Download Link Doesnt Work, Other Sites Have Only Older Version

[rickastley]

Simply trying to download this mod, official download link from civfanatics does not work, and searching google for other links only shows much older versions


working link to current version would be nice

thanks

 

[Bringa]

Hey, it's "bring up the torrent idea again" time!

I really can't see a reason why we shouldn't host the latest big version on a torrent. Right now that would be FallFromHeaven2021.exe, at around 280MB. Perfectly good size for a torrent. The patches can still be here on civfanatics, since they're small and easily downloadable.

I could upload a torrent, but my connection is really weak. I can't dedicate more than 5k upstream to the torrent without severely slowing down my own internet access, and I'd have to turn it off from time to time. If anyone has a better connection and is willing to put up a torrent, this might be a solution for those people who have no luck with 3ddownloads.

I've looked around a little bit and unfortunately there does not seem to be a general purpose, anyone can upload free public tracker which restricts itself to LEGAL files. So we'd have to use something like demonoid. I'd like to hear from the team if THAT is the one big problem that discourages them from running the download as a torrent, because if it is I can look into running the tracker on my server.

 

[BCalchet]

I usually provide a temporary mirror when asked, but I agree that a torrent would be handy.

 

[Bringa]

BCalchet, if we get an okay from Kael, maybe you could donate your bandwidth to a torrent instead? I'll help seed, and once we get like a dozen people or so seeding, it should be pretty persistent.

 

[BCalchet]

Oh, of course, I'd be glad to seed a torrent instead, if you create one.

 

[Bringa]

Yeah, I'll do that. I just want to wait for an okay from Kael. I remember the first time I brought up torrents he was very much opposed to the idea. It's his project so he should have the final say.

 

[BeefontheBone]

The problem he had with it (which was eminently sensible) was that versions were changing so often he wanted to avoid torrents of old versions knocking about. That's probably less true now - 0.21f, for instance, has been current for a good while. I'd suggest holding off on a torrent until at least 0.22's release, and probably for the first few bugfix patches after that (since they'll likely come in rapid succession).

 

[rickastley]

I usually provide a temporary mirror when asked, but I agree that a torrent would be handy.

( http://lewser.mine.nu/FallfromHeaven2021.exe is up right now, since it was a while since last time.)

thank you very much for the link

also, I think future releases / revisions should be hosted on somewhere stable (not sure how old the civfanatics official link is)

filefront.com is great and free, or maybe gamershell

prob less hassle for individuals to put on there than a torrent system for 1 file.

cheers

 

[rickastley]

I usually provide a temporary mirror when asked, but I agree that a torrent would be handy.

( http://lewser.mine.nu/FallfromHeaven2021.exe is up right now, since it was a while since last time.)

actually that link stopped working for me as well

it went at 30k to 4%, then stopped completely

said it would take about 2-3 hours to complete, which is ok but it actually just died on me this now

 

[BCalchet]

actually that link stopped working for me as well

it went at 30k to 4%, then stopped completely

said it would take about 2-3 hours to complete, which is ok but it actually just died on me this now

That's odd - others are downloading stuff off me with no apparent problems... either way, just keep trying - everything looks okay on this end.

(Another reason why a torrent would be handy - no problems with resuming downloads, ever!)

 

[Kael]

thank you very much for the link

also, I think future releases / revisions should be hosted on somewhere stable (not sure how old the civfanatics official link is)

filefront.com is great and free, or maybe gamershell

prob less hassle for individuals to put on there than a torrent system for 1 file.

cheers

I tried filefront. I got locked out there for months with issues. Ive never had a problem with 3dgamers before this incident, they seem to do great. Im not against moving it if there is a better site.

I am against torrents at an almost relgious level. Even outside of the amount of bots, trojans and viruses are transmitted through them they suck up so much bandwidth. Not only why they are running, but when they are running and even after being uninstalled.

The reason is that a torrent client tells the world about its existance. Once you are on those lists other torrent devices will constantly be checking in and trying to talk to your workstation. So even if you have uninstalled the client your bandwidth is still being used by all the other torrent devices trying to get to your computer. You can take a network trace and see all the activity thats going on, its nasty. I would hate to subject someone to that just because they want to play FfH.

 

[rickastley]

Ya, I think just a stable regular hosted site would be fine

if 3dgamers gets it back up too that is ok, was just frustrating searching entire internet and official link and come up with no current version

 

[BCalchet]

I tried filefront. I got locked out there for months with issues. Ive never had a problem with 3dgamers before this incident, they seem to do great. Im not against moving it if there is a better site.

I am against torrents at an almost relgious level. Even outside of the amount of bots, trojans and viruses are transmitted through them they suck up so much bandwidth. Not only why they are running, but when they are running and even after being uninstalled.

The reason is that a torrent client tells the world about its existance. Once you are on those lists other torrent devices will constantly be checking in and trying to talk to your workstation. So even if you have uninstalled the client your bandwidth is still being used by all the other torrent devices trying to get to your computer. You can take a network trace and see all the activity thats going on, its nasty. I would hate to subject someone to that just because they want to play FfH.

...are you sure this is bittorrent you're talking about? I recognize none of the problems you're mentioning, and I'm completely sure most clients don't tell the world about their existence or add themselves to some sort of mysterious lists other than (,quite temporarily, ) peer lists on trackers.
Bots, trojans and viruses are a complete non-issue when compared to less safe methods of transferring files, such as, say, http or ftp.

