As documented in my previous post, I found out with some questionable testing that butler is the best solution currently for Adastral’s versioning.

…That doesn’t mean we can’t make it better. One thing I already knew was that butler uses brotli compression (with the option for gzip instead). Brotli isn’t what came to my mind when I think of file compression, usually Zstandard does (see the arch repos) - I remember reading somewhere that this was a deliberate choice and that brotli just worked somewhere, but I can’t find any sources for that. With blazing fast decompression times, I thought changing to zstd compression would improve patching speed on clients, and maybe even lower patch generation times on servers!

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What’s better than a relaxing day after finishing your exams?

SPREADSHEETS.

For context, this all began about two months ago when I was informed by a colleague at TF2c that they were looking into a system called desync for versioning as opposed to Butler which was (spoilers, still is) the incumbent versioning protocol/program.

This seemed like an eerie repeat of last year when TVN was binned in favour of Butler, OFToast II died and Adastral was born, but feelings aren’t cold hard data unfortunately. Time for some data crunching.

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Well it’s been a bit, eh?

Sorry for not writing anything on this for a year and a bit, I’ve been “busy”.

Busy doing what, you may very validly ask.

…Well I finished my first year at university which was definitely an experience, but also working on other things.

To catch you up:

• Codename:Delta, formerly Delta-T, has been permenantly shelved. Codebase was too hard to work with and it was too ambitious for a first game.
• OFToast II was cancelled due to (amongst other things) TF2c just having a better solution than us. I’ll explain this later.
• Adastral has risen - a joint installer. For all the soucemods. (I mean of this sort of TF2 inspired mutltiplayer sphere that isn’t on steam due to the legal grey area)

It’s been a long year and a bit but it’s simultaneously gone really, really quick. There’s been drama of sorts, arguments, great progress, months of inactivity and everything inbetween.

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If you didn’t know already, I’m one of the lead developers for the launcher of Open Fortress, a free mod for TF2.

Now the history of the launchers is a story for another time as it’s somewhat confusing and predates my involvement, but I joined at the beginning of 2021 roughly, and the subject of this post, TVN, was implemented by welt at the beginning of 2022.

Now the first question that a few people may have is “What even is TVN?”

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Good evening!

This is my blog- it’s a static site with no Javascript and no HTTPS as of yet, so you can view it on your Windows 3.1 machine. Instead of handwriting HTML (in which case this would’ve taken a fair bit longer), I used a modified version of the smol theme for Hugo. The modifications to the theme have been limited, but I think the changes made help improve the looks of the site.

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