I am waiting to join a server right now that is full, problem is I don’t have all of their addons installed and I can’t bother to find the download for them. This unfortunately leads me to lose priority and as soon as someone with either a faster connection or the content already downloaded stealing my spot.
Would be nice to have a queue to join and maybe even having it so that while you wait you can download the content.
Repub if you support this idea
Of course, you’d be added to the queue only once you’re done with the downloads and are ready to join right?
Wouldn’t make sense to be behind someone in the queue who can’t even join yet, they’d be ignored and MAYBE be put in front of the queue if they started the whole process before anyone tried to join.
In general the way GMod handles content delivery leaves much to be desired. A “download all content” button would definitely be a huge win, as well as some mechanism to ensure that you actually have all the content the server needs.
Alternatively, for players that have a lot of bandwidth available, live-streaming content is another very viable option. Most servers with a lot of content don’t really even use all of that content at once (if ever).
I’d gladly bet $100 that all servers who have more than 500mb of content on them don’t ever use all of that at once. You could get away with downloading 1/5th of that and download the rest as you play, or only when its actually brought into the game or close to you.
Cue in “missing map” despite having downloaded everything, then having to search for that specific version of the map on the workshop whose map name isn’t written anywhere on the addon page.
Cue in “missing map” despite having downloaded everything, then having to search for that specific version of the map on the workshop whose map name isn’t written anywhere on the addon page.
That’s the worst offender. Also cue in the administrators being completely oblivious to the issue because they somehow have the right addon but don’t have it in the server config.
Server owners be like: “Don’t worry, we can fix this!”
Spams workshop with server content tagged as an addon
“The workshop is my personal CDN.”
I don’t get why they spam the workshop with content, addons can now be 1 whole gigabyte, can’t they fit it all in a single “content” addon?
I recall this topic being brought up in another thread.
I think someone suggested having a button on the server browser to view/download content prior to requesting a connection.
Yeah that’s exactly what I was thinking!
Yeah, having a button that would allow to view the size of the content, see what’s in it and then be able to download it right away from some kind of server browser would be one of the best things, would make everyone’s life much easier.
You could also do the idea with the queqe, but you would have to separe it into two - one with users that have downloaded the required server content, and another one where users are currently downloading it. This would really help the big servers.
We need it.
Download content button is such a good idea, even just previewing the content for the server. I think it’s been mentioned a lot so I’m sure it’ll be hard to ignore
Remember most similar servers (take swrp) share a lot of the content. The player could already have most of it and only needed to download 20% of the whole pack (make sure installed add-ons are included in the calculation of space required)
Actually a really good idea. Would be cool to have a button that allows you to view the server content and then if you are interested, you can download it before even joining the server. As for the queue, another great idea. Right now, using the legacy browser, you can select the option to join the server as soon as a slot becomes available but I think having an actual queue system would be a much cleaner and simpler.
Overall, great ideas 
I think it would be epic if there was also a “Delete Content” Button.
That could be very useful in a scenario like this:
You just joined a server and its way worse than you thought and you change your mind and leave.
Then you could just press that button and the content you just downloaded wouldn’t take up anymore harddrive space. I think we all wanted to put GMod on our SSDs at some point just for GMod to be like 30 GB even tho you have no addons subscribed. (Or is that just me?)
It’s because server content is saved on a different folder and you can’t just unsubscribe to it.
Yeah im aware of that but i think a button to nuke the content downloaded from a specific server would still be useful…
Yes, it’s VERY annoying having to go through your files to delete stuff you don’t use anymore, even in Gmod they should add an option to delete all server content downloaded.
Sounds like more effort than necessary because some servers might use the same contents packs off the workshop; They’re updated all the time, too.
If both server X and server Y use addon A and you delete all of X’s content, will A be deleted? Surely, unless clients maintain content lists off servers they connect to. Seems tedious to manage.