Quote:
Originally Posted by BadAim
There is no more division in the online community that there ever was (IMO). Everyone always had preferences as to what kind of server they wanted to play on, and that has not changed. The only ones who are excluded are the ones who see a cheater behind every cloud, and quite frankly I see no way for Daidalos to fix that.
I'll grant that absolute surety for competitive purposes is gone, but I reiterate, we'll probably never get that back with IL2. Why don't we just kick back and have some fun?
If I sound harsh in this post, I'm truly sorry, but as I've said 100 times before, I don't give a crap if anyone else is cheating as I don't have any money on the outcome of a given fight and I know I'm not cheating.
If some twit needs to cheat to think he has a bigger penis than I do, then that's his problem, as I know the truth.  |
That's pretty much my outlook on things as well. I know the way mods came about was not satisfactory but i can't discount the positive aspects of the whole process just because it started the wrong way.
I'll just use that content to have fun and make sure i fly on servers with a good community and attentive admins to weed out any possible troublemakers.
What Mysticpuma says about the trouble of switching between versions is true however. That's why SoW is going to be mod-friendly from the start.
If i had any say in it, i would choose a server-enforcable list, just like the difficulty settings. A mods folder would be created and all mods placed in there with their own subfolders and maybe a .ini or .txt file for the game to read the mod titles from. So, if i added a freeware mod plane, say a handley page hampden, i would have a c:\SoW\mods\Hampden folder.
Then, when i would run the game i would have a menu option called "mod/add-on management". When i clicked that, a scroling column of all installed add-ons would appear, with an on/off switch next to them. This would permit me to activate/deactivate them from within the game.
Even better yet, a similar list with slightly modified logic would be available to me when hosting a multiplayer session or running a dedicated server. In that list, all mods on the client PCs would be overriden by the host PC and set to off by default, unless the server allowed it. This would essentially prevent the client PC from using anything included in its mods folder unless specifically and individually approved by the server, all running from one version/installation and without the need to exit the game and switch the mods around.
The best thing however is that it would prevent the need for server admins to compile lengthy lists of available mods. By having the server enforced list default to an "off" state, we effectively create a universal base to start from. Then, if the server admin or host would like to enable mods, he would have to specifically state which ones would be changed to an "on" state.
Instead of having to maintain a constantly updating list of available mods, they would only have to maintain the list of mods they would actually use on their server, reducing management time by a wide margin.
This could be done by dropping the relevant files in the server's sow\mods folder so that the game can read them and display them on the server enforced mod list, thereby allowing the host to toggle their state. Alternatively and to save disk space on dedicated servers who only track data and don't have to display any graphics, maybe only the .ini and some data files from each mod could be used to read the mod and enable it, without including the textures and 3d models. Just letting the dedicated server know to allow certain files would be enough, even if these files weren't included on its hard disk.
I'm not a professional software engineer and this is a very simple solution that i came up with in the space of maybe 5 minutes, it is sufficiently modular to allow for expansion and it still allows for good control of what kind of mods people would be able to use without having to exit the game and move files around every time they want to change servers.
I'm sure that if i can come up with something like this, people like TD and the Maddox team can come up with way more refined, elegant and useful solutions for SoW.