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Hexagon

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Joined: 2015-04-22

Posts: 1,213

[Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

Has anyone tried downloading their world, and commit it and push it to GitHub after every X number of changes? Something like this would allow almost endless revisions, allowing you to revert back to almost any point in time, provided that you have a large enough hard drive to store it.

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hummerz5

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From: wait I'm not a secret mod huh

Joined: 2015-08-10

Posts: 5,853

Re: [Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

Here's an algebra (not calculus?) problem for you
considering the complexity of world save data (x) and number of 'changes'' lumped into one github push (y),
when does X become large enough to force Y up? And when does (hypothetical) Y become low enough that lumping updates to github is inefficient?

Basically, I'm asking: what if we just saved the differences, instead of the whole map?

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thanks HG, HG, HG, HG! anatoly, zumza! zoey!

Hexagon

Member

Joined: 2015-04-22

Posts: 1,213

Re: [Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

Basically, I'm asking: what if we just saved the differences, instead of the whole map?

GitHub does this (only saving deltas) by default, unless you're talking about the communication between the EE client and the PlayerIO server (in which case I think it sends the entire world every time.)

Edit: if you're talking about disk space usage, the ruby github repo has ~40,000 changes over hundreds of files, and is only 232MB (including revision history) on disk. It should be very space efficient.

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den3107

Member

From: Netherlands

Joined: 2015-04-24

Posts: 1,025

Re: [Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

If you're to save every level in single files, you indeed would have the problem hummerz said. Guess best way to fix it is create a folder per world, where the folder contains files, where every file is a non-default block object (meaning that tiles without a background won't fill up your space for no reason).

Hexagon

Member

Joined: 2015-04-22

Posts: 1,213

Re: [Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

If you're to save every level in single files, you indeed would have the problem hummerz said. Guess best way to fix it is create a folder per world, where the folder contains files, where every file is a non-default block object (meaning that tiles without a background won't fill up your space for no reason).

For the world format, I was thinking about using this one because since it dynamically encodes the data, the compiler doesn't have to be updated nearly as often as the parser. That means that programs are more likely to work since they'll all be writing the same similar format for years to come, and automatically support updates.

What could happen is when the world is saved, it replaces the old world file, and a git commit is made. Changes are made to one file only.

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den3107

Member

From: Netherlands

Joined: 2015-04-24

Posts: 1,025

Re: [Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

Are you planning on saving just a couple (like your own) worlds, or all world on EE, to make a public waybackmachine for EE worlds?

A little idea if the 2nd applies:
Make a little tool where you have to login and from that tool you can get your EE worlds, that way you can prevent other users from copying your worlds. (ability for a permalink to share your worlds with others might be an idea for an extra feature).

Hexagon

Member

Joined: 2015-04-22

Posts: 1,213

Re: [Question] Keeping multiple saves of EE worlds with GitHub

Are you planning on saving just a couple (like your own) worlds, or all world on EE, to make a public waybackmachine for EE worlds?

I was just planning to have this as a private-ish tool for world makers, as they could backup their worlds via GitHub/my server. Saving all worlds would be pretty cool, but I'm not sure how it would resonate with the community because it's making a lot of stuff semi-private to fully public.

As with others copying others worlds...well... Either one of two things:

(1) We would encourage "forking" others worlds (i.e the original owner gets full credit). This would allow users to make changes to the world, and ask if their changes could be put back into the original world. This would drastically reduce trolling, as the creator knows precisely which blocks have been changed, and can choose to accept them. This would allow everyone to edit, but not everyone to troll.

(2) We'd have to download every single world on EE everyday multiple times a day. From there, we'd have to find who made the world first by looking at the revision date.

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