About ready to try to wrap up an in-engine mod installer.

However this leads to other issues:

I'm not sure I want to have a user have to wade through more than a thousand items.

I also --- at least for a FitzQuake style implementation --- and not sure whether or not to make the engine possibly generate a map on the fly or if I might actually find a way to implement a "gallery" that looks like it belongs in a FitzQuake or oldschool engine.

I know I don't want a "list" in the engine (that's impersonal) and I personally feel the Quaddicted ratings get skewed towards 4.5 and 5 star ratings (maybe the # of ratings says more about a release).

Plus I think some of the maps that have lower ratings are of definite gameplay value (many of the 5 star maps are too hard/too big for a non-hardcore person ... )

Perhaps I should prototype and tune first, and then bother you more.

I guess I'm not sure how to deal with ...
1) The sheer quantity of entries.
2) A way to limit to a relevant pool.
3) Some way to know to ignore things that aren't going to work (require some non-FitzQuake 0.85 engine or feature.)

the data is a bit too complex for csv iirc

I know megaman, I just want mod name, URL to archive and image name. I want to test installation, presentation and some other details. 

I might also want to exclude by necessity huge download size mods. Maybe ones over 3 MB zipped.

(Which sucks, but an end-user having to wait 15 minutes to play something or maybe 2 hours on a bad connection ...) 

mod name, URL to archive and image name would not be enough to successfully install stuff. You will need at least the zipbasedir too. See the XML at quaddicted.com/reviews/ quaddicted_database.xml

I made a bayesian rating a while ago but something broke it. https://www.quaddicted.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=55 

Not sure if, but I think I fixed it http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/index_bayes.php (only works if logged out, just a wip) 

You will need at least the zipbasedir too

Hehehe, actually ... I don't!

With the engine, I can have zip functions give me the directory contents. And then write some code looking through the directory contents to see where .pak or .bsp lives and derive the basedir.

But yeah, early yesterday I was thinking I'd need zip basedir too.

And then I realized if I write something to look around the zip file directory section, I can have an engine know how to install any archive (and tell the difference between a gamedir mod and a mere map with extras).

Still, I suppose other things are important --- there isn't a way to tell if something requires -hipnotic or know if a map requires Quoth or is a Nehahra or Travail expansion map. 

that is so stupidly simple and nice I wish someone was actively developing the Injector so I could nag about it bring added. 

the nightmares dealing with all corner cases I wanted to avoid :-) 

Also having the MD5 checksum and the file size would be useful. So that the engine has some way to validate expectations of what it downloaded as being correct. 

Say exactly what you want and how it should be formatted and I will make it if it is easy enough. Might be deprecated once I really make an API though. 

I can make a fake template for personal use while prototyping.

I'd rather ask once with a tested out plan than ask 2 or 3 times when something unexpected causes trouble.

When I'm ready I can graft the prototype into the Quakespasm source (so you can compile it) and you can tell me what you think or suggest tweaks. 

Should be back in some hours I guess. It is all my fault. If OVH's "plug in a 2TB USB disk" was not so expensive I would not do stupid things all the time. Just trying to host the forumplanet forums...

90% uptime is good, isn't it?!! 

it's back. I would be interested if you notice a slowdown (even slower...) in the coming days. 

Slowdown on the overall site? Seems about the same for me (maybe 1 second for the main page) 

Aaargh, it has happened again. But now I know why. I am mounting the forumplanet files from a compressed archive. That works well until updatedb runs... So I have now disabled that. Unfortunately the process is unstoppable. So I will reboot. Unfortunately it will fsck on reboot so it will be a longer downtime, I guess an hour or two. I THINK afterwards I will be smart enough to prevent this from happening.

How often do I have to do this until someone gets annoyed enough to add local caching to the Quake Injector? ;) 

lol, that's one way to solicit help.
Are you saying like, download the urls for maps so that quake injector doesn't have to ask for them from quaddicted itself? I didn't know it was doing that.
Wouldn't it just be a matter of dumping the urls it has in memory to a file and then reading that one back?
Course.. i have no idea how the thing works. Is the source available? 

now that was a quick reboot, guess I counted wrong and the fsck will happen next time.

the forums stuff will be mounted tomorrow (it takes 10 hours to do so, no kidding, several tens of gigabytes in a 3G .tar.bz2)

------
for necros or anyone else who might look at this:

the Injector has 3 online dependencies, the zips, the screenshots, the xml "database' with the metadata. zips are already easy to store locally (just dump everything into its download directory), for the screenshots I made an ugly fork iirc, the xml is what is left. basically you would just need to download and store the xml file instead of directly opening it from http. I think megaman had started working on that.

the source is at https://github.com/hrehfeld/QuakeInjector/ , pester megaman with questions, checkout the issue list and the forks before doing anything. might be a pain to build on windows since ant is used. 

I was able to click and drag the thing into netbeans no problem except for one class that can't be found, "BuildCommit", which seems to be needed to tell the server what build you're using. Part of svn or something?
Netbeans uses ant for compiling ( http://wiki.netbeans.org/Ant ) so working on it in windows doesn't look like a problem.

basically you would just need to download and store the xml file instead of directly opening it from http. I think megaman had started working on that.

Looks like that's line 354 in QuakeInjector.java which seems to try to deal with an inaccessible online database. I guess the only missing component is saving the xml to disk? 

Yikes, lots of stuff in here I know nothing about. I'm afraid I will be of no help to you. :) 

Ok, http://gamespy-archives.quaddicted.com/forums/ are back 

Ant is no problem at all on Windows.

The Antscript builds the BuildCommit class from the git version nr. 

http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/maps/e4m7rmx.zip 

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/rmx-pack.html 

I had only seen it in a zip by itself on SDA, didn't even realize there was a pak. sorry. :) 

negke wants to know, are the videos on https://www.youtube.com/user/Quaddicted/videos unusually loud?