Arma Addon Sync 2009

[.kju [PvPscene]]

well any mission is always compatible to any version of the islands
in a technical and practical sense.

to avoid that the config would need a different cfgPatches class
or people had to rename their island (in pbo name and config class).

so again in a practical sense you only have new islands popping
up like your problem with new yomatools server ***

[Yoma]

**Minor progress report**
-started work on "importing" data from remote server db
It still has lots of issues, but the basics seems to work fine.
-next in line will be downloading this file, verify the md5 of the file and import it (the nice thing about this is that the tool will be able to tell if you even need to think about updating your addons)
-I'm still a long way from making a first workable beta version, but the good news is that i now have "proof of concept".
I think a lot of admins will like the fact that you'll be able to alter for example game ip without the need to warn all players that it has changed. Same goes for TS settings.
-I'm still in doubt about importing addon passwords and ts passwords, i think i'll make that optional when creating the db to put online.

One problem i have has to do with "security": importing the server settings is a good thing (eases configuration a lot), but i wouldn't want people to put db's online ruining the settings of other servers. If anyone has a good idea on this please let me know.
At the moment i think of it like this:
the url one uses to download the server settings is most likely the only thing to be unique.
What i could implement is something like: if the url stored in the remote db differs from the url you entered at server config level, do not import the settings.
This way it should be impossible to ruin settings of an other server unless you actually spoof the remote server url.

[Yoma]

**Minor progress report**

-I've been looking into providing a "game server browser" in my tool as well (compare it too the ingame server browser).
It works pretty well atm, but uses an external tool to query the servers. The great thing about this external tool is that it's actively under development and could provide an easier interface when switching to Arma2.
My goal here is to provide some kind of interface so you can add servers to a "default serverlist", that default server list will be the same as your "addon server serverlist".
This way users will be able to easily add servers to their default server list, and use various launch settings/download the addons needed for the server.
It even may be possible to capture some "data" from the servername string so we could further automate stuff.
I dream about something like
-select a server from the gamespy serverlist
-have the url to the file describing the "modfolders.txt" in the servername itself
-parse the string and automagically "know" where to get the correct addons.

[Yoma]

**Minor progress report**
-I think i'll leave the "repositry" serverside in xml after all.
(it has the benefit of being easy to "generate" with external tools / edit etc)
-I'll keep the local database idea as it eases up a lot of stuff.
-I also think about reading the xml directly from remote source as this could greatly ease up integration with websites (untill now the idea would have been to download the entire xml in a compressed format, extract it and then use it, but if the amount of files/data in the xml is not overly big then actually a direct read could ease up a lot of stuff for me)
-Bought a halfdecent FTP component this means that given a lot of development the tool could actually "sync" the files to an ftp server/ delete files from an ftp server that are no longer needed. This could make deployment/maintenance a breeze for admins.

[Yoma]

**minor progress report**
-working on a lot of gui stuff.
-As more and more full mods are being released we are starting to see more and more "server mod x events". I've been thinking about this and maybe it would be nice to have some kind of "event" support inside the tool, where users could be notified of upcoming events and serveradmins could prepare a special "event" sync on the server, with server password optionally included as well as TS settings. If you have any good thoughts on this, don't hesitate to tell them.

[Yoma]

**minor progress report**
-The built in gamespy browser now has saveable filters, so you can build and save your own filters
(stuff like give me all COOP servers running 1.15 with mod X)

[.kju [PvPscene]]

got the chance to test. very cool

[PuFu]

somehow i missed this thread....had a look throgh all of it, and it sounds better than expected Yoma!

looking forward to seeing it released

[MattXR]

Nice one yoma glad you got round to doing the gamespy feature.

[Yoma]

**minor progress update**
-currently kneedeep into developing the "repositry generator"
The gui will have a lot of nice (drag drop) features and i think it will just work out a lot better then in the previous version. My goal is to make generating a repositry something a 10 year old kid could do if he just follows the correct steps.
I'm allso aiming for an "ftp upload sync" so you can have the tool actually upload the correct addons to your ftp server. (you'll still be able to use your preffered ftp client, but the nice thing about including the upload part is that i can actually go check what you need to upload and maybe delete files that are no longer needed from the FTP)
However, if people want to use this feature i would strongly advise them to use a separate FTP account (locked in a separate "userdirectory") for this purpose.
Currently the tool is progressing rapidly and technically (i hope also practically) it will be a lot better then the previous version.