At 4/6/15 08:47 AM, DarkShadow166 wrote:
I'll do some testing and get back to you guys about this.
Right, I tested multiple scenarios and I have some interesting results. @BrenTheMan you might be interested in this.
First thing I did was upload a test song to my alt which I called Test (because originality). I went on my phone, loaded up Geometry Dash, and made a custom level out of that song. I downloaded the song before starting the level, and then played through it. Everything worked as expected. Then, I went through the following steps:
1.) In Geometry Dash, I deleted Test from my custom song downloads, and then I unscouted my alt on Newgrounds.
2.) I then tried playing the GD level again, so I downloaded Test, played through the level, and again, everything was fine.
3.) I removed Test from my downloads again, and this time unpublished it on Newgrounds.
4.) The song still downloaded and played in the level just fine.
5.) I removed Test from my downloads one last time, and this time I deleted the audio on Newgrounds, so there should be no trace of it on Newgrounds at all.
6.) Guess what? Everything was still working perfectly in GD.
This is where things get interesting. I went on my alt account once more, and submitted a song called Test2. I made another custom level on Geometry Dash using this song, except this time, before I downloaded Test2 through Geometry Dash, I unscouted my alt on Newgrounds. Then I tried downloading the track via GD and I got an error - "Failed to fetch song info". I scouted my alt again, and downloaded Test2 through Geometry Dash to play my test level. As expected, it worked just fine. I unscouted my alt for the last time, and this time asked my friend @lemon42, who has the full version of Geometry Dash, to try playing my level. He tried to download Test2, and to my surprise, it downloaded just fine for him!
TL;DR: I made a song called Test1, downloaded it through GD, played my level, and naturally, it worked. Despite unscouting, unpublishing and deleting the audio, the level continued to work. I then made a song called Test2, and unscouted myself right off the bat before playing the level. It didn't work. I then re-scouted my alt, played through the level (and it worked), and finally unscouted my alt and asked my friend to try playing the Test2 level. It still worked.
My conclusion is as follows: When a custom Newgrounds song is downloaded through Geometry Dash by at least one person, it gets stored on Geometry Dash's servers, so no matter what we do to the corresponding Audio Portal submission, it will still work in GD. However, if a song was never downloaded through the game before (because its uploader was never scouted or the track was unpublished before it ever saw the light of day on GD) then it will remain undownloadable and nobody will be able to make a level out of it.
The reason why the songs @6359 posted still work in GD is because they were posted before the download disabling on unscouted submissions took effect (which was on February 2nd). Therefore, they were still downloadable on GD, and by the time the downloads became disabled and the tracks became unpublished, the songs in question were already stored on GD's servers. That's why they still work.
I get why GD custom songs are stored somewhere else after they're downloaded for the first time, since this reduces a huge amount of load on NG's servers, so I suppose on that front it makes sense. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is really the only conclusion I can reach at the moment.
