Wesnoth LITE

General feedback and discussion of the game.

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toms
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Post by toms »

Xandria wrote:Now - I don't think that the 90 megs of Wesnoth are too much for the fun it provides, especially when compared to commercial titles that use 2 or more gigabytes of space.
Uhm...you usually don't download a commercial game. And some people pay for downloads.
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taro
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Re: Wesnoth LITE

Post by taro »

Weeksy wrote:I was just thinking that, as this wonderful game has increased in generation after generation, so has the file size. I know part of the large gap between 1.2.5 and 1.3.4 is the extra campaigns that have become mainline (at least for a while) in 1.3.x, but I think that for those who have slower speeds or just crammed hard drives (I'm at 137/140g) large files can be a pain.
Trying to improve more campaigns to "mainline quality" was a good idea. But to include them all into the basic wesnoth source tree was a bad one.

The Add-On server is beeing reorganized. So why not remove the mainline campaigns from the basic wesnoth tree and handle them like all other campaigns. You can mark them as mainline (or something similar) on the Add-On server so people can see that these are the campaigns with the highest quality to expect. Leave only the tutorial in the basic wesnoth and put a message at the end of the tutorial how to get other campaigns.
This is probably the easiest way to reduce the initial download size of wesnoth and should not need much effort.
Noyga wrote:This is a packaging problem, not something that the Wesnoth team usually directly deal with.
Not only. I also speak about the sources (the binary packages are already well separated for some distributions like debian, as you said). The source tarball and the SVN checkout has grown more and more with the newly included campaigns. You have to download all the campaigns with every new version even if you want to use wesnoth only for multiplayer. In SVN you can't even remove them locally because every svn update would download them again.
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turin
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Post by turin »

Uhm, the campaigns aren't really a significant part of the download (most are less than 1MB), so doing that wouldn't save much space. And it makes the user do more work to get the mainline-quality content. I vote NO.
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taro
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Post by taro »

turin wrote:Uhm, the campaigns aren't really a significant part of the download (most are less than 1MB), so doing that wouldn't save much space.
If campaigns would be that small we would not have this problem ;).

Size of data/campaigns:

Code: Select all

version 1.3.4:    25.7 MB (376 kB tutorial)
SVN (trunc):      79.5 MB (1.5 MB tutorial)
Most of this are images (png, jpg) and sounds (ogg), which can't be compressed much. So the part in the download package is not much smaller.
turin wrote:And it makes the user do more work to get the mainline-quality content.
To click on the Add-On button and select the campaign he wants to play? A lot of work ;).
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turin
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Post by turin »

taro wrote:
turin wrote:And it makes the user do more work to get the mainline-quality content.
To click on the Add-On button and select the campaign he wants to play? A lot of work ;).
And wait for it to download... if the user's problem is that he has a slow connection, then it doesn't make sense to force him to wait before playing each campaign, instead of having him download everything all at once and get it over with. And if he has no problem with downloading Wesnoth, then there's no point in not having it downloaded automatically.
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torangan
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Post by torangan »

It got already stated very well: the official distribution is the source package which is as it is. If you want something else, package it in a different way or find someone to provide you a package you like.
Wheter a campaign is in SVN or on the campaign server makes a huge difference development wise. Get more involved into the process if you want to understand things.
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Soliton
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Post by Soliton »

taro wrote:
turin wrote:Uhm, the campaigns aren't really a significant part of the download (most are less than 1MB), so doing that wouldn't save much space.
If campaigns would be that small we would not have this problem ;).

Size of data/campaigns:

Code: Select all

version 1.3.4:    25.7 MB (376 kB tutorial)
SVN (trunc):      79.5 MB (1.5 MB tutorial)
Most of this are images (png, jpg) and sounds (ogg), which can't be compressed much. So the part in the download package is not much smaller.
That's bogus data, you probably used your svn checkout with all the overhead of svn meta data/copies.. There have no campaigns been added since 1.3.4 so there is really only a minimal difference there.
Here is a listing split by campaign:

