I dont understand the big deal with not forcing updates automatically upon login? Why not have everyone play with all the same utilities/AH and anything that is invented for war2? Why should people be playing with different versions of the games? This is unheard of in the gaming world.. i dont understand it.
Several reasons as for me:
1. My loader updater works for itself currently. Not for the whole combat, just for loader only. (The idea was to release updates for antihack only, that was part of loader).
Hole puncher is not a part of loader.
2. If (in theory) we increase updater to the whole combat:
It's much more difficult job to make proper version control to update everything in combat. How to handle differences in mpq-files or anywhere else?
To redownload the whole file every time something is not equal to last version? It's really a big work to control differences in mpq files and redownload changes only.
Also, if somebody want to make some minor changes (like custom textures, etc), should we deny that and enforce sync with original?
Also, somebody prefer older combat versions as new ddraw.dll can work bad on some old and weak computers or w/e.
Also, if you downloaded old combat you can reinstall it, and then it will be redownloaded after each installation.
3. My vision: server should not be limited by only 1 version of war2.
We are not blizzard, we are not authors. We just want to merge as many war2 players as ne can.
That's why i think the important thing is to let everybody see our server is alive and join us by any other war2 client: any official build, any pirate build. Just add our gateway, join and play.
At least they should be able to join and see the chat, to let them see our community is still playing war2.
4. When i tried to share combat on torrent tracker i saw that their admins don't like builds of games developed by one specific unofficial server.
I think torrents could be a good way to distribute war2, so maybe these rules could be applied to many other torrent trackers and other resources.
I also never planned to tightly link between ru server and ru client.
Of course, ru client can have some additional functionality together with ru server, but is should work the same way with any other server. Same as ru server should work with any other client.
On rutracker i just explained that our client is not a war2 build for our server, but server is included to gateways only because it's the only one war2 server in the world.
So, i think maybe we need some steps to enforce updating, but not just enforce that automatically.
