Would an Auto Updater benefit Daidalos Team and the community?

[TheGrunch]

Originally Posted by EJGr.Ost_Caspar

Not being in such stuff... was it possible to have more than one server to load from? As you know, we mainly rely on mirrors.

Hi Caspar,
Depending upon the program used as the basis for the updater (rsync is one of the best bandwidth-wise as it only transfers changed files), nearly any number of mirrors could be provided. Using rsync or similar is usually as simple as distributing the sync software and including a short batch file, e.g.

@echo off
if not exist il2fb.exe goto :noexeerror
echo Sync IL-2 1946 with mirror:
echo 1 - http://www.jgzbv.de/downloads/IL2-46/
echo 2 - http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/IL2-46/
set /p mirror= Please enter mirror number: 
goto %mirror%
:1
echo cwrsync -avz http://www.jgzbv.de/downloads/IL2-46/ ./
goto :eof
:2
echo cwrsync -avz http://atomicgamer.com/files/IL2-46/ ./ 
goto :eof
:noexeerror
echo Please run from the main IL-2 1946 directory!

Try it out, just create a file with the above content, name it whatever.bat and run it from the command prompt in a directory that also contains a file called il2fb.exe. It won't do anything because the actual file operations are just printed in this example but it proves the concept. If there is no il2fb.exe it prints an error and exits. There are various ways to make this more sophisticated including providing the mirrorlist as a separate file that can also be updated.

However, if the mods have a more sophisticated updater built around this concept already that could possibly update itself and its own mirror list etc., I don't see why it wouldn't be easier to just use that providing the authors are happy for you to do so.