Hi there, I Wanted to Present you Phoenix Client.
What is Phoenix Client?

Phoenix Client is a content delivery system, which can handle every type of files. It will deliver mostly, but not only, games, as it will also deliver applications and more. Everything will be FREE and EASY TO START PLAYING.
We want to talk with you about it, perhaps a possibility of delivering your game.

http://projectashes.site.vu/

With The Best Wishes,
Hck~D3v, Project Development Team

I don't know, it's kinda FISHY if a "content delivery system" has to use a FREEHOSTIA free web site.

Let me guess - you found out that it's Freehostia from the MySQL error message when trying to enter the forum?

Well, it's for free, so why complain...

Now to the user interface: http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... hotoc9.jpg does not look like a "done" application either (it should either look creative or like WIndows standard controls, but not this way - no menu bar, overly large icon bar, weird spacing in the content window)... sorry, but when I look at that window, it isn't typical of Windows apps at all, and isn't creative either (if it's a totally styled interface like many games use, why not). Also, what's that news box? Also, something makes this program look similar to eMule. Not exactly what it should look like... but I assume that a final version will be in normal Windows XP or Vista design, or in something creative the authors will cook up.

Also - can you tell us what's the point of it? The website isn't really informative. Just an automated downloader and installer? Will it feature (on the screenshot it doesn't) a list of all games available through the system, or would we be required to put a Phoenix link on our website? Will it do P2P downloads (if yes, through which protocol) to save bandwidth on the servers, or will it just download via HTTP or FTP?

Well, of course you can distribute our game on that system - just be aware that the GPL requires you to distribute the source code of Nexuiz too. If you just include the contents of the sources/ directory in our Nexuiz zip file into what people download (it's small) or provide it separately, everything is fine. Actually, you don't even need us to allow it - the GPL already allows you to freely redistribute Nexuiz as you wish.

However, if your system is really good to use, provides P2P downloads (maybe optional) for faster and more server bandwidth conserving downloads (well, we use sourceforge, so we do not really need the latter part) and an integrated list of available games, this would mean your application would promote Nexuiz, and of course your application would then deserve a link on our download page. But until then, please make sure it looks somewhat professional, which includes a "real" domain name and web space and an application window that looks "done": Currently, it looks somewhat fishy.

If we can help you, tell us - like, if you have questions on how to set certain path names or options from the command line, where settings are stored and stuff like that.

ok seems like you want to have some background area information, the final look of the app shall be something like this:


but we are still working on the GUI, we wanted to make the program functional first, and then move on to the graphics.
Now, about P2P, it is a future improvement, and what does this mean, at the moment we have http download ready, it downloads files not packed, so we can have an auto-update system that you wont have to download the whole game to update the game.
The future improvements are:
P2P, Friends Network, .7zip auto-decompression for the files the releaser wants to pack.

We use our own filesystem, .DNF, it contains all the info on where to do the download, information about the website, the creator, the version (which is this that will trigger auto-updating), the parameters you want the application to run with, the icon that will appear on the client, etc...

So, this is a on-going application, we will always need more coders to help, because we are always implementing something new, but these apps needs to start from somewhere, and this is our start point, the question is, will you come along with us?

So people won't be able to download games from within your application and have to get that DNF file from an external source? I'd instead like the PACKAGES button to also show "available" packages that are not yet installed.

I don't have time to help you with development, but of course you can provide Nexuiz on that platform. Just adhere to the terms of the GPL.

Also, can you make it work on "non-specific" download files, so you can for example just use our Nexuiz.zip and add some script or extra programs to unpack and install it? It would be nice if you could also "dissect" some other archive or installer formats so your application would download the ORIGINAL files as released by the author of the game and not a file you have to make or a file we have to provide especially for your application. If you need us to include a special info directory into out Nexuiz.zip, we could do so, in that case, just ask.

