Welcome to the first public release of the Tribes2Maps.com AutoDownload System. This is a combination Tribes 2 script and Visual Basic application. The two pieces work together to enable your Tribes 2 client to automatically download maps from www.Tribes2Maps.com when you attempt to join a game server that is running a client-side map which you do not have installed.

For the techies in the crowd, here's how the system works: The T2 script has a package which hooks into the common dialog functions. When you join a client-side map which you don't have installed, it traps the error that is normally displayed and detects which .ter or .dif file is missing from your T2 installation. It then connects to Tribes2Maps.com via a standard HTTP connection and passes the missing filename and the map name to a CGI script. That CGI script searches the Tribes2Maps.com database and returns the map VL2 file which your client is missing. The catch is that the T2 scripting language can't write binary data to the disk (for security reasons) so the map is downloaded in UUencoded ASCII format. That's where the VB application comes in. The VB app monitors the disk drive, watching for downloaded maps, then converts them to their original binary VL2 format. Once the T2 script sees that the VL2 has been converted, it loads the VL2 and asks you if you want to rejoin the server. That's it!