Wondering why we are making all Vehicles seperate packages?

[pooty]

So its actually a wonder any of this works right... allow me to explain a bit. So UT has a "namespace" for classes -- Everything in UT is an object with a name. However the biggest failing is that the namespace is package.objectclass

However, when some objects are loaded into a map, typically vs seperate file it goes into a default bucket called myLevel. This means if we have something like this (actual example)
FireTank.MinotaurTurret
Arbalest.MinotaurTurret
Minotaur.MinotaurTurret

And they get loaded into the map seperately by say loading Minotaur, then FireTank, then Arbalest, guess which MinotaurTurret class you get? I'm not even sure if its the first one or last one. Many of the homegrown vehicles over the years leverage other classes, which if fine in and of itself -- in this case for reduced damage from the mino minigun.

But including other source classes in different vehicles was was a terrible way to do it (and Snarf has actually given us a better way, by just check a class by Name property which EVERY class has vs. using actual class).

But as you can imagine this potentially has the side effect of vehicles not being consistent to malfunctions (anyone remember short circuit/plasmatank fire malfuctions..) to even crashing the map. Potentially also this makes maps/vehicles larger by including classes that should be defined elsewhere. Having Vehicles separately also makes Maps smaller, you down load the Mino package once, and use it on many maps vs. having to download a giant map with all the vehicles. For example, Minus-KitchenSink has gone from 111MB down to 94MB (not huge, but it is shrinking).

So please report any odd issues with vehicles so we can clean them up. I want to thank Snarf for hard work in get us I'd say a good 80% there and fixing many annoying glitches!

[Provert]

Thanks for everyone's hard work. I know it's hard to break 20+ yrs of how to play this game to accepting the new stuff, but it's been fun so far. I think not caching anything is helping with the mismatched files. Again, a habit I've had for many years that had to broken.

[pooty]

Again, a habit I've had for many years that had to broken.

Yep when playing over a much slower network where downloading 20MB took forever.... Like the 9600 connection notes in that UT2004 doc... most of us have some pretty fast internet now so even download 100mb isn't anything

[McLovin]

...
Yep when playing over a much slower network where downloading 20MB took forever.... Like the 9600 connection notes in that UT2004 doc...
...

Ha, back in the early 80s I tried downloading 14 Mb of stuff from our University computer, took about 2 days tying up my phone line, LOL

[Tater]

For example, Minus-KitchenSink has gone from 111MB down to 94MB (not huge, but it is shrinking).

Woohoo!
Awesome if you don't play for a while and miss a few updates, it felt like every game the other night I was a "late join", and the teams would be offset.