Mod Showcase

[Buster's Uncle]

Darnan actually found it useful, as a list, too.  There was a screenie and everything.  He answered a question of mine at CFC this morning. 

[Buster's Uncle]

...On a related note, if we can get some hands recruited to the sorting and all -there's some tech work Solver thinks is over my head, too- we're talking about at least indexing all the old files and putting up a page.  He says he'll need some doodz to sort through old files w/ names like dan1.zip, and a couple guys who know markdown and git...

[DrazharLn]

Ere wrote to me saying that their project can be used for any purpose, btw.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've been getting email notifications from that for some reason.

Speaking of which -I didn't say Apolyton Downloads in that last post, which is what I'm on about; the Gold of The Ancients is going to waste, and it can be fixed if we all pitch in- in case he doesn't see an email notification from here, indexing some old stuff is SO up his alley, not least as an organizer -we also want Blake00 and MysticWind, and you, if you like- and he needs to check 'poly for an Important PM.

[DrazharLn]

Well, I imagine Ete has moved on from SMAC, but I imagine it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Do you want to share details of Solver's project here? Or maybe invite them to publish the details somewhere?

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, Apolyton is maybe the oldest still-alive gaming site on the webs, right?  And the database, as a consequence, is huge now.  And MarkG, one of the original owners, was quite prone to kludging up mods of the forums software.  And it's changed management several times over, of various levels of tech competence.  And vBulletin has gone through a lot of versions since 1998.

So vB doesn't get much call for handling a site that old w/ a database that large and disorganized.  The place looks great, largely thanks to me, but is a creaking, glitchy mess that we fear will break completely the next time I move a thread.

There's been a number of different downloads sections over the years, I gather for technical reasons, and there's nothing going now and for most of a decade, I think, also because the place is a tech mess.

Well, there's a goldmine of uploaded mod files still on the server, sez Solver, and we agree that that there stuff needs to be made available.  Best, he says, for tech reasons and the long term, to not even try to do it as a forum function - something about text files and Markup and Homer being way better than I knock up a straight Poly-looking .html page w/ links, maybe to do w/ uploading functionality.  I'm unclear on that last.

I don't gather making a Downloads page is much of a hurdle, though.  What is, is so many years' worth of files with names like dan1.zip that will have to be opened and looked at to describe, organize, and index/link properly.

I'm wildly overcommitted, and Solver is wildly having a job and a family, and I don't see it happening this year -or maybe ever- without some folks pitching in.  It NEEDS doing, it's WORTH a lot to the greater online Civ gaming community, and everyone wins with all that great content made available, and the community benefits from that bait being out there drawing lurkers and getting them more interested in lurking, joining, and getting involved.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Also, we've gotten our hands on MarkG's backups from circa 2005 -including the sites Poly hosted- Solver says there's several things long thought lost forever.  We're definitely going to be seeing something out of THAT...

[DrazharLn]

Sounds like it should go in a git repo or something and just open it for people to look at what's there and propose changes and moves to order things up.

[Buster's Uncle]

He mentioned git, working knowledge of.  May be thinking the same way.

[Buster's Uncle]

Since this is where it came up -also to bump the very good idea in the OP, that shoulda drawn some interest and cooperation, it being a good deal for everyone- an Altera Centauri scenario collection update.

Unfortunately, the GotM team's stuff in the subfolder of Altera in Dowloads was omitted from the updates elsewhere.  I have just completed remedial action at CFC, and am about to go log in at Apolyton and duplicate that hard work.

Altera Centauri Scenario Repository | CivFanatics Forums

That is all.


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Draz, you being on the bus w/ the Modding Showcase project -was that YOUR idea to begin with?-  you should go first with SMAC-in SMAX.  Modding Showcase is one of those things we could promote - easy to describe, link, use a screenshot cropped/reduced when I've made the page, even if it's just the one.  For NOW - I can will include a pitch to modders who see...

[DrazharLn]

The best version of the SMAC-in-SMAX project is now bundled with induktio's Thinker, so any promotion of it would probably be combined with a promotion of Thinker.

I found a kinda annoying bug with the latest release of Thinker today, so we might as well wait for that to get fixed before doing anything.

[Buster's Uncle]

I WANT to showcase Thinker.  Persuade Induktio to play ball, willya?

[Buster's Uncle]

Got Altera took care of at Poly yesterday.