Thumbnails on map voting

[Dokujisan]

Ok, this was mentioned (by me) on this thread
http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.ph ... thumbnails

But I want more clarity on the topic.

divVerent said

Thumbnails would be REALLY cool, but are held back by there being no possibility to upload the map pictures on demand.

It is my understanding that the biggest problem is that the client would need a way to get the map thumbnails in order to display them since the map (pk3) files don't download until AFTER a map is chosen.

Would it be possible for a server admin to setup one of those auto-download packages for this? (I've never done it but I have seen it setup by other admins for models and sound packs). The map repositories could offer up this pk3 full of thumbnails to make it easier on server admins. Then we could update it with version numbers, etc to make sure everyone downloads the latest version when it gets updated.

So, assuming this would be possible...

Would their be a default thumbnail for maps that don't have one?
Would it scale thumbnails that weren't the correct size or would it just ignore them?
Would we have to wait for the next version of Nexuiz to come out before something like this could work?

What are your thoughts?

[divVerent]

Well, this is nowhere in the near future. We still need someone to finish CSQC support... THEN we can think about this.

As we never get any more people into our team, this probably will never happen. I simply don't have time for this.

[morfar]

Isn't this almost possible with the gecko engine?!
That way you can get thumbnails for maps you don't have. But then we need a server with all or most thumbnails.

[divVerent]

We don't want the Gecko engine in Nexuiz for security reasons. Note that it does not use an installed Firefox, but a specially compiled offlineGecko library - which is not available from mozilla.org, but has to be compiled by us for each release. Thus, it'd get very outdated...

However, the Gecko engine would only help with this if we had good integration between Gecko actions and the engine - which we also don't.