Having a podcast could be good. Could attract some more users. Problem is need to ind someone with the time and skills to record, produce and publish it.

Also there is a question of where to host the mp3 files. Could this server handle the strain? the RSS feed needed is hit ALOT. Podcast readers will hit that file many times from all over the globe. Juice podcast reader can hit RSS feeds every 30 minutes, it might not sound like much but from alot of people could increase the load. But then again it might be small compared to the current load as people load pages here quite a lot. The real problem is bandwidth. This is where you can be a victim of your own success. Some of the big podcasts have report bandwidth usage of Terabytes a month. Can lancersreactor afford this? or does this site have unlimited bandwidth? either way servering all the mp3s could slow down page views. Which would be a bad thing. People will put up with slow loadingon a podcast file but if it means slow loading webpages people will be annoyed and possibly leave.

Btw for thoose who don't know what podcasting is:
It is a way of regularly sending an audio (or sometimes video) file to a user who subscribes to the list. It is normally similar to a radio show style that users can load onto MP3 players or an iPod (hence the name) and listen at there lesiure. Someone wishing to listen subscribes to an RSS feed using PodCast Software then the software automatically checks the feed and downloads any new files listed in it.

If you want to try out listening to a podcast I can recommend
this week in tech, thisweekintech.com
Adam Curry's Daily Source Code dailysourcecode.com (doesn't explian how to subscribe)

Or for a podcast reader I use Juice http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/
you can also subscribe to Juice through ITunes (don't ask me how, iTunes screwed up my computer damn thing, spent ages change file acossiatons back, I hate programs that don't ask first)

I think its a great idea but they need a new server first. I'm pushing for them to add a wiki and ultimately other content asset management systems to support free open community open source game (and mod) development. Expanding that into a podcast and other news resources would be nice.

I'm also putting something along those lines into the game design framework for the Openlancer project with a radio/TV system that allows for MP server communities to create their own shows (e.g. news, server events, or even movies). Both can be rendered to MPEG audio/video format but will probably start with the Ogg format since MPEG encoders now legally require a lincesing fee.


-Burn

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato

glad some others like my ideal. Burn I hope your not putting too much on your plate, Openlancer is a massive progect to begin with, adding the podcast might be the straw that brok your back, and I would hate to see you burn out.

Blessed Be to all those that still dream of the flight to the stars.

quote " You wouldn't like my Happy Place it is full of blood, carnage, and destruction" :ME

Indeed, its a lot of work but with the other radio/TV stuff we want to do, I think adding podcast support should be possible. The technical details are a bit of a headache though...

Leave it to say for a normal podcast to work the players or a 3rd party server will have to host it for any non-players that want to downloaded fully rendered audio/video. This can be further supported by the global server's radio/TV listings by including an extra variable for whether or not a fully rendered media stream is available, and if so from what address. All items with that variable can and filtered off into a new RSS feed just for podcast listings.

For players its really simple, they just have to save the radio/TV stream to a game script file and then render it out to a normal MPEG/Ogg media file. Its not a normal podcast but can work like one for players. Some extra user interface stuff needs to be added to support that but its pretty simple. Non-players can't do this without the full set of game data and about 80% of the game engine code, but technically it is possible to wrap all of that up into a another program just used for viewing/rendering the radio/TV streams.

Point of discussing it here being that TLR could use Openlancer as a platform for creating podcasts. Then again if they have no bandwidth limits and could add another server, then they could host the fully rendered streaming media or bit torrents for the full radio/TV listing. Thats highly unlikely but something to keep in mind as an interesting possibility.


-Burn

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato