Thanks Bradd! Looking forward to giving these a try!

Not a problem, I might require your assistance when the time comes for the site upgrade to maybe give some of the mod/file downloads in the Starshatter area a brief description. I believe I can give you access to make all the changes yourself, but that won't be until I upgrade the site (hopefully in June sometime).

You must have had a nice collection to have all of the mods from that site, I wish I had some more members that had some of the missing files I lost a year ago when I had to switch providers.

Enjoy, the site and the file area. And on that FTP info you might loose access to that once I remember to change it. So if there is a lot more files needing to get added just let me know and I will get you some special ftp access.

That sounds like a great idea. I'm sure that most folks who look in the download section will not have much of an idea of what they are downloading at this point. I am a least somewhat familiar with most of the mods that are there, so until the board is upgraded and we can get some descriptions for the mods, I'll be more than happy to at least try to answer any questions that downloaders have about the mods. If you are really curious about a given mod though, the best thing to do is download it and give it a try.

Salutations,

As the creator of a few Starshatter mods... I will give descriptions of my favorite and or best one. SOLCOM

SolCom is my best mod for Starshatter:The Gathering Storm and is arguably the most complete Starshatter mod extant. It includes an entire fleet of ships of every variation including two modified Marakan ships and a unique Zolon fighter that you traitorious, slimy, and alien loving cretans can take into combat. Oh, and most of my mods craft have virtual cockpits or bridges from which to command or fly. SolCom's fleet boast some unique and potent weapons for commanders to deploy. This mod also includes a long list of custom missions and I assure you that many of these missions will pose a challenge for even the most experianced Starshatter Commander. I've coded some of them with built in variables that may create different experiances during subsequent play throughs thereby attempting to create some mission replayablity. Of note, original voice-over files have been created for the custom missions that go a long way in creating better immersion for you the player.

Unique for any known Starshatter mod are my hover tanks. Yes space campers, one can fight ground based tank battles! I've included two custom missions that feature them.

One will ultimately discover that the SolCom fleet is very powerful but not invincible. Sol Command has developed excellent new (unique) weaponry but their ships aren't much more durable than the games stock craft. Commanders that stick their forces necks out too far will probably get their heads cut off. Trust me.

Finally, included with the SolCom mod is a Commander's Notebook which includes a wealth of information about the ships, weapons and craft included in the mod. (PDF and Word)

Please download and take the SolCom fleet out for a galactic spin. Profuse compliments and accolades are always welcome.

Sincerely,

Sol Command Supreme Commander

Mars Planetary Defense Station

Wdboyd

Great! I had started to download Starshatter 5.0.5, and left my PC alone for a while. When I came back, I noticed the download had stopped at 35 MB because, so a message said, I had been inactive for 10 minutes. Because I didn't see a way to resume the download, I restarted it - and was told this was impossible as, so another message said, I had "exceeded the maximum amount of bandwidth allotted to you by the administrator for the month".

Are you serious? What am I supposed to do? How can I be "active"? - press a key every 10 seconds? And how does the download know? Does "Big Brother" watch me? And what's this business with the bandwidth? I understand that bandwidth costs money although it's free for me here, but the combination of cutting off a download without me requesting it but counting volume of the interrupted and useless download for the bandwidth limit is not nice, to be polite.

What's your advice? Wait until next month, but then make sure I'm seen as active until the download is finished?

hmm, I thought I straighten that issue out already. I will look into that right now.

I see what the issue is, currently there was a bandwidth cap on members to 1.5GB a month. You must have exceeded that greywolf, if you tried to download every mod in the Starshatter area you definitely would have exceeded that mark. I will raise this.

On the 'active' issue, I think this had to deal with a session timeout setting. I set this to 3600s because it was much lower and could have caused the issue you speak of. Session timeouts are for security reasons, if you leave your computer and SSC is on the page and if you don't logout someone can do things as you. But after the timeout is exceeded you would have to log back in, so it is security for the user from malicious people.

Thanks sscadmin, I appreciate what you’re saying.

That said, I can’t see how I could have downloaded 1.5 GB in August. Unless your system counts attempted as accomplished downloads - in that case, 3 attempts to download Starshatter would use up the quota. I had started the download, noticed it was quite slow, and decided I could do something better with my time than to wait for the download to finish, signed out from your forum and went away from the PC. When I returned about two hours later, I noticed that the download had been interrupted (with said message about my “inactivity”) and that only 30 MB had been downloaded before it stopped. I didn’t think much of it, started the download again, but was told this was impossible because my bandwidth was exceeded. Because of 30 MB? Well …

I do understand and share your concerns about leaving your PC unattended. That’s why I signed out from your forum before I went away from my PC. But this shouldn’t prevent started tasks from continuing – or you warn people that signing out will kill their active downloads from your site. My personal opinion is that there is a little flaw in your system … - no offense intended.

The final point is how you define and detect “inactivity”. If it’s that your system receives no input from my PC for 10 minutes, fine, but if you would monitor my keystrokes or mouseclicks (which would be technically possible), then this would be unacceptable for me. Please clarify.

