I've installed ZK on the new PC

Hi!

While I'm in the business trip with my office laptop, I'd like to share my experience dealing with fresh ZK installation. Imagine for a moment I'm a new user and want to see some random replay (which I genuinely want to do)

1) I went to http://zero-k.info/Wiki/Download in order to download a lobby client. While client DL itself is fast, it took me about 50(!!!) minutes to download chobby(zk:menu) & zk:stable. I almost got old waiting for DL to complete and and it's only 500(!!!) MB of size. Very-very slow.

2) After Chobby was finally downloaded I choose Replays --> Download replays and got here: http://zero-k.info/Battles in my Firefox. In the replays I selected this replay: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/451580 and pressed "Watch Replay Now". Once. Then I pressed it again, and again, and again. And surprise nothing happened. No replay started, no error message was shown, just bare silence... Fortunately I'm quite knowledgeable of what to do, so I went back to Chobby and selected "replays" tab and it did show the replay I was looking for.

3) After I selected the replay I was looking for and pressed start, I got the spring's error message "Archive living land v2.03 not found" and afterwards spring terminated abnormally.

If I was a new player and not 6+ years spring/ZK veteran with quite some knowledge of how things work, I'd immediately tag ZK as slow and buggy piece of .... software, which never works and would hardly ever tried it again.

My suggestions:
1) Figure something out with Rapid. It's not rapid at all.
2) Web --> Chobby interaction doesn't work. At least on my PC (Win 10/Firefox)
3) Replay is started without making sure, that required resources (map in this case) are available. Just a big oversight.

Generally I think it's worthwhile that Chobby dev team (whom I truly respect) tested what kind of experience new lobby delivers to new players.

Thank you!

BTW, after my spring has crashed, I was unable to find "ZK lobby" program in the start menu. I searched for Zero-K (only found a folder where whole content resides) and Chobby ([why would I know the name?] and it only yields a few random files, which are related to the game itself, but not related to chobby.exe).

Perhaps after the installation has been successful, Chobby should add itself as an "application" to Windows, so in case of crash/restart it's discoverable (so one won't go to http://zero-k.info/Wiki/Download again)

So why is the latest lobby program called Chobby.exe? (I get "obby" from lobby, but "Ch"?)

The original was called Zero-K.exe iirc, which made a lot more sense.

Not to be escaping responsibility, but all these particular issues sound like infra issues. Except maybe the missing map issue, can't tell for sure, but it suggests lobby didn't do a particular check that it can/and should be able to.

PS: Yes, Chobby's exe should be called Zero-K.exe, so users know what to click. Internally in development, it should be called chobby or zkchobby since then we know what we're talking about.
PS2: For those curious, chobby's name stems from "Chili" + "lobby", as it's the ingame lobby. It runs on uber and supports other games so no reason it should be called ZK Lobby as far as the technical aspects go.


PS3: The most important takeaway from this is that ZK shouldn't be released to Steam until after a long time of dedicated testing. I'd allocate at least one month (but preferably something closer to three) to that alone: meaning complete feature freeze and bug fixing.

This "lobby not checking map presence/sending map name to download to wrapper when starting replay" is possible, as I said - I haven't implemented that so I dunno. Wrapper doesn't need to be used as map downloads is something Chobby can do normally.

I don't believe "lobby not responding to "start replay" command" without proof (infolog), because it works for me. Are you sure the command is properly sent? Maybe the user wasn't logged in to the site because the session token wasn't transmitted correctly?

Can you show me a link? It's interesting..
Also for the download on rapid, non ZK servers are used, maybe they have some issues with some regions?

I guess we could prepare zip to download all at once from the main server.

stop being lobsters and use bittorrent protocol for downloads
- spring, zk itself and all maps can be easily torrented
- embed torrent support into chobby
- spin up 1-2-3-5 servers(depending on $$$ and desired reliability - use existing one if we're very poor) with ALL needed files, they will be used as initial seeders
- as users start to download new updates they will take significant part of the load off from seeding server(s)
=> faster, more stable and cheaper updates for everyone

and threw this piece of shit called rapid into trash bin pls :|

quote: Also for the download on rapid, non ZK servers are used, maybe they have some issues with some regions?

no issues if torrenting is used, user base is always geographically diverse

and pls don't tell me about law issues with torrenting, they can go and f*k themselves - there is nothing illegal in using torrenting for a just cause(sharing files that are under OSS license).

don't register such maps on torrent tracker =) let users bear all associated pains
as far as I'm concerned 99.99% zk content is under GPL

Torrents can be problematic practically, even if you're doing it for the technically legal and even valid reason (just this week I ran into some issues at the uni when I was downloading some dicom image torrents for research).

They're also unnecessary if Steam will be how most of ZK content gets distributed.

Lastly I don't believe your claim that they're universally faster for updates. Rapid provides very small update diffs and I don't see how torrent would beat that (unless you re-impelment your delta update system in torrent - and good luck finding the time to do that).

I don't think you understand the difference between full downloads and diff updates (which is in the 100x).

Geographical location shouldn't matter, should it? Unless you're living under a VPN/blocked IP.