Rethinking addon distribution.

Currently distributing and downloading mods is a very tedious process. There are some pages like Armaholic that also function as distribution hubs. 

You have to build your addon with whatever tools you prefer and then distribute it as a zip file. Either on your private webspace or on filehosters.

The packaging for these zip files is not standardized. So for every new addon you have to figure out how to do it in the best possible way.

You have to know where to get the addons from. You have to know all the different websites and other distribution channels. You have to have the state of every addon in your head (or a spreadsheet).

Once patchday hits you have to visit every single site, check for new versions, download them manually and then distribute it to your server. Then (depending on the tool you use) you have to update the distribution mechanism of your choice and hope that everything "just works".

You have to get used to more or less complex and confusing tools that will help you (or stand in your way) to get all the addons that you need for a gameday.

AMOS is aimed at solving these problems by providing an integrated toolset from start to finish.

!Important!: This does NOT mean any fancy UI. AMOS will (in the beginning) just provide simple tools and libraries that other tool creators (like A3S or PlayWithSix) can build on to ease addon distribution for them.

The plan is that in the future the process looks like this: 

You use a tool based on AMOS to pack your addon in a standard way. Then you use AMOS to push the newest version of your addon to a remote distribution hub (this can be your own or some larger, more centralized one).

You use AMOS to get a list of all available updates for all addons you have installed. You select the addons you want to upgrade from said list and then AMOS will do the downloading, verification and unpacking for you and also provide you with a shortcut to start your server.

You can use AMOS to get the latest version of all addons as specified on the server you want to play on.

The process is taken from Maven or basically every other Dependency Management tool known in Software engineering today. The interesting aspect of this is that it removes the need for manual tracking and downloading of dependencies (addons, libs) for all involved parties.

This specifically also enables some interesting use cases. Lets say you are developing a weapon pack like RHS. You can distribute it as a huge group of items and thus force everyone to use all of it.

With the AMOS system you could provide every single gun as its own addon and then also provide a grouped addon set ("RHS ALL Weapons") as a convenience. Of course this also works for other dependencies. E.g. some Weapons depend on files created for other guns (if I remember correctly some RHS assault rifles all depend on the same M4 config file). With the AMOS system you could distribute said dependency (the config file) as a single artifact. Then all your other guns can have a dependency on it and will be available for your users when they want to use your gun.

With this the whole addon system becomes much more flexible and we remove one important step. Currenlty some communities are manually packing parts of Addons into their own, custom groups. Some also rename files (make everything lowercase). This makes it virtually impossible to synchronize addon sets over multiple communities. AMOS tries to fix this by providing an easy, integrated approach to addon distribution and dependency management.

Currently this is a theoretical draft. As soon as there is enough interest in the community I would start working on this and also invite everyone interested to help out. Until then feel free to create issues with new ideas or pull request with changes for this document.

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Copyright (c) 2016 Jonas

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