I am not exactly sure how quota's are actually tracked because the software really doesn't go into depth on this issue, I will open a ticket with support to get some clarification on this because I want to know as well, and the same with the activity and getting logged out. I haven't experienced getting logged out and I sometimes leave my PC for hours on end and come back to it still logged in. I would have to check this myself, but you also may have some settings in your UCP that controls this as well.

Another thing Greywolf, you never did say if things are better after trying to download or stay connected? I did make a few tweaks and wanted to know if it helped at all.

William!!!

Its great to see that you made it here. How are things going? I hope you like what we've tried to do with continuing your legacy of preserving Starshatter. Welcome to SSC!

Bradd

Salutations Bradd.

Thanks. Things are fine... I'm still lurking around. How are you?

I just thought I'd provide a description of my SolCom mod. I'll be checking in every now and then.

sscadmin: Just saw your reply. I am now able to download Starshatter again - thanks. It's always nice to know the rules you're supposed to play by <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-)' />.

However, i have meanwhile found another source for downloading Starshatter and obtained it from there.

No big deal at all, all of this could be my configuring as well. I am still learning all of the settings and things like that. There must be hundreds of settings in this admin panel for this software, and you can lost in it. So I'm bound to miss something somewhere.

Heh... that's why I resigned as an Admin/Mod on the Oolite forum. My old, frazzled brain ain't up to it anymore!

hmmm, I'm new to Starshatter and just tried downloading the main game. I left the computer for about 4-5 minutes and when I returned my download had stopped. No error or time-out messages. :/

edit: well I tried it again, sitting here actively using my pc the entire time and it still stopped. At exactly the same place as before too: 44.0 mb

I too can confirm what zero is saying, except I can reach just over 100 megs before it quits. Perhaps it might be an idea to split up the archive into smaller parts, remember Darkone what you did with FFE3D that time there were download problems on the old forum? Perhaps a similar solution would work again?

Well, at least mine didnt take as long as yours to fail geraldine, that wouldve been even more dissappointing. Still i tried it for the third time last night and it got to 48mb, i became fairly excited thinking it would work. Then it stopped <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_razz.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-P' /> verrryyy unfortunate.

update: i tried it once more just now. 55mb then it stopped. If it increases by 5mb every time ill only have to try it like 80 more times! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_razz.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-P' />

This has to be a connection between where you are and where SSC is hosted from (its in the USA somewhere). I talked with the software providers and they do absolutely nothing with the downloading of files. That is server/line based, there could be a hard coded php threshold, depending on how long your download is going for before it times out. I think I have the bandwidth set to like 150-200k per sec and Geraldine's account has no limits on bandwidth because she is a gold member. I have downloaded Starshatter in like 10mins or less, even at 50/100k sec the download would take about 20mins max. So your downloads must be getting dropped because they are taking too long or the lines are not that good.

This weekend I will work on splitting Starshatter down into some manageable chunks for everyone. Just remind me in the shout box if you don't start seeing me upload anything come Sunday sometime.

No worries Darkone! I will give the Star Shatter download another try and post how get on. It might be time for me to find another ISP as my contact up up in September.

Edit: Managed to get 120 megs this time out of 521.04 megs, average download speed was 180 kb/sec. Was going well then stalled and quit. Perhaps it is my ISP after all or my distance from the US server?

Which ISP are you using at the moment?

Talk Talk, its cheap but flaky at times <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//girl_mad.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Oh... hmm, cheap certainly! I'll refrain from castigating it, or the air will turn blue! I 'maintain' my brother's and my niece's computers - he now has BT via copper (he used to have bloody Talk Talk), she has Virgin (aka Vermin) via cable. Myself... I use Sky via copper, which I've found to be excellent value. So I have experience of all four of those ISPs. I hesitate to actually recommend something, but if you can get a good deal from Sky, then go there - friendly and helpful tech-support (call-centres based in Scotland, which I like), and rock-steady internet. My deal costs £10 per month (plus the landline of about £12 per month, of course), and I have unlimited usage (no caps) - 20 downstream and 1 upstream.

This seems to be a pretty common problem. I have the same issue, and I use Comcast out in New Mexico. I find it unlikely it's ISP related.

Remember all it takes is a pause or a few dropped packets to hose your download, thats why rock solid connections are key to completing downloads and noise on the line can effect this. People tout speed as the huge thing, I would much rather know my connection will never (if ever) drop packets than have a killer connection speed. 100kps is decent speed and you can do anything with it like stream HD video and download large files. So I think it comes down to the quality of the lines your packets are going through to go back and forth from SSC. I think most if not all of the complaints about downloads have been from overseas so there must be something that is causing it? Whether it is the lines of the provider just isn't upgrading their equipment like they are supposed too.

Thanks for your ideas Cody. I thought about SKY but don't you need to have a TV package with them to get the best deal? I don't have SKY TV as I barely watch the crap on the terrestrial channels as it is. Virgin needs cable which I don't have in my area. So my options are limited, but I will keep hunting. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> I think Darkone must be right, its quality rather than the distance of the connection that is causing the problem. So much for 21st century telecommunications! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//girl_wacko.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />