Image Cache Enhancements

This page contains the design document for an enhancement or feature. It is a work of collaborative development, and may not represent the final design. If you are not part of the development or design group, please post comments and suggestions on the talk page and not in the middle of the design.

Overview

There are several enhancements we can make to our image caching system.

Tracker Items

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3602336&group_id=3248&atid=353248

Image Download Confirm

It would be nice to be able to ask the end user if they wish to add a specific server to the allowed downloads. Children who are running with a locked access file should not be asked. The message should be similar to the message for SSL sites with self signed keys in browsers.

Force Reload

In order for a server to use dynamically generated images it must be able to tell clients to reload the image. This has several challenges.

1. The client would have to store a hash for the image (may already be done)
2. The client would have to know the URL for every image in order to recheck the hash
3. Curl would need to tell us if the hash is different from the one on disk
4. Curl would need to download the image in the background and not disrupt network play
5. The texture system must be able to reload an individual texture from disk with out affecting the frame rate in a bad way.

Some of these challenges may already have solutions, some may need threading or other time management systems to implement properly.