I, for one, have no mysterious mass network activity going on despite having been more or less constantly using bittorrent for over a year with the same computer and ip address, and I can't seem to find anyone else with those kinds of problems...

 

[Kael]

Yeah, Im pretty sure. Shutdown your internet and bittorrent applications, install wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/) and let it capture the network activity on your computer for a little while. I think you will find a lot of activity that may surprise you.

 

[BCalchet]

Ah, looks like I found the problem you're talking about, which isn't one with bittorrent as such.
Using DHT, a technology for trackerless torrents common in newer clients, apparently causes mass incoming UDP packets for up to a week - When I turned it on, the previously absent packets started flowing.

 

[pamme]

yup..like someone else said, compared to other forms of transferring files, bittorrent is probably the one safer ones against maliciously added trojans and viruses. as long as the original uploaded torrent is legit, you won't really have any problems with viruses getting through. that's because torrents use hash checks to make sure that the file you are downloading from someone else is the same as the file originally posted. http hosts however, mostly don't do any such checks.

don't know much about the excessive network activity but from what I know, bittorrent distribution is pretty legit. lots of open source software projects and things like linux distributions make use of it. also, from what I understand about torrents, the torrent client tells the tracker about its existence and only through that does it get distributed to other peers and/or uh..people tracking bots.

actually, now that i think about it, did you perhaps use a less than scrupulous torrent client? the things you describe sound more like the result of spyware and adware than the direct result of bittorrenting.

 

[onedreamer]

what about having both a torrent and an http or ftp server ?

 

[Bringa]

Kael: I won't speak to the technical aspects until I've researched that a little, but what you describe really doesn't sound likely. It wouldn't make sense for torrent clients to continually query a client just because they saw it on their DHT. They query, the client doesn't answer, they remove it from their local copy of the DHT. That seems to make most sense. The biggest problem as far as optimization for speed is concerned in torrent clients is the amount of connections; any client optimized for speed will keep these down to a minimum. Thus, continually querying an address just for the off-chance it might come back is silly for the client. Evolution in computer design suggests that those clients which are now the biggest (Azureus, BitComet, µTorrent) have become the biggest because they delivered the best functionality (speed being the largest factor in there), so we can deduce that this sort of behavior will not be found in them.

Maybe I should watch less House

As I said, I can't speak to the technical aspects because I don't have any facts. What I can speak to is my own experience. I've been using µTorrent for a long time now (and other torrent clients before that), and I've never had any kinds of problems with bandwidth after turning off the client. Also, the reality of the situation is that most people out there ARE already using Torrent clients. It's the de facto standard of p2p these days, and I find it incredibly convenient. I'm not alone in that.

As onedreamer pointed out, there's no reason why we shouldn't have both. The vast majority of gamers, who already have a torrent client installed anyway, can get the torrent, and those who don't want to install a torrent client can get it from 3d downloads. Really, no activity on your side is required, Kael; a simple "okay, do that" will suffice and we'll take care of it.

Also, as one person expressed that common misunderstanding a little earlier, I'd like to point out once more that we would not host patches on torrents. That doesn't seem to make much sense. We'll only host the MAJOR versions (like 0.22, that will be the next major version), which run up to around 280MB right now. The patches would still be distributed through the civfanatics download system, as before. A new major version is released what, ever two or three months?

So, a summary:

a) torrents as additional option. For Kael, everything remains the same: he still uploads a new version on 3ddownloads or whatever, and the first torrent-guy to download it from 3ddownloads puts it into a torrent and posts the link for the torrent. This is only done for major versions

b) most gamers will have a torrent client installed anyway. No one will need to install a torrent client just to get FfH. However, if an outage should happen again as happened these days with 3ddownloads, there will be another option. Also, since 3ddownloads doesn't work well with download managers at all, we now have resume.

c) all we need from the team is a little "okay, do that".


And as for the alleged horrors of BitTorrent, I'll make some research and get back to you. I can only repeat: I do not have any kind of problem here.

 

[Kael]

For those that are interested here are three traces of bittorrent activity:

bittorrent.zip

The first, bittorrent-idle-crap.pcap, is what happens when a bittorrent client is left alone on a pc so you can see the amount of activity and connections it is making to remote devices.

The second, bittorrent-launch-search-maddona.pcap, shows a bittorrent client being loaded. By following the trace you can see where is connects (surveymonkey.com, questionmarket.com, zedo.com and others). Some with considerable delays. Slowing your computer, and putting your information at risk. This activity is common among viruses whose authors write them to force you to ping websites in the background (they want to use your computer as a bot to increase hit counts on sites they get paid to send traffic to).

The third, bit-torrent-startup-background.pcap, is the network traffic that is being generated by a bittorrent client (this is from a clean system with only the bittorrent client installed). This is a big trace with a lton of traffic.

The sad part of this is that if you can read those traces you are probably able to mitigate the issues. I worry more about the people that can't and dont know what their computer is doing in the background. Which is why I feel bad if anyone grabs a bittorrent client to download the mod and ends up with the kind of slowness and above activity because of it.

 

[BCalchet]

So, uh, what bittorrent client is that? It certainly *sounds* like malware - µTorrent doesn't do anything remotely like that on startup, and no strange outgoing connections appear at all when left on its own.