OK - progress update time. Things have been a bit slow recently due to my being in another country for 10 days. I'm back now though.
I've been focusing a lot on the new website because I'd like to get this working as soon as possible. A lot of it is just designing and writing content at the moment but I'll be moving onto more of the functionality soon.
I'm contemplating a small RTB v3.4 to fix a few bugs and also to add content downloading. Content downloading is a new feature I explained a while back which essentially downloads all the RTB add-ons on a server before you join it. Here's what would happen in a typical situation:
- You join an RTB server with an RTB client.
- The server has the Weapon_BigAssGun add-on.
- Normally you have to download BigAssGun.dts, GunSound.wav, TextureA.png, TextureB.png from the server.
- With RTB you download Weapon_BigAssGun.zip from the RTB server instead.
There are a number of benefits here. The first one being that instead of downloading individual files from someone's home internet connection, you're downloading the entire add-on from the high-speed RTB server connection.
The second benefit is that all the required files are downloaded, and that includes custom bricks, skies, kill icons and item icons.
The third benefit is that this overrides the user's network settings which are set to not download content from the server by default. Of course people can disable the RTB downloading entirely, but it will be enabled by default. This means people will always see the correct model and not some inappropriate placeholder.
The zip you download from the RTB server is a content-only zip file. It only requires the art and content required to view and interact with the add-on in the server and doesn't include the scripts so it won't show up in your add-on menu when you start a server. There will be an option to view all the content-only add-ons you have and then choose to download the entire add-on instead so you can use it on your server. This makes it much easier for users to identify and obtain add-ons on other people's servers that they want to use on their own.
So yeah, this should also hopefully increase the popularity of custom brick add-ons since people won't have to download them manually before joining a server. It should also serve as a large incentive for more people to use RTB and increase it's effectiveness for everyone else.
