On May 31, 2009, at 10:37, B. Smith-Mannschott wrote:
> 2009/5/31 Bernhard Glück <business_at_bernhardglueck.com>:
>
>> My company is developing a Massivly Multiplayer Online Game. As you
>> might know that kind
>> of game needs content updates often and reliably. Because of that
>> I had
>> the idea to use Subverison
>> as our update technology, and i wanted to check if you think that
>> this
>> is a viable solution before
>> either implementing it or implementing yet another propriatry
>> patching
>> techology.
>>
>> Our Game client at the moment has about 500 MB of "Content" files.
>> Those
>> are split up into
>> textures ( 10-200 kb files ) models ( 10-5000 kb files ) and audio
>> samples ( 10-4000 kb )
>> We manage those by having a "Content" subdirectory in our game client
>> install directory, where
>> they are all placed in a strict hierarchy.
>>
>> What i wanted to do is setup a master server where on release of a
>> new
>> version the release engineers
>> will check in the new content files.
>> This will then be mirrored to "deployment" repositories which are
>> apache
>> servers with their own independent
>> Subversion server in the background. ( so we can add new deployment
>> servers to improve the number of users
>> we can handle )
>>
>> The game client would integrate a subversion client and on startup
>> do a
>> svn update on the content directory from
>> one of our deployment repositories.
> I don't know from my own experience, but I do recall that initial
> versions of Tribal Trouble [1] did this to manage their updates.
>
> [1]: http://tribaltrouble.com/
>
> I just downloaded the current version, and have found that they
> apparently still use this method, at least on the Mac. (Mac OS X
> includes a Subversion client.) I assume it must be working for them.
Mac OS X has Subversion starting with version 10.5.0. Earlier Mac OS
X does not include Subversion.
> One technical aspect that worries me with this solution is the
> relative fragility of an Subversion working copy. What state will the
> working copy be left it if, for example, the network connection drops
> during an update? Will your software be smart enough to svn clean? If
> that doesn't work, will it punt to the user (bad usability), or do a
> fresh check out? These issues are not insoluble, but will need some
> thought.
Another detriment could be the size of the working copy. If you have
500 MB of content you want to distribute, the working copy will be
larger than 1000 MB. Is it ok to waste over 500 MB of the user's disk
space just to give you a convenient update mechanism?
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Received on 2009-05-31 18:03:23 CEST