[ArgusMagnus]

Im planning to build some maps which would all use the same set of textures. It seems like a waste of harddrivespace to me, to pack all textures with each map into a pk3, especially since there are going to quite a lot textures. Is it possible to pack the maps each into its pk3 and the textures into a seperate "texturepack"-pk3?
Im pretty sure that this would work when the player already has the packs in the right place, but would this work with auto-download? Would the client be able to auto-download all the required packs?

[[SnP]J.English]

You can only set autodownload to download the maps that they are going to play on. Meaning if you set it to download your textures.pk3 through it they could. But it will cause the server not to crash but become "inaccessible". This is because it would not be an actual map and therefore no spawns or bsp to load so the server would have to restart to allow people back on.
Urt doesn't have a texture-checking type thing where if you don't have the textures it auto downloads with the map your downloading. I'm pretty sure some games have that but not urt.
If your a coder or have one etc and your own server you would be able to most likely with tweaking of the open source part of urt to check for a certain texture and if the person doesn't have it then it downloads the pack but I'm not sure :)
Of course that would work only for your own server so people wouldn't be able to put your maps on their own servers unless people want to play without textures.
Otherwise you can implement the textures into the first map and have that rotating for like 1 min to allow people to download. It means people would download it but people without the textures that come into the server on one of the other maps wouldnt have textures until map change :P

Hope I made sense or shared some insight on the matter :D

[ArgusMagnus]

You did make sense, thanks for the reply :)

I am a bit of a coder, but I guess even if I were able to implement this feature and publish a custom build, only people using my build would be able to use the feature (naturally) which the majority of the players would not. So I dont think I will do it, but if I did, does FS accept constributions and consider to include them in their own builds?

[[SnP]J.English]

It really depends on what it is you have done. I would say they only consider from the general community would be a security fix of some kind and only those kind of special enhancements from the actual FS coders. Of course if they did it would be for a 4.2 release where majority of the urt population I believe still sit on 4.1 so they wouldn't be able to. But if you did it you would be allowed to distribute it as you have done it through the open source part. You could even include the build inside your textures pk3 for server owners to open and use for it (as well as including a patch file in case server owners already have modified files so they can then add the code to their one manually).
Of course it can be a lot of hassle to you and the server owners for possibly no positive result to your maps.
Even though there would be a lot of textures do you actually expect the size to be immense? Like I would say most players would be happy to download a map up till around 30mb.

[ArgusMagnus]

Nah your right, I dont think the amount of work I would need to do is in no relation to the actual benefit.

I cannot exactly say how much size the textures will use. Im currently trying to develop a Minecraft to .map exporter (altough Im not sure it will be done soon since I dont have that much time) and depending on the used minecraft-texturepack, the size could be immense (the texturepack I downloaded last was 80mb)

[[SnP]J.English]

Yeh people wouldnt be too happy to download a map that big unless it is the most beautiful perfect urt map there is :P
The biggest urt map I know of is mxl_school which is a really cool map and is 66mb. It even has missing textures :3

[Wily Duck]

I've experimented with this in ut_mspacman. The maps look like this:

ut_mspacman1.bsp
ut_mspacman2.bsp
ut_mspacman3.bsp

Server admins could not put any of the included bsp's into their server config. Later, I re-released each map as its own pk3 (which I can't find now).

Having map variants within the same pk3 would be cool...

This post has been edited by Wily Duck: 08 April 2013 - 02:58 AM