Did I understand this right that you download parts of existing zip files for updating? In case of Nexuiz, that's not exactly clever since one file that changes is the data pk3 file which contains ALL the media and is about 190MB. For updating, you'd rather install an additional datapatch....pk3 file (but we already provide patches, maybe your system could be made to use those).

no, youve understand it wrong, at the beggining of the application, it will check on our server if any .dnf file was updated and download it, or if its the first time the user uses the program, what will happen is that it will download all the .DNF files. The .DNF files just stores information of what to download, as the name of it says .DNF (Download information file).
So it will show every game available on phoenix client, if then the user wants to download Nexuiz or another different game that it is there, he has the ability to do it with just one click, no need to download .dnf anywhere.

Well, if youre releases are in .zip, it will be kind of complicated... We can host the files on our server, but it hasnt a very good speed, as for updating, the client downloads only the files that have been updated, and overwrite the old ones, im going to check how is your system of data patching and then will say something on how it can be done, by the way, it would be easyer if we talked trough msn, ricardo@live.be, im the project leader.

Edit: Ive seen the datapatch .pk3 but didnt understood how it was applyed.... any explanation?

knight_of_honor wrote:Edit: Ive seen the datapatch .pk3 but didnt understood how it was applyed.... any explanation?

It works pretty much the same as a .pk3 file does in Quake 3.

A few things:
Your 'project ashes' logo shows JPEG artifacts that do not appear to have been a result of the screenshot, the original logo appears to have artifacts. It has large areas of flat contiguous colours so use PNG.

I already have a nice content delivery system, most modern Linux distros do.

my question is how that .pk3 patches the main .pk3? is there any program that does that?

and which logo were you talking about?

knight_of_honor wrote:my question is how that .pk3 patches the main .pk3? is there any program that does that?

No, it works just like Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Doom3 and most of their derivatives work. You really should know how that works.

knight_of_honor wrote:and which logo were you talking about?

The redish brown one here:
http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... hotoc9.jpg

oh... lool thats the old news page, we already have a new one, but hasnt been uploaded yet, will go online when we release phoenix client.

Still, I know how .pk3 works, I just dont know how is it updated...

knight_of_honor wrote:Still, I know how .pk3 works, I just dont know how is it updated...

It's just copied to Nexuiz/data. Nexuiz loads all PK3s in there in alphabetical order, if a filename occurs in more than one PK3, the one that was loaded last will be used.

oh.... only that? so yes its is very simple to integrate nexuiz in the client.... I just need green light from the producers and some info, nothing more...

divVerent wrote:Let me guess - you found out that it's Freehostia from the MySQL error message when trying to enter the forum?

The page is a frame that displays this url

http://andenc.freehostia.com/index.html

knight_of_honor wrote:Well, if youre releases are in .zip, it will be kind of complicated... We can host the files on our server, but it hasnt a very good speed, as for updating, the client downloads only the files that have been updated, and overwrite the old ones,

Well, our nexuizpatch zip files basically contain all you need to patch the installation to the next version:

• complete new engine binaries (these change all the time)
• datapatch...pk3 (this is basically an automatic generated difference pk3 between old and new data...pk3 and just needs to be put in the download folder)
• new copy of Documentation (small, but does not necessarily change, that's there for sake of completeness)
• current engine and game sources as zip files (also change all the time); the DLLs are also included even if they did not change (there is no way around that on Mac, and on Windows it is a small waste that should get fixed in the next release)

And if you do want to extract single files out of a zip, that should be possible with three HTTP requests. The first one would be a HEAD to find the size of the zip file, the second one would download some part from the end of the file that is likely to contain the full central directory, and the third one would download the actual compressed data. Note that HTTP requests can download just part of a file if a Range: header is sent. In case of our nexuiz...zip releases, the central directory is always in the last 24k of the file and I doubt that's getting exceeded so soon.

We do have proper hosting, currently used for some client files. We are gonna get a domain sorted but are wating for new site design to go ahead. Also i think what ever archive type the file is in aint a prblem i think i have a way to work it out, also will do some changes so we can define the documentation path in the .dnf.

Thanks.

kk, At the moment we will host those files extracted on our server, we may use .zip but that is very very unlikely, at least for now. Im going to upload everything to the server now.