Open Trail v1.0 download problems

I just tried downloading Open Trail v1.0 several times. Between 500kb and 1MB of the file will download and then the download will end. Obviously, the impartial zip file cannot be opened.

Other games on the site seem to download fine. Does it have to do with Open Trail's monstrous size? Is it some problem on my end?

What's the deal?

It won't work for me neither.

I'm guessing it is the size thing. When Barnabus uploaded his "every single one of these short little game-like things" zip file that was 100+ MB, a lot of people had problems getting it to download, too... so I'm guessing files in the 80+ MB range just don't work well on this site, for some reason.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

Here is a theory. I notice that the amount of data that gets downloaded on each attempt seems to be random.

My guess is that when somebody clicks the link to download a large file, the download.php script load that whole file into memory. This probably uses more memory than is allowed by Dreamhost's memory-limit daemon. The memory limit daemon kills the php process as soon as it notices, but because it is a separate process, and has a lot of other processes to watch, the exact time when it notices and kills is random.

If my theory is correct, there is probably a workaround that would allow the downloads to be served without ever loading them into memory via php, but I wouldn't know exactly how to do it without seeing the source code of download.php

aaah

Your theory is correct. I've changed it to make archive files download directly.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Ah, downloaded it. It's pretty interesting for someone new to SS...

This game has a really bizarre walkabout style. I just opened it up to see if it worked, I'm not sure this needed to be an 80 MB file.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

I got curious, so I unlumped Open Trail.rpg, and looked inside. As expected the sound effects were very large, and the music tracks were ginormous.

...strangely ginormous, actually. The largest one was 13 megabytes. I opened it in audacity and re-exported it, and the resulting file was a mere 2.5 megabytes.

it appears that the author imported all of their music and sound a maximum quality levels. I guess it is easy to misunderstand ogg quality levels. You might think quality 9 means 90% quality therefore 10% crappyness. it is nothing like that.

-1 you will probably notice scratchiness
0 you might notice a little bit of scratchiness
1 you might notice a tiny bit of scratchiness
2 you might notice a tiny bit of scratchiness on a few files
3 you are unlikely to notice much scratchiness (similar to mp3)
4 you are very unlikely to notice much scratchiness (better than mp3)
5 it will sound perfect
6 you are a hipster audiophile who likes to pretend you have better ears than everybody else
7-10 you didn't even try the lower encodings, and just assumed the numbers were percentages


I make fun, but actually for someone to assume that choosing quality 9 or 10 is a good thing is not a crazy thing to do at all. The way the numbers actually work is not intuitive. I should add descriptive quality hints to the quality selecter screen (although that will be no help to people who use some external program to encode their ogg files)

You might also put some kind of note that says if you're importing from mp3 anyway, it is useless to try to increase the quality.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

The latest nightly now has subjective text descriptions.



That is a good point, Mogri. if converting from mp3, a high quality ogg level is just more accurately reproducing the lossyness of the mp3

My personal favorite ogg quality level is 0, and I rarely go as high as 1 or 2 for a few select sounds in my own games.

This is good to know! I've been using mp3s. I'll just skip to ogg next time.

Encoding the OGG at the same bitrate as the original MP3 would be best, which would require either another utility or pulling in an MP3 reading library, but I'm sure that things like VBR will give us trouble.

Edit, also, the OGG quality levels correspond to bitrates, though that varies by encoder, and VBR complicates everything. It doesn't make any sense to say that some quality level is "comparable to mp3". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Technical_details I think we should include those as guides -- you can easily check what bitrate your MP3s are.

I rephrased a few of the descriptions and removed the comparisons to mp3