Quote:Do you know the how the game is programmed so that you can make claims about the reusability of the current code, and how long it would take to adapt it? The launcher could just be getting some set of files configured statically on the server, which is a little bit different from arbitrary new files being added by players during gameplay (assuming they are stored on the server as separate files).
No, and neither do you. For all we know, how "hard" it could be to implement for Haxus depends entirely upon what already exists for such on the client and server. It could literally be a case of it already being implemented, and he forgot a bracket somewhere, or it could be almost impossible to adapt due to how the exchanges are setup.
Quote:I think this is true as long as "anything" excludes using the mechanism for partial updates for downloading the entire library. If there are several new designs, you have a good download speed, and you have a high latency to the server, though, it's possible an individual update might take longer than downloading the full update currently does, because the overhead of making all the requests might be larger than the download time saved. For example, a european with 100Mb/s download speed and 200ms ping would download the entire library in less than two seconds, but just the overhead from making requests to download 10 new ship designs would take up two seconds. In the common case this won't happen, and this cost gets spread out anyway so that the total amount of time spent downloading across all design listing updates will almost definitely be smaller. I'm not saying that he needs to implement batch requests to make caching designs an improvement, but it's needed to guarantee that it's a straight improvement always with no tradeoffs. And anyway the code changes required may not be trivial even without this feature.
Sure, but consider it's not only the user's download speed which affects the timing on this. The bandwidth available from the server-side would also matter, which already is fairly low and lowers even further during periods of high player count or just multiple people refreshing the libraries at once. I'm also speaking from experience on this with being in the UK and having a 200 down package. The entire library takes about 10 seconds to download currently. Consider also that your example of 10 new ships may not be entirely relevant, as unlike building designs, the average player wouldn't be refreshing the ship exchange every time they login, due to needing to store designs to local gear for manufacture. For buildings, at most, I've observed maybe 2 new buildings get added over the course of a week, so even given the 200ms latency in your example, you'd only have 400ms of download time per week. That's minutes of time saved compared to now.
What even