Nimbus! - AGS Steam - PreAlpha release

[ddq]

Meh, could work if implemented well enough. It seems like it would be pretty neat, if not wholly necessary. If someone were up to the job, I'd approve enough to use it. If you want to, go for it.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I would even love to make some flashy looking mockups of how the interface could look. (no guarantees though )

[Calin Leafshade]

Feel free RT :p I suck at interfaces and I'll be designing it in WPF so i have total control over how the window looks (like curse and steam etc)

[LimpingFish]

Theoretically, I love this idea.

In practice...

The combined downloads of the top five games last week accounted for 110GB of data. The top five. In a week.

Running just those five games, at those download levels, through a single server would average out at around half a terabyte a month, wouldn't it?

Seeing as I generally suck at both maths and intraweb gubbins, feel free to correct me.

[Calin Leafshade]

Hmm Thethoughtradar.com transfers about 40gb a week without a problem and thats not a dedicated server (i know thats like a tenth of the required number but peders hosting would be far superior to mine).

If the server has unlimited bandwidth and a relatively decent connection (I imagine peder has both of these things with a professional hosting service) then it shouldnt be an issue.

Also it's not really 100% necessary for the files to be stored with a single host. It wouldn't really make any difference if the files were stored elsewhere providing 'AGS Steam' knew where they were.

[GarageGothic]

If we're talking a stand-alone application like Steam, would some kind of P2P distribution make sense in addition to server hosting (making, in effect, the server a reliable seeder, but allowing those of us who don't mind sharing our AGS games folder to provide additional bandwidth)?

[Wonkyth]

yeah, a bit-torrent thingy would work nicely, I think...

[Calin Leafshade]

i'm not sure the AG community is large enough to provide the kind of seed network that would require but i guess it would take some of the load off the servers

[GarageGothic]

At least for newly released games, which would most likely be the ones eating up the most bandwidth, it should spread the server load quite a bit if even just a fraction of those who download keep sharing the file for a couple of days. Of course most non-AGS'ers would get the game from other sources rather than download a special client program just for a single game. I don't know if it would be worth looking into using magnet links that could also be opened in standard P2P, but perhaps some developers would be opposed to the loss of version control and download count inherent in that approach.

[Calin Leafshade]

Ok so let me give a brief run down of how I think it would work:

Project: Nexus! 

Basically we have a C# coded WPF application. (WPF is just a rendering library to replace windows forms.. means i can make the window prettier)

--- game workflow ----

The app has a browser control which can access a database of games (via php & mysql)

If you like the look of a game you can click 'install' this is a custom protocol link formatted something like:

Code: ags

 
nexus://InstallGameID:57838 
nexus://ViewGameID:42342

theses link tells the app to start downloading (or show) the game. (these links could also be posted to the forum and used just like download links so that if you click them it launches Nexus)

So the app downloads the game and extracts it in the background so you can continue looking through games or whatever.

once the game has extracted its added to a tabled list of games in your library.
This list would look similar to a song listing in itunes. Something like:

Name                      Dev                Current Rating            Your Rating            Gamepage
Backdoor Man 7      Edmuntito         * * * * .                      * * * . .         Show Game Page

This kind of format would allow you rate the game (and indeed change your rating) with a single click just like itunes.

You would be able to rightclick the listing to access commands like "show readme" "uninstall" "play" "settings" and so on.

You would be able to make sets of global settings for all games with certain resolutions.
for example you could set all games in 320x200 to play fullscreen at 2x scaling but all 800x600 games to play with no scaling in a window.

---community---

On the community page you have a kind of activity stream which would look something like this.

Darth Mandarb commented on Ben Jordan: Case 8 and said "YOU DIDN'T FOLLOW THE RULES" - 3 Minutes Ago

ProgzMax rated 5 Days a Stranger 4 cups - 2 hours ago.

DualNames installed Eternally Us - 3 days ago.

and so on.

The stream can be changed to only show friends activity or only certain members of your friends list

certain games could be 'followed' so that you could see if anyone had rated or commented on it.

---adding games---

For a game to be added to Nexus certain requirements would have to met.

These would only be very loose requirements just to homogenise the system.

such as:
a text only readme with the name "readme.txt"
the resolution settings and engine version must be supplied (for compatibility and global settings purposes)
a screenshot must be supplied

and things like that.

once a user successfully submits a game their account has developer status, this allows them to add certain things to their profile that 'players' cannot such as an rss feed of their blog and/or twitter

Developers would also be able to create Studios. These would be groups of users which have their own little profile.. I havent really thought this part through yet.

That's about as far as my brain has gotten.. I apologise for spelling and grammar errors..

Does anyone have any thoughts and/or feature requests?

[Atelier]

Perfect name choice. I believe the features you've already outlined would make a great first version as-is. Beginning with over-ambitiousness has killed many a project. Good luck, Helmsman of Nexus =D

[Virgil]

One minor note for the UI, next to each game should have an 'Options' menu or dropdown, which is essentially the same as right-clicking but a little more apparent. (I don't know if you had already thought of this or not)

Also on the feed, maybe instead of commenting directly inside the program, any comments are pulled from the game's forum page? This way we don't have separate feeds where one is possibly neglected. The game's feed can still say downloads and ratings as well.

[Atelier]

maybe instead of commenting directly inside the program, any comments are pulled from the game's forum page?

More often than not topics tend to go OT. So you'd be left with alerts pulled from the game's thread that are very forum-centric. Perhaps as well as also, a feed could come from the AGS database, where comments on the game are always on-track. Here though, you sacrifice quantity.

[Stupot]

maybe instead of commenting directly inside the program, any comments are pulled from the game's forum page?

More often than not topics tend to go OT. So you'd be left with alerts pulled from the game's thread that are very forum-centric. Perhaps as well as also, a feed could come from the AGS database, where comments on the game are always on-track. Here though, you sacrifice quantity.

You could have it work the other way round aswell... perhaps have a function on the AGS Steam software to leave comments about the games which would automatically appear in the regular AGS database.

It sounds like a good idea, Calin, but as you stated in your very first sentence, it's a tad unnecessary... I'm rubbish with computers but even I've managed to keep all my AGS games in one folder (apart fom those which self-extract and create their one folder, but those are few and far between)... still, I'd be interested to see how this goes.

[Calin Leafshade]

unnecessary does not mean not cool

[LRH]

Sounds great indeed! I would to see something like it.

[IndieBoy]

As much as I like this idea, I have doubts if we will see this ever being made. We still haven't accomplished updating the website yet, so something on this scale seems too much of a big step for the community. Although I don't want to sound pessimistic, I'm just trying to be realistic here.

[LRH]

Meh. If one puts their mind to something, where there's a will, there's a way. Sure it takes dedication, but finishing such a project isn't that far-fetched.

[Calin Leafshade]

you underestimate how mental I am

[Wonkyth]

Well, get going!

* wonkyth gets JimReed to use his awesome whip-crack sound on Calin.