BobHegwood wrote:If I may here...
The size of the base installation is a factor whether people realize it or not. Since I'm using a very fast cable connection, I really don't mind downloading large files. I would like to point out, though, that when people are downloading the latest releases of Celestia from Shatters Net, the forum's performance slows to a crawl. Hasn't anyone else noticed this?
I would opt for optional language pack downloads if it's all the same to others here. Anything you can do to reduce the size of the entire package would be better for the entire community would it not?
At the risk of getting yelled at again, I would also point out that the ML could also host these language packs.
Sorry, but I have only heard rumors of what happened while I was away, so I'm just offering the suggestion.
If this suggestion is offensive, please believe me, it is NOT meant to be.
Thanks, Bob
No offense taken, Bob. But for something like language packs that are really part of the core program, we'd probably just use SourceForge for storage. The official Celestia releases aren't actually stored on shatters.net; I think it's the increased forum activity around release time that slows down the forums.
I don't see a big problem with the size of the Celestia package doubling since 2003. Disk storage and network speeds have more than kept pace with this growth. For the benefit of dial-up users, we could split the Chinese and Japanese fonts (the Cyrillic glyph sets are much smaller) into a separate language package. I'm ok with this, but someone would have to commit to maintaining this package, as I simply don't have time to do it.
Post 1.5.1, we could look into generating the glyph sets at run time instead of supplying font textures in the Celestia package. In addition to reducing the package size, this would allow users to pick whatever fonts they wanted from the set installed on their computers.
--Chris
