[fysiks]

Originally Posted by MegaBrutal True, but someone on this forum mentioned that HL supports IPv6 for Fast Download and so I had that expectation. Also at one point I did implement IPv6 support for my application which originally only supported IPv4, so I know it doesn't take much to convert a software to be IP version agnostic. Agreed it might take a little more with such a complicated software like HL, but still somehow I thought they got around to do it. Wonder if Source supports IPv6.

It's less about "how much work is it" and more about about incentives for them to do it at all. Also, it's a fact that even the smallest change in software can create cascading effects so companies have to put most, if not all, changes through regression testing, public beta testing, etc. Time is money.

And for fun, this just popped into my head: "If you don't want it broken worse, don't fix it at all" lol. They've fixed things before only to cause other bugs to occur.

Originally Posted by MegaBrutal Why though? It made lots of sense in the old days for performance concerns, but now we have multicore servers with blazingly fast SSDs and gigabit upload speeds. Since HLDS is single-threaded (as far as I know), it may only claim 1 core at maximum. So I don't see any bottleneck here, I think one server may host HLDS and the Fast Download webserver just fine.

I guess my suggestion is mostly just that, a suggestion, not a requirement. I have two reasons. One, it minimizes the risk of exposing important files when you accidentally make a change in settings on your web server that exposes sensitive files. If your web server never has access to the sensitive files then it can't ever expose them.

Secondly, there are some modifications that can be made to maps that don't need to be implemented in your fast download version of the file. If I were to modify a map in such a way that it doesn't prevent compatibility, I can do so without causing people to download a slightly different map than what they would download from most other servers that host the same map. Granted, it's not all that big of issue functionally since those customization will be negated when they connect to a server that uses the non-customized version anyways.

Originally Posted by MegaBrutal It wouldn't be that much of a problem if HL wouldn't give up on using FastDL altogether... But overall it's still better than if it would prevent people from connecting at all.

If the web server is down, there is no other option than to download directly from the server. The bug where it permanently falls back to direct download when it fails once is a bummer and certainly isn't the intended functionality (hence we it's called a bug).