Better Add-On interface

[Iris]

An easy way to "patch" upgrade huge files (e.g. Extended Era) would also be nice, but I don't think that's doable without a lot of work.

Patch-upgrades? That is possible with XDelta and manual downloads through the web interface currently. Noyga used to do it for EE IIRC.

Note: for the poor low-bandwidth people that download BFW as its source code package, and that don't know, there are always XDeltas for most development and stable releases. The required program is xdelta, included in most major GNU/Linux distributions, although I think a port for Windows or others do exist. I recommend this procedure. No more 90 MB downloads! Just use your old locally-stored download and update it with a 4 MB patch! It slices! It dices! And comes with a free toaster!

[Noyga]

It would be nice for the campaign server to have something like this, but first we have to add true version support in addons management.

[Aethaeryn]

An easy way to "patch" upgrade huge files (e.g. Extended Era) would also be nice, but I don't think that's doable without a lot of work.

Patch-upgrades? That is possible with XDelta and manual downloads through the web interface currently. Noyga used to do it for EE IIRC.

Note: for the poor low-bandwidth people that download BFW as its source code package, and that don't know, there are always XDeltas for most development and stable releases. The required program is xdelta, included in most major GNU/Linux distributions, although I think a port for Windows or others do exist. I recommend this procedure. No more 90 MB downloads! Just use your old locally-stored download and update it with a 4 MB patch! It slices! It dices! And comes with a free toaster!

All the better. It adds more professionalism to Wesnoth. For a lot of computer games, you never need to worry about installing/updating things for MP as it does it automatically when you join games. I think a synchronization of add-ons would be more critical and important than aesthetic improvements of the update interface as it increases use of updates and decreases stress and random guys not knowing what add-ons are annoying everyone by having one less person involved.

[Iris]

It would be nice for the campaign server to have something like this, but first we have to add true version support in addons management.

Once that is done, someone might want to work on XDelta integration and whatnot. I have a special love relation with that utility.

[Aethaeryn]

I don't know if this has been suggested before because the terms are too common to search for, but I'll post it anyway. I posted it here because it's related to redoing the add-on interface.

There should be some kind of tab layout that organizes the content type so people get what they want. Why tabs instead of an extra column? Less clutter and easier organization. When people look at the add-on list, they probably have at least the type of what they want in mind and it would be easier to see only them than to have people have to sort by type and not be able to sort by other criteria as well.

The tabs could be organized as follows: All Add-ons, Featured*, Eras, MP maps, Campaigns, and Other. It wouldn't add too much to it, maybe a line's worth of height to it, but would really make the disorganized list easy - sometimes you have to download something to see what it really is.

The All Add-ons, Featured, and Other tabs may also have type columns. When uploading or updating an add-on, the creator could choose which type from a drop down, Other prompting a custom typing of what type it is.

*Or some other name stating that they're well-done and popular. I really like the idea of the presence of such a function to allow Wesnothian players who don't go to the forums to find the more complete/polished add-ons and thus allow them to have more fun.

[irrevenant]

Note: for the poor low-bandwidth people that download BFW as its source code package, and that don't know, there are always XDeltas for most development and stable releases. The required program is xdelta, included in most major GNU/Linux distributions, although I think a port for Windows or others do exist. I recommend this procedure.

It would be good for Wesnoth.org to have this info somewhere prominent.

Currently if you want to download (eg.) a Windows version of Wesnoth, the link takes you straight to the full download. Perhaps it would be better to link it to an appropriate section of the download page that gives you a choice between a full dld and an Xdelta, along with info what an X-Delta is.

[fyorl]

I don't know if this has been suggested before because the terms are too common to search for, but I'll post it anyway. I posted it here because it's related to redoing the add-on interface.

There should be some kind of tab layout that organizes the content type so people get what they want. Why tabs instead of an extra column? Less clutter and easier organization. When people look at the add-on list, they probably have at least the type of what they want in mind and it would be easier to see only them than to have people have to sort by type and not be able to sort by other criteria as well.

The tabs could be organized as follows: All Add-ons, Featured*, Eras, MP maps, Campaigns, and Other. It wouldn't add too much to it, maybe a line's worth of height to it, but would really make the disorganized list easy - sometimes you have to download something to see what it really is.

The All Add-ons, Featured, and Other tabs may also have type columns. When uploading or updating an add-on, the creator could choose which type from a drop down, Other prompting a custom typing of what type it is.

*Or some other name stating that they're well-done and popular. I really like the idea of the presence of such a function to allow Wesnothian players who don't go to the forums to find the more complete/polished add-ons and thus allow them to have more fun.

This could be achieved with filters (like I suggested already). Just click a checkbox to filter 'Eras' and only the Eras show up in the list. No need for tabs.

[hagabaka]

I think rather than adding ratings and filters to the addon UI, it would be better to have a website display that kind of information. Better yet, provide a web API so that people can write programs to easily fetch the addon information and do whatever with them.

Wesnoth's GUI framework is impressive, but it still lacks many features which are already implemented by general-purpose UI toolkits, for example the ability to copy text from labels, filter-as-you-type listviews, etc. Adding those features would take a lot of work and make wesnoth bloated, because they wouldn't be used extensively in other parts of the game. The current addon UI already provides the basic functionality people want -- to list and download selected addons. Functionalities like ratings, categorization, filtering, detailed description, maintainers contact, don't need to be built into wesnoth.

By the way, http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/UserScenarios already describes some external ways to download and view addons.

[fyorl]

I beg to differ. I think having an external website would make the game less user-friendly (as people would have to download and extract files and place them in various folders) and detract from the professionalism of the game. A few extra features could make the add-on interface much better and easily usable without making the game bloated. Essentially, all of the information is being delivered by the server, all that the game is doing is displaying different amounts of that data on-request, it's not having to generate or manipulate it particularly, just read and output. Those sort of function won't really make the game bloated.