Since we are downloading those verisign things anyway, I was thinking it may be beneficial if admins offer a choice between loading neveron's graphics from the internet OR loading neveron's graphics saved on the player's hard drive. All admin really need to do is offer the graphic images of neveron in a compressed file so players can saved the images in a specified location (such as C:\neveron\) and add some code to switch between local and hosted image loading. Since it is all regular GIFs or JPEGs, I doubt the community will have an uproar, I could be wrong.
For the Admin, this may reduce their bandwidth use since people will not be loading those unit icons or map hexes each and everytime.
For the players, this means no more download graphics errors (like in arenas) and possibly eliminate "invisible" players without refreshing (newly joined) in the FFA tournament and even faster page load times since it does not download the images (especially for modem users)... better gaming experience.
For home players, image heavy pages load faster. For netcafe users, the images can still be loaded from the internet so they dont have to download anything.
Something for everyone, right?
Another game has implemented this idea. http://space.coldfirestudios.com/To
see this switching system firsthand, join it and go to "main" and then select "settings" Image location settings and near the bottom...
"
Download file at [zip file address here] unzip it, install it, and then click button below to use downloaded graphics to speed up your game and move lower load on our servers.
If you are going to go to another machine without images loaded locally, set images to load from our servers or images will be broken.
"
also, if we upgrade and get "prettier" graphics, we should be careful not to get carried away with large images (large file sizes) since there are still modem players.
Then again, i'm no programmer and easier said than done.
Eh, thats it. What you think?