Code: Select all

820K    data/campaigns/Descent_Into_Darkness
924K    data/campaigns/Eastern_Invasion
4.4M    data/campaigns/Heir_To_The_Throne
5.1M    data/campaigns/Northern_Rebirth
1.2M    data/campaigns/Sceptre_of_Fire
2.6M    data/campaigns/Son_Of_The_Black_Eye
3.9M    data/campaigns/The_Rise_Of_Wesnoth
1.5M    data/campaigns/The_South_Guard
376K    data/campaigns/tutorial
324K    data/campaigns/Two_Brothers
5.3M    data/campaigns/Under_the_Burning_Suns
27M     total
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taro
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Post by taro »

torangan wrote:Wheter a campaign is in SVN or on the campaign server makes a huge difference development wise. Get more involved into the process if you want to understand things.
Sorry if my proposal wasn't clear enough. I did not propose to remove the campaigns from SVN. I only proposed to split the campaign files from the wesnoth SVN repository into an own repository module (or whatever this is called by subversion) for development and to split the campaign files from the wesnoth source tarball to the Add-On server (or maybe into an own tarball) for delivery.
But you already ended this with "it is as it is", no need to waste any further thoughts on it ...
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Post by taro »

Soliton wrote:
taro wrote: Size of data/campaigns:

Code: Select all

version 1.3.4:    25.7 MB (376 kB tutorial)
SVN (trunc):      79.5 MB (1.5 MB tutorial)
That's bogus data, you probably used your svn checkout with all the overhead of svn meta data/copies..
Yes, that's what I wrote in the second line: SVN 79 MB

This is the space I would save on my local disk for every version I have checked out if the campaigns were in there own SVN module.
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Post by Soliton »

taro wrote:
Soliton wrote: That's bogus data, you probably used your svn checkout with all the overhead of svn meta data/copies..
Yes, that's what I wrote in the second line: SVN 79 MB

This is the space I would save on my local disk for every version I have checked out if the campaigns were in there own SVN module.
Might as well suggest we use something other than SVN that doesn't make copies of everything.. Or wait till SVN conveniently handles excluding directories. I don't quite see how that is relevant to packaging though.
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irrevenant
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Post by irrevenant »

IDEA: Perhaps we could sell (& ship) CDs?). We could charge a little on top of cost recovery to put towards server maintenance etc. It shouldn't cost more than 2-3 dollars US.

That provides an alternative for people who find it too cumbersome to download.
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Viliam
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Post by Viliam »

turin wrote:Uhm, the campaigns aren't really a significant part of the download (most are less than 1MB), so doing that wouldn't save much space.
If you want to make an English-only version.

Otherwise we must consider the size of campaigns and their translations. For example UtBS has 2.9 MB but translations to UtBS have 6.4 MB, so by removing the campaign you save 9.3 MB -- that's 10% of the total package.
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ivanovic
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Post by ivanovic »

Viliam wrote:
turin wrote:Uhm, the campaigns aren't really a significant part of the download (most are less than 1MB), so doing that wouldn't save much space.
If you want to make an English-only version.

Otherwise we must consider the size of campaigns and their translations. For example UtBS has 2.9 MB but translations to UtBS have 6.4 MB, so by removing the campaign you save 9.3 MB -- that's 10% of the total package.
Sorry to tell you, but you are wrong:
The pure and compressed translation files for utbs do need about 2MB (when only using the .mo files). That is what would be shipped in the package. Plus the campaign itself has compressed about 2 MB. So by removing the campaign you would remove about 4MB, not 9MB...

All your numbers are *bad* simply because you assume that in the shipped package things would be uncompressed and the very way they are in the tarball. The windows binary does only ship the *compiled* po files, not the uncompiled ones.

For those who want a smaller download:
Set up your own compile environment, fetch the sources once and then just get the xdelta each release. This file has always <10MB. So people who don't have much bandwidth should use this way.

For those who recommend using the campaignserver for the mainline campaigns:
ARE YOU STUPID?
The more lengthy version: The max speed a normal user gets from the campaignserver is at <100kb/s, vie sf.net you can get whatever your bandwidth can manage. For me this is at about 2MB/s, a factor of >20. Add to this the huge amount of extra bandwidth our campaign server has to have. It is clearly a no-go.

If you want a smaller build, create it. ATM there is what you get, if that is not enough for you, download the binary and split it up the way you want to. IMO splitting apart basically everything does not make sense and we will *definatly* not split away campaigns from the tarball as long as I do create them. And developing the mainline campaigns in an extra branch does not make any sense either. ATM all campaigns are at least easily parsed after every code change so that it is obvious when something critical does not work. This would not be the case when campaigns are developed seperatly.
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Post by Weeksy »

I heartily agree with zookeeper about keeping the mainline campaigns off the server. If you want to play those campaigns, download a full, big package. It's faster for everyone, as the current campaign server is a spiteful, sluggish beast that quits halfway through big things such as campaigns. The main reason I personally would like to see wesnoth lite, is that it's easier to delete the folder I have once I'm done playing the campaigns I want to, to save disk space, and reinstall a Lite version, than it is to delete all sorts of individual files, many of which I've never bothered to find out what they do and if they're necessary.
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