A new download center: gethering ideas and proposals

[IgorEliezer]

Hi,

Until now, I've been the guy who maintains the simutrans.com portal (as you can follow here).

The problem is that, Simutrans is a bit, say, complex. Simutrans is available for 4 operating systems along with ~20 paksets. Every time that something new is released, I need to update manually the site. If a pakset is released (and if someone warns me about), I update the pakset gallery. When a major release is out, I need to update and review approximately 30 links, version numbers, dates, info about the paksets, etc... both the download page and the pakset page are edited and reuploaded on the WWW to be available to the external public.

(Not mentioning the info about tools and other Simutrans-related sites too. But this is another subject... x.x)

It became an overwhelming task, consequently the (pseudo) download center became outdated. So, I decided today to make things simpler, at least for me: I removed the download links and non-permanent info; the few links that I left now point to the forum or to a specific topic of the forum... until the next update and things there become outdated again :S (you can see the results: download page and the pakset page)

But I am not happy with the results, really.

Therefore, I open this discussion so we can find a good solution for people to find, download and install Simutrans in a simple way, like any other game, since Simutrans doesn't "come" in a usual fashion.

I see the download page as the front door of our community. If people get in trouble there, they will not be able to get into and know about the deeper rooms of the community, our projects and activities.

I have recommended some people to play Simutrans. Most of them complained about the difficulties upon downloading and installation, and I ended up packing a "ready-to-play" zipfile with Simutrans+pak64 and sending them the game via e-mail.

Ideas, comments and proposals are most welcome.

[ӔO]

how does the nightly page update its links?
IMO, not the easiest to find what you want immediately, but it's not terrible. In comparison, I think winrar's download page is one of the easiest to find specific versions.


Also, doesn't simutrans now have an online installer? Any reason for not linking to the online installer?

[Lmallet]

Doesn't Sourceforge provide "latest version" links automatically?  You could possibly just point to that permanently.

[Roads]

Igor, I didn't have any problem finding and getting the game when I first heard about it.  It seems to me simutrans.com couldn't be more intuitive.  As AEO said, there is an online installer and it works beautifully for windows...I can't speak for other operating systems.

I have been and still am dependent on the community for finding more in depth things, like source code and such but I think that is as it should be since most people probably need advice from the community whenever they want/need such things as that.

[IgorEliezer]

Also, doesn't simutrans now have an online installer? Any reason for not linking to the online installer?

It does. Only for Windows.

[kierongreen]

I suspect that most problems regarding installing would come from Windows users. Hence the general recommendation for Windows users should be to use the Installer (which should hopefully be very friendly to use). Although I read in the past there's a tendency for players using this to download *every* pakset they can...

[prissi]

Linux will get a facility to download paksets if nothing is found on startup. This requires writing rights to a pakset directory, but then it will be sufficient to download only the executable.