makes most of the size and that rarely changes. The other is that you can (and should) integrate it with git, making it easy to test development versions.

[Forboding Angel]

That last line is one of the most important parts... At any point in time you can pull down the latest test version using the rapid tag ba:test and see things for yourself. No guarantees though, you might end up just happening to get a commit that broke the game (not often but sometimes happens, especially when dealing with batched commits that aren't finished).