Setup: Shared DCS Content library for storing common assets for multiple installations

[Worrazen]

Hi

I've heard that not a small amount of people including myself have multiple DCS versions installed on the same system, even more so now with the dedicated server installation into the mix. It might be helpful to support having a common library location that could be the central place where same (or similar) content could be read from, without having it duplicated to each specific installation.

There's a bit of a question how effective this would be if patch-level's vary significantly, but even with many differences I've seen cases where ample amount of gigabytes are still copied locally from a neighbouring installation and only the rest has to be downloaded from the internet.

Ofcourse only applicable content would be put into this location. There would just be a bit more complexity to each installation, you would have similar folder structure in DCS Shared and DCS Server/Client/etc installations, but different contents, but still I don't think it would be that of a problem for modding, while for a normal user it shouldn't be noticable at all.

There may be other issues that could arise with this approach so this has to be thought out how would it be implemented. Perhaps to avoid issues with installation-specific updaters working with this common shared assets library, the asset library could be it's own installation with it's own separate updater.

Also, I am aware of the recent modular dedicated server feature, that's a big improvement in this direction, but it's not the same and this idea should still stand on it's own, and it would add ontop to make the overall DCS ecosystem storage space requirements more lighter.

The more I'm thinking about it, the more issues I think could be uncovered and it might take quite a bit of re-doing the installations and the way patching and patch updates work to make it effective, and it could even bring some inconveniences to the users.

That said I have my doubts but also how many people actually have multiple installations and use them much, I don't really know.

I just had it on my mind for some time and I thought I should at least mention it, perhaps someone thought about it before and what they've figured out discussing about it.

 

EDIT: One fairly good reason against this is beta testing where you'd actually want to have separation, and other players and groups who would want to hoop between patch levels when one doesn't work out for them. So updating the shared content library would update and ofcourse an installation wouldn't be able to work

EDIT2: This kind of a feature might only have a good practical use case for where a user would want to host a server of the same edition on the system where he plays at.

So for example OpenBeta Client and OpenBeta Server on PC1. The idea would morph itself into just a server installation's capability of something along the lines of "let's just use the files we can from the OpenBeta Client installation, without copying/duplicating it, and download the rest which are different to our directory". This would work out because in that scenario a user would most likely want to keep both installations on the same patch-level, because he is to be participating in the server he is hosting.

The server's updater would have an extra dialog where it would ask you to select the location which it would use existing content from another applicable installation, a dropdown box to select which installation (or a manual browsing).

If it wants to update, it should notify the user that it has to modify that "host" installation, but that would most likely render that installation broken, so it should, with user prompt, launch the host's updater and update that first.

Ofcourse this feature could be done vice versa, with the client having this capability and not the server, but I think that on systems when only a server is first installed, there's probably no plan to be playing due to it being a different tier of hardware system.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Worrazen