Addons & Mission Sharing Past Issues

[evilnate 0]

I've searched and searched and couldn't find anything related to my concern.

My concern/curiosity is regarding the past issues with addons not working when they are required, to play a downloaded user created mission/campaign. For example in order to kill the ArmA waiting time, I tried downloading some great user campaigns.

For example I downloaded revolt 1998 and spent a great deal of time hunting down the addons that I needed. After all the downloading and file distributing, the campaign won't even load due to addon errors. Invalidation of one's expectations is the root of all frustration. I'm not saying that it's BIS's fault or anything, I'm just think there is some serious room for improvement here.

Has anyone heard/read that ArmA will try to do somthing to make this problem less prone in the future? Can they add some sort of checksum-check? Can they help resolve the reasons for people to need JAM2?

[martinovic 0]

I have that campaign and it worked. Try getting the files on this list: http://ofp.gamepark.cz/index.php?showthis=8908 .

Maybe you just have older (or newer) versions of the files required and those versions are missing stuff you need.

BTW that campaign can get annoying ... "Mission failed because you left the mission area" ... hey don't blame me for taking another route that goes around all those tangos that have nothing to do with my objective, sir! >_>

[GBee 0]

Maybe you just have older (or newer) versions of the files required and those versions are missing stuff you need.

The whole approach to addons does need work. Some of this BIS are already addressing, though I don't really know the full details. It does seem as though checksums will be created for some of the higher quality addons, as determined by BIS giving proven mod-makers a signing cert. (Don't shoot me if this isn't entirely accurate).

The community have to take responsibility for the other half of the problem, this includes makers releasing addons before they are properly tested/finished so several versions are left floating around the internet. The lack of one single (semi-) official site for _ALL_ addon downloads which can make finding addons, or the right versions, difficult. Not to mention missions/campaigns requiring beta versions of addons. Then the always contentious problem of every mod maker re-inventing the wheel so that 100 different versions of the M1A1 exist).

Many of these issues could be solved by an official download site which requires addons to be peer reviewed, to be of a certain quality and to follow certain standards before they will be available to download. Addon makers passing the quality/standards check would get the opportunity to fix issues raised in the review part and re-submit for a higher rating or release anyway. This system has worked very well in the past, Action Quake 2 (Q2 mod) used this system for maps.

Quote[/b] ]

BTW that campaign can get annoying ... "Mission failed because you left the mission area" ... hey don't blame me for taking another route that goes around all those tangos that have nothing to do with my objective, sir! >_>

Any campaign that takes the open environments of OFP and turns it into an ordinary linear shooter gets a thumbs down from me.

[ntokarek 0]

What works really well in a lot of games is just if you have an autodowload option in the multiplayer game, that way when you wish to join a server or something you can always join and you dont have to spend hours and hours looking for all of the addons out there thta are required to play on one server

i just think that an autodownload option owuld be a great improvement on how we get addons and missions in

[Commando84 0]

yeah would be great with auto download like in unreal torunament and call of duty 2 i barely make it to the toilet and back sometimes , depends of course how many mods the server's running but damn some of the mods where annoyingly hard to get rid of if you want to play clean install.... no readmes anywhere saying anything cause the autodowload from the server just downloads the mod file not the readme with uninstall instructions or anything like that so i have seen good sides and bad sides of mod downloading from game to game. i hope addons for armed assault will come with good instructions like they usually came with ofp addons

[Big Dawg KS 6]

Quote[/b] ]BIS also plan to introduce so-called “Certified Content Developers†– content creators that register at BIS and receive a better support than in the wiki or forums and avoid a lot of speculations. They will be given the possibilty to "sign" their PBOs, marking them as reliable within the anti cheating system.

This might help.

Quote[/b] ]Missions in Armed Assault can also be within addons.

Missions and addons are both .pbo files, I assume this means that the two can be merged - this could mean that missions and addons needed could be contained in the same file, and it might be possible to download addons with missions in MP - though as I said I'm assuming that's what it means.

[Uziyahu--IDF 0]

It's probably a better idea to put the missions within the addons, as the size of the mission.pbo is usually much smaller than the addons needed.

This will also motivate addon-makers to provide missions to go with their addons, AS IT SHOULD BE.

If you had addons within the missions, you'd have the same huge addons in a multiple number of smaller-sized mission.pbo's.

I like the auto-download feature in other games. Hard-drives can fill up quickly, though.

There's no easy solution.

I like the idea of a B.I.-selected Board of AddOn-Makers who act like Quality Control, make sure the AddOns & Mods are quality stuff, then provide an approved version.

Other AddOns & Mods could be "At Your Own Risk", without a Board Certificate.

[Kode 0]

It's nice for a small number of addons. No more addon chasing etc...

But imagine the time you need to download them, for example a missions with some nice addons, for a total of 50Mb. Not to mention when 10 people are connecting at the same time. The server will have a hard time. Anyway, I think they'll come up with a good solution.

[Scrub 0]

If there is an opportunity to add to an alternate servers list and distribute the bandwidth, then there may be no bottleneck. I believe OFP Watch had the foundation we needed to support, and we might now have the ability to take it to the next step.

[evilnate 0]

I'm starting to have Steam nightmares.

I think it's the right idea to have a official and single collective filter to decide what is an acceptable addon. Maybe have 3 teirs of addons. Release addons would be the addons that come on the game disk or expansions. Official addons would be the addons that the community has made that have a BIS blessing, and is hosted by either BIS or their publishers. The addons that didn't get a BIS approval would be the ushual "public" addons that you can find at our favorite ofp addon sites.

The checksum/serial number/unique ID for addon files would be great for the mission/campaign author to reference in readmes.

[frederf 0]

Every server should have to register their mods they run to a server that keeps track of all registered mods by a unique number and a database of name, size, description, date, author, version,ect.

That way you connect to a server and it says "Running mods: 004535, 006740, 019295." And you can go look them up as opposed to chasing down broken links through some god-awful czechslovakian pornad site.

[Dohtar 0]

While centralised mod/mission check would be a good filter only to publish good stuff, I dont think that would have a positive impact on community's creativity.

I'd rather see each addon would be recognised by it's hash string.

Than every mission should use some kind of include() function for all the addons it needs, and players should have those downloaded when joining server. Since every addon and even every version of an addon would have its unique hash string, you could have for instance Jack's M4 addons v0.9, v0.8, v1.1 and Rob's M4 addons v0.2, v0.4 all in your game folder, and would simply use the one that specific mission wants you to.

URLredirect for mision downloads would be cool aswell.

And, importantly, on server list you should always be able to see if you have all the needed addons for a mission that is played at the moment, or which you are missing.