Mainlining popular UMC tracks

[Gothyoba]

Alternatively the most popular tracks (say the top 10 most referenced tracks in add-ons) could be rolled up into a single download?

I think that's kind of what UMC Music Book 01 is

Not really. I’m not sure how the UMC Music Books are organized, but In the Lands of Madness, one of the most commonly used songs, is found in Music Book 3. In fact, none of the originally proposed exteemely popular tracks are from music book 1.

I do agree on the feature request on specific files from add-ons, though I’m not sure how hard that is to implement with the current system.

[gnombat]

Not really. I’m not sure how the UMC Music Books are organized, but In the Lands of Madness, one of the most commonly used songs, is found in Music Book 3. In fact, none of the originally proposed exteemely popular tracks are from music book 1.

I'm just looking at the download statistics, which seem to show that Book 01 is more popular than the others:

https://addons.wesnoth.org/1.18/

Of course, download statistics for the UMC Music Books may not be a very reliable indicator, since most UMC authors do not even use the UMC Music Books as dependencies, but simply copy individual music files into their own addons.

[Gothyoba]

Not really. I’m not sure how the UMC Music Books are organized, but In the Lands of Madness, one of the most commonly used songs, is found in Music Book 3. In fact, none of the originally proposed exteemely popular tracks are from music book 1.

I'm just looking at the download statistics, which seem to show that Book 01 is more popular than the others:

https://addons.wesnoth.org/1.18/

Of course, download statistics for the UMC Music Books may not be a very reliable indicator, since most UMC authors do not even use the UMC Music Books as dependencies, but simply copy individual music files into their own addons.

I suspect this might be just because of the 01 in the title meaning players will download it first and then often not dowload the rest of them. The use of these tracks in actual add-ons seems like a better indicator IMO. The others have a similar amount of downloads amongst each other which is significantly loser than the first despite containing many very popular UMC songs.

[Soliton]

A sledgehammer approach to reducing bloat would be to create a separate add-on for each music track.
It would, IMHO, stop creators embedding additional tracks into add-ons rather than using music books because the granularity would then exist to add music on a per-track basis allowing UMC to use (share) a single download for additional music tracks rather than whole music books, but it's a bit late to do this now.

There should be no issue to do that at any time. Once you do it you can change the UMC books to depend on the addons with the tracks they contain now. Addons depending on the books will continue to work and UMC authors are now free to either depend on a book addon or one with only the track they want.

It's going to add quite a few more addons but there are already a lot of addons either way. For starters you could do it just for the most popular tracks.

It will also mean some re-downloading when the switch is done so perhaps best done on a new stable release.

[Spannerbag]

...I think what you're basically looking for is a way to download individual files from an addon, rather than downloading the entire addon. Which isn't really possible right now, but it might be worthwhile making a feature request for it. (Actually, I think the add-ons server can basically do this already, but it would require a lot of changes on the client side to make it work.)

Yes, IMHO the duplication/bloat/redundancy in add-ons stems from insufficient granularity in downloads.

Alternatively the most popular tracks (say the top 10 most referenced tracks in add-ons) could be rolled up into a single download?

I think that's kind of what UMC Music Book 01 is now?

I knew I shouldn't have put that in my last post...

The problem is that most UMC authors will probably not be satisfied with just picking from the most popular tracks, because authors usually don't want their addons to sound like everyone else's addons. (It's kind of like what Yogi Berra once said about a popular restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.")

Exactly.
Plus everyone will have a different idea of what tracks should be included.
Also this doesn't address what I see as the fundamental issue of granularity.

Cheers!
-- Spannerbag

[Gothyoba]

Yes, IMHO the duplication/bloat/redundancy in add-ons stems from insufficient granularity in downloads.

I agree this is certainly at least a major part of the problem. I believe soliton proposed a good solution to this. I’m not sure about this, and I’m not sure if can know, but it could also be possible that not enough people actually know about the UMC Music Books in the first place, but that’s just speculation.

[Spannerbag]

A sledgehammer approach to reducing bloat would be to create a separate add-on for each music track....

There should be no issue to do that at any time. Once you do it you can change the UMC books to depend on the addons with the tracks they contain now. Addons depending on the books will continue to work and UMC authors are now free to either depend on a book addon or one with only the track they want.

It's going to add quite a few more addons but there are already a lot of addons either way. For starters you could do it just for the most popular tracks.

It will also mean some re-downloading when the switch is done so perhaps best done on a new stable release.

Thanks for your input.
As access to the music books will be restricted, I assume that if this were to be done, it would need a feature request?
Then, if approved, could anyone help or would it need to be the developers as this is a "core" resource?
...
Actually, thinking about it, a couple of scripts could do this automatically (assuming that's less work than manually wading through all 10 music books)?
On *nix, something in shell, perl, whatever...

Cheers!
-- Spannerbag

[Spannerbag]

Yes, IMHO the duplication/bloat/redundancy in add-ons stems from insufficient granularity in downloads.

I agree this is certainly at least a major part of the problem...

Personally, I'd like to see this done for 1.20.
It's eminently feasible, is backwards compatible and is an open-ended solution, tho' as Soliton said it will spawn a lot of additional add-ons.

Cheers!
-- Spannerbag

[Gothyoba]

One potential issue of adding so many add-ons is filling up the add-ons screen significiantly when looking for a new add-on. There are dozens of tracks in the UMC Music Books, which would significantly fill up the add-ons list. Most people looking for a general new add-on probably don’t want these individual songs cluttering their display. They might be interested in a larger add-on with multiple tracks inside, such as the UMC Music Books, but probably not dozens of individual tracks. Similarly, people looking for tracks for their add-on probably don’t want to wee a lot of other, unrelated add-ons while looking for them.

One potential solution to this is to hide these individual tracks (not the UMC music books) by default, and have an option to show them. This option would be part of the dropdown menu where you can select add-ons by type, e.g. era, campaign, core etc. A new category which would be hidden by default would he added called something like “UMC Music Tracks”. All of the ind ividual UMC music add-ons can be added to that category, which would also allow more tracks to be split into individual add-ons while addign less clutter.

The UMC Music Books should probably not be added there to allow them to be more discoverable to players, but individual tracks can. I am wondering how difficult this would be to implement into the current system?

[Soliton]

We could hide resource addons by default since IMO none of those should be useful to install alone by the average player so they are already cluttering the list right now. Though I guess especially music is often a soft/optional dependency where the players need to find and install them by themselves. Is telling them to filter for resources too much to ask? If so then I suppose we need some separation between hard and soft dependencies where the former will only be required dependencies that always get installed together with another addon and the latter need to be installed manually because some addons recognize and use them but not depend on them.

Or we improve the dependency system to express that distinction and then players can decide what optional dependencies to install with an addon...

One simple implementation might be to make the dependency list in the addon manager clickable so when you have an addon selected you can simply click a dependency and install it that way. Then you just need a second list of optional dependencies and you're done. (That would also help the case currently where you say no to installing the hard dependencies and want to later install them anyway.)

[Gothyoba]

I agree all resource add-ons should probably be hidden by default. Given the introduction of campaign-specific music to TDG, I think it would be nice to add Flight of the Drakes as a campaign-specific track for WoF.