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Pushing files from the server

by Ken Finney · in Torque Game Engine · 01/29/2002 (1:39 pm) · 4 replies

G'day gents,

We can modify .mis files at the server and they will d/l to the client when the client logs in.

How do we do that with other files - say any arbitrary file - instead of popping up the 'incorrect version' dialog, just have the correct file be pushed down from the server ?

I've putzed around with the 3 load stage thingies and I just keep getting more confused ...

Any help would be appreciated.
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Torque Owner AzraelK
#1
01/29/2002 (2:02 pm)
Whoa! thats a very good question, however I think your way to phrase it was a bit "odd". (pushing files from server?)

What you want to know is how to autodownload files from the server at gametime, (thats how the feature is called and is used in several games from counterstrike to quake 3 arena)

In addition, you may also want to have a version checker for your exe file, but thats a different history and it involves a coding trick. Instead of running the exe run a version checker, check the filesize with one you have in an online ftp server or sql dbase, and download the needed file, if is not the same size.(or version)

However this whole thing is done by coding this "by hand", (using win32 calls and winsock calls) I have some code to do this "by hand" at home. just let me look it up.

However, to know if this is already scripted in torque is a very good question in deed.

Does anyone know if there already is a function in torque to do this?

Torque Owner Tim Gift
#2
01/29/2002 (7:36 pm)
The engine currently does not support any way of auto-downloading files. This is something we've talked a lot about and is something were interested in seeing implemented. I think this is a awesome feature to have, and something that was seriously missing from the Tribes 1 and 2 products, but I'm not sure when it will get implemented.

I've seen references to an integrated/scripted Tribes II ftp-downloader, but I'm not sure where I saw it. If someone knows where that is, could they post the link?

Torque 3D Owner Daniel Eden
#3
01/30/2002 (2:44 pm)
I scripts Tribes 2 a fair bit but apart from the one I wrote myself (which only works for text files and has some fairly dodgey implementation), I don't think there are any auto-downloaders for Tribes 2. There's some update functions in one of the scripting support files out there (Writer's, I think, but don't quote me on it) that connect to a website, check the latest version, and then take you to the website in your web browser, but it's not really the same thing is it...

Torque 3D Owner Luigi Rosso
#4
01/30/2002 (3:13 pm)
You could not send binary data via Tribes2 as you couldn't read in binary data from a file (script side).

I had updating scripts in my Tribes2 mod, Warped. It'd autodetect if your scripts were out of date and redownload them from the server but that was just scripts (only read in ascii).

I think what Tim meant was some software that reads files created by the T2 script and then autoconnects an FTP client according to the info sent by the server. I saw someone set this up in Tribes 1. It worked but you did need to restart the game.

I don't think it'd be extremely difficult to send files to client it depends how you want to handle it. You could make it's own class and simply send the binary data down to the client in a series of packupdates (that may work). A class like, updateFile, or something.