[SUGGESTION] download reliability

not sure if this is a suggestion or a bug report, but anyway...

right now, the code for automatically downloading a map is incredibly unreliable. it has been like this since I started playing nexuiz. I can't say how many times I have downloaded a map in game, only to have the map appear as a completely black screen. After several years, this seems like a pretty big problem to go unnoticed.

so anyway, could someone fix this please?

Actually this is what happens:

The client thinks the map has successfully finished downloading/already exists, and thus when it tries to load it -- it doesn't find it and then there's just a black map displayed (not even a skybox, etc -- no map loaded, just entities).

I don't know what causes the first part precisely, but I do know that it's probably the fault of the map repo or the server itself. e.g. the server has a conversation something like this:

Server: I need waterloo_map.pk3 and waterloo.bsp for my shit to work. (I got this bsp from this pk3, so must be right)
Client: Ah, I don't have waterloo.bsp -- i'll just grab waterloo_map.pk3 from your curl directory and see if it's in there.

Note: The client checks for itself whether it has the bsp, so if it does it just skips downloading and uses that.

For whatever reason something goes wrong here, this is where the client either:
A: Cannot find the map on the download repo/download wasn't completed
B: Does it decide that it already has waterloo_map.pk3 and just thinks "oh, maybe I don't need to download the package anyway" ?
C: It has the bsp, but it's corrupt/when it saved, it saved wrong... THIS actually has been seen, where pk3's are downloaded but end up being 1kb or less. Corrupt download.
D: ?????????
E: Profit.

Basically all I can think of is: Map repo is broken, or client already thinks it has the pk3 file and can't overwrite it... or something like that.

Why don't we ask the person who actually implemented this: divVerent?

I think it could be helping in that case to have an extra console-command to re-download the map.
If it's already existing in dlcache, just overwriting the old one with the re-download.

I have no idea how (or is) this could get implemented - but it would be helpful with broken downloads.


-just my 2 cents of nonsense-