Stepped Install

[MrGadget]

I’d like to propose a stepped install plan to get new players started with the game more quickly.

From the full install, extract the barest minimum files and assets needed to get the game up with the Login Screen and Character Generator and Tutorial. By this I mean just that map, the dagger weapon, the air glyph, the iron ore art, the races plus the rat, one client skin (instead of 3) plus the client base, a subset of files from the data folder and the client core DLL files. I may have missed a bit in that list but you get the idea.

Distribute to the mirrors this package as the smallest download you can make, and distribute the rest in a 2nd package also to the mirrors.

The concept is to let a player get the small package first, install and run it. When it runs, it gives them something to do in getting their account logged in for the first time, creating a character, and playing their way through the Tutorial. While all this is going on, a separate spawned process with a progress bar is running minimized that is downloading and unpacking the 2nd package.

By the time a new player gets through Character Gen and Tutorial, most of the rest might be downloaded. At this point the progress screen would be brought forward so they can see how much is left (if any) and as soon as it finishes they can reload the client into the full game.

Obviously this means reworking the end of the last Tutorial quest a bit to just update the server with their new load POS and (magic happens here) determine state of 2nd package and go from there.

Not entirely thunk through, but you get the idea.

[Caarrie]

we already have few devs working on the official client, it would take even more to do something like this. also the testing team to debug it and then those on slow internet connections to download 2 clients just to get ingame is not worth the time, i would rather the team take time to debug the official client then take time to make a new client that is not going to be used much.

[MrGadget]

This has so little to do with the client itself.  This is about distro packaging.  There would not be "download 2 clients" and for low-speed connections they would benefit the most, since a small starter package would get them going so much quicker than the full 300+MB download we have today.

We have psupdater with CheckIntegrity - use that initially for the 2nd part...dress it up later.

That which is needed to create a character and run the tutorial is a small fraction of the total download package.  All I'm suggesting is a split of the contents of the package into two parts.  Go have a look at products like InstallShield...they make building stepped installers pretty easy, and they can do evaluations on the target machine for sufficient specs and prerequisites too, which might actually save the player from downloading parts he doesn't need.

C'mon Caarrie - this is wishlist - no one is calling for anyone to make this happen today, or tomorrow, or this year.  Wishlist is full of things that may be a year or more away but still have merit for discussion.  You slammed my feature request shut within 15 minutes of my posting it in BT without letting anyone even look at it.  Here at least it might live a little longer.

MrG

[Kerol]

This is the wishlist. The devs will have to decide if something is worth looking into after all the arguments are discussed. Bashing an idea from the start is inacceptable.

[steuben]

initial projection would put the size of a "stepped" installer at ~170 meg. that eliminates all maps but the tutorial and leaves all the suppporting art intact.  even with careful working of the supporting art i don't think you could trim it much smaller then 130-140 meg.

[MrGadget]

We trimmed it to 80MB.  Details to follow...stay tuned 

MrG

[Nykolai Raskaniov]

That's probably a good idea for the future when the client will get big enough, but for the time being, if you have cable connection or equivalent, downloading ~300-400MB isn't so much of a problem. When I say this I'm thinking about how big Ryzom or EVE clients are.

[MrGadget]

So now it's up to 995MB.  Just sayin'.

[Jawir]

If all this is made to help with slow internet connections I can't see much of an improvement: after you downloaded the lean client package you can start playing, but in the background the download continues, right? Well, with a slow connection, since you are playing online, how much lag will cause the background download?

[MrGadget]

1) For new players, the time to get started in the game would be vastly shorter.  If a "slow connection" is 1mb / sec (that's megabits, not megabytes), we're now talking 995 * 8 = 7960 seconds = 132 minutes = 2 hours 12 minutes.  That's a long time with nothing to retain the "customers" attention. How many get bored, move on to something else, and decide the download is lagging them with that other activity and cancel half-way through?  That's bandwidth wasted for both the player and the hoster of PS downloads.

2) Tutorial Map is small, fairly light, low net traffic because the player is there alone (mostly).  When this idea was proposed 5 years ago, each player in Tutorial was instanced so they were always alone, so no other player movement net traffic would be present.  The NPC's don't move either (idle wiggles don't count). A background process shouldn't create noticeable lag.

3) I'd imagine that a fair percentage of people that download the game never get past the tutorial, perhaps for technical reasons, perhaps PS isn't their cup of tea.  Why waste bandwidth on a player whose computer isn't strong enough to play the game?  Better to find out with a small download in ~15 minutes I'd say. Perhaps not mentioned above, but internal discussion considered 3 parts, the first being a teeny tiny diagnostic app to evaluate the players computer in a matter of seconds for meeting the minimum system requirements, so failing that check would at least prompt the player whether they want to continue anyway with the small client install.

Anyway, I stumbled onto my own thread and found it amusing that the download is 500% larger and still this idea has received no traction.