=DRK= Community Downloader

[Bluedrake42]

One of the things our community has always been frustrated with is the difficulty players have downloading custom maps or mini-mods for their specialty servers (either for events, or otherwise.) Having to constantly advertise new downloads, updates, or events normally harms player turnout severely... which means community content gets considerably less love than it should, and subsequently less creators work on creating new content.

Our community has been spending an extensive amount of time building random projects that we enjoy working on, most recently of which has been our community updater and installer for Battlefield 1942. This launcher allows you to sync your Battlefield 1942 installation to our server (mods & maps included) as well as offering full Mumble integration for in-game proximity voice chat.

What we're hoping to do is build a similar, yet smaller scale project for Project Reality. Instead of building an entirely new launcher for the game (which already exists, and is super-great) we're hoping to build a small auto-updater client for our server's custom community content. This means you'll only need to download one single client in order to participate in all our future custom server events, and instead of having to hassle with new downloads, installations, and patches... you can just press one button to update yourself to the newest community content available on our server.

Keep in mind this is ONLY for our server's community content, and is in addition to Project Reality's core content updater. You'll still use Project Reality's launcher to play the game, and update to the newest version of the core modification. However you'll be able to use our community updater to download all the additional maps and mini-mods that we play on our custom server.

We'll of course use this client only for mini-mods and maps which we would be able to normally host on our server with permission, and we won't be using it to update all clients to every piece of community content available on the forums... however we're hoping that it will host an extensive amount of additional content to keep our custom Project Reality server fresh and new.

We've started work on this launcher this week, and we expect to have it finished... likely within the month. However it could take more or less time, depending on what issues we run into (likely none, as it'll be almost identical to our other launchers)

Hopefully everyone is on board with this, as we're excited to finally have a go-to solution to syncing all our community content for specialty events! We think this will make custom events much more fun and feasible, so we're anxious to see it in action!

We're hoping to possibly also use this system to develop a new version of Scenario Sundays (named Shadowspear) that will be a fully integrated gamemode, instead of admin enforced events. The potential is extensive!

If anyone would like to offer their map/mod for our first server event with this client please let me know! We'd be happy to include it <3

[AncientMan]

FYI, you can use PRBuild to build custom mini mods (I.e. mods/pr_mymod) and updates. PRLauncher supports these mods via the +modPath parameter, and PRUpdater can be used to deliver updates as necessary. PR WW2 used this system in the past.

[AfterDune]

@AncientMan: the launcher still checks the version or some json file on ancientdev though - with WW2 we had to place that file there to make it work.

[Bluedrake42]

FYI, you can use PRBuild to build custom mini mods (I.e. mods/pr_mymod) and updates. PRLauncher supports these mods via the +modPath parameter, and PRUpdater can be used to deliver updates as necessary. PR WW2 used this system in the past.

How does the PRUpdater even work? Is it torrent based? How would we host the download? I didn't realize this was as open as it is.

[AfterDune]

Just http download as far as I know.

[Bluedrake42]

Done - https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... pdater.exe

Right now we only have 6 maps that PRTA lent us, as well as a few of the recent map testing events. We'll have a custom server up sometime this week. All you'll have to do is press that update button to update your Project Reality installation to our server's custom map list, and then press play.

It's super simple. Just finds your PR directory, then downloads all the custom maps to it, the launch button is literally just a shortcut to the PR launcher. Hopefully this will make our custom events much easier and more long-term (instead of just single events.)

[AncientMan]

@AncientMan: the launcher still checks the version or some json file on ancientdev though - with WW2 we had to place that file there to make it work.

Probably were missing PRLauncher.updates.baseUrl in the launcher config file . But anyway...