Auto-updater suggestion: RSYNC

Werewolf

Hey guys,

i dunno what your plans are for an auto-updater, but I strongly suggest you take a look at Rsync. Not only can it be launched whenever the game starts to look for updates, but it's also smart about the transmitted data, and is perfect even for updating larger files without having to redownload them as a whole.

Best of all, it's dead-easy to set up and maintain.

PacketRacket

While we are at it why don't we implement bittorrent. I mean WOW uses it so it must be good. :P

There are plenty of command line bittorrent clients...
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_software

kamishizuka

Well, just because WoW uses it doesn't really have any bearing here. However, considering the Tribes fanbase is pretty sizable, even a small 1.4MB patch download could potentially become a very, very big load under countless simultaneous downloaders. But even then, I have my doubts.

WoW uses BitTorrent presumably because they a) have tons of people to patch for, and b) the patches are big. Granted, being a hugely successful developer probably means they could come up with the bandwidth to support direct downloading the whole way, but that ability diminishes with the more players you have.

BitTorrent certainly works for getting the initial loadout of Tribes out there (installer and patch, it's how I got it), but I get the feeling that because the current patch is just barely bigger than a floppy disk, there might not be quite as much benefit from BitTorrent as there is for WoW.

But then, I'm probably underestimating the size of this community and how many people would be downloading on Patch Day.