Why is this in it's own thread now ? Tom your points were still highly relevant to the original thread it was posted in.

As to the whole external file thing, nearly everything I've written in the past 4 years or so has required external files.
The bigger portals I'm sure will be pretty cool with hosting those files ( And even if their not, the bigger portals pay for your game, which helps offset any bandwidth costs ), it's the smaller portals that just run off a standard framework which can't cope with it.

To keep in mind though is that aside from possibly tilesheets, most external files are little xml ones or map data. Neither are too big. I know ( More than most after suffering a huge bandwidth bill years ago ) that all the little sites hitting your server can add up, but when I got stung it was 4 swf's being hit millions of times, not a handful of text files a fraction of the size.

It is a problem and something us as developers have to look at, but it's a double edged sword. If your server is being cained in terms of bandwidth, it means your game has gone huge. If you've got ads in it then the ads will more than pay for any additional bandwidth costs should they occur.

Also say each map file is 100k at most, which is pretty huge, not every player will be hitting every level, a lot will only load the first level. A 100k file is a lot lot less than a meg+ swf.

I know I'm kinda digressing a little, as this is about FGL, but as it came up I thought I'm mention that it's not all doom and gloom hosting some files yourself.

Squize.