Congradulations! You’re not a total idiot!
@russilker, Makes lots of sense but perhaps not to you but thats cool, its your opinion and I can see why some of you say its useless. Most of the game is complete, as stayed in your signature. The predownload could be 95% of the game; maps, textures and sounds encrypted and compressed. The other bit could be data completed post predownload pack.
It wouldn’t be for downloading on the day of the release though. It would only be for people who have difficultly downloading large files and to lessen strain on mirrors (if they use that approach) by having the data before the release day. For example, for me to download a 500 Mb torrent could take over a day just 'cause our ISP loves to fuck with us
Hope that explanation helps it make a bit more sense and again usually only expensive custom software would use such messures but I thought it would be a neat idea.
Thanks for the input!
@sersoft - There are people in Newfoundland that still rely on dialup =( Sad times.
So you want the devs to go through all that extra work just because you happen to live in a country with shitty internet?
lol, good luck
I live in Canada and get a 1-2 MB/s download speed consistently, and who gives a fuck if it takes a day to download? Start the download and do something else, what have you been doing every other day BM hasn’t been released?
Guys, not looking for a flamefest or special treatment. Just thought it’d be a neat way if they had the time to help, if anything, alleviate server strain.
@That Happy Chum - Yeah mainlanders get a better connection than us islanders I suppose. We’re super bottlenecked.
Also I want to point out this wasn’t a ‘waa can’t download fast enough, halp me’ post. Was just a suggestion that might help others and help server strain. Its just something I do a lot for my software I write so I figured it’d be neat for this as well.
Thanks for the interest to at least respond though I guess.
The problem I have with “pre-download” is that the mod is still currently in a state of flux. If the devs send out a texture or a brush or sound or whatever that they need to change later, you’ll have to redownload it anyway. It’d be a waste of your time and bandwidth to download things that might change anyway.
I have a way to circumvent all the pre-release issues:
Delay the mod a couple hours, and then pre-release the whole, playable thing a couple hours before you release it. 
Or, here’s another idea:
Release the mod, when it’s ready, in a variety of download formats (website, torrents, etc) and then expect your audience to have patience while it downloads and request more seeders for torrents so that downloads are quicker and more distributed.
Crazy, I know.
Exactly, although… in my experience, those are the most excruciating hours out of all of them. You can see the amount of time left and time slows down (like looking at a clock Christmas morning when you aren’t supposed to run down stairs until after 6 o’clock 
)
An hour is about 0.0019% of six years, by my calculations.
You hear that guys!?! BM is going to be released in a few hours!
Wooo! Spread it on the internets :fffuuu:
we should totally do it again
Wonder if it will be worth the waiting … :]
And what about porting it to latest source engine ?
I just hope it will be released not only via ftp. My isp slows down my connection temporarily whenever I try to download something larger than 100mb via ftp. Funny, because it doesn’t slow down steam (haven’t tried torrents yet).
Steam uses a weird internet protocol that works when nothing else does. I think it doesn’t use TCP/IP. My ISP booted me about 2 years ago, for 2 months due to non-payment and somehow steam still worked. I was able to use steam chat, download games and play source games in multiplayer but I wasn’t able to view web pages, download torrents or even use msn messenger, even the MOTD in counter strike source only showed me “Your internet connection is offline” but I was successfully connected to the server like always.
Steam uses magic.
OMG BM will be released in a few hours !
What? It’s a joke or so?