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Some ideas and tendances about developing a launcher and plugin manager of SC4

Started by alice, May 25, 2019, 12:54:07 PM

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alice

The reason that brought me here to post this topic is because of some tendances in chinese SC4 communities. As far as I know, the simcity.cn is blocked due to *registration problem*, but as I am currently living outside China and it's still not available, which make me thinking that it's not simply a technique problem.
They said that the name simcitychina.com is available for visitors. I don't know what's going but it seems that there are quite a lot of troubles.
Then, a community called *youwangcheng* which pretends to be the *official community of SC4* (yes their group is called like this), and runs a *multiplayer SC4*. I don't know if it's the cause of troubles that encountered by simcity.cn. But obviously they are doing something really uncomfortable, for example, integrating NAM32 Chinese translation without any acknowledgement, saying that *their launcher is different to any game version because it allow players to loot each other*, *the launcher fixed lots of game issues using the latest algorithms*, etc.
And I don't know what will happen if they use a 32 translation on NAM36... But I don't think there is any interest to stay at NAM32 which is quite old for a game which is really old.
In fact they are just synchronizing the saved files of players and without shared plugin folder it's impossible to go to somebody else's map otherwise there will be crashes and boxes.
This community has recently declared to carry on a development for a plugin manager.
They said they would go to develop something to *scan all sites on the internet to download a plugin for its user*, I don't know how will they implement it. Maybe they will use CDN (but it could be expensive, which I am not sure if they really accept).
Since simcity.cn is in a really hard situation, I am worrying that this community might be troublesome to other sites like sc4d, simtropolis, hide-inoki, etc. So that's why I have written down this.
As for me I am not at all interested in the launcher because I think it worths nothing but a wrapper of some simple commands. Nobody can decrypt the main program of SC4 and do something to optimize the performance or add some extras, for example.
But I think a plugin manager could be quite useful.
I have a friend who worked on a plugin manager on c# 2 years ago, but the work has been suspended. Someone else tried to work on the structure of sc4lot but I have never heard anything from him. As for me I may think of something like electronjs.
I had been playing a GOG version of SC4 on Mac before APFS with High Sierra made any wine program unusable. Therefore I think it's still interesting to see if there are something to do vis-à-vis managing huge sum of plugins and switch the configs for different maps and it should be cross platform so that it could be useful for Linux and Mac gamers.
But it's still a plan too far away to reality.