Wanted: Places to upload Hedgewars-related stuff

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Wuzzy
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TL;DR: Many players use OCHs to upload their stuff. But OCHs suck, therefore we need independent places for our Hedgewars-related stuff.

When creating stuff for Hedgewars (e.g. themes, maps, voicepacks, graphics, …) and you want to share it with the Hedgewars community you soon encounter a problem: There are no good places to upload your stuff. What most people do is they upload it on some one-click hoster (OCH). The problem is that most of these OCHs delete the shit out of their servers, either after a fixed time period or seemingly at random. These OCHs are not suitable for long-term file-storing. This is a big problem, because we already have lost a couple of themes, maps, voicepacks and so on solely because players currently see/have no real alternative ways to upload their stuff.

Therefore, we need dedicated places in the Internet where we can share:

  • maps
  • themes
  • forts
  • voicepacks
  • hats
  • graves
  • flags
  • demos
  • saved games
  • teams
  • game shemes
  • weapon shemes
  • missions
  • scripts
  • minimal graphical modifications that modify the looks of something (hedgehogs, weapons, whatever)
  • works in progress (or stuff where the uploader isn't sure enough to consider it "finished")
  • screenshots
  • fan art
  • anything else Hedgewars-related

These places should be run by volunteering Hedgewars fans/players/devs and not by a unknown 3rd party. That way we are safer against random deletion surprises. At least any HW player should be allowed to upload stuff.
These places could come in many flavours. Maybe in form of a webpage. Maybe in form of a FTP server with a directory structure that actually makes sense (That would be awesome!). Maybe in form of forum attachments for smaller files. Whatever.

Currently, I know these places (feel free to contribute to this list):

On the list, I mark achieved stuff using green text color.

Another problem are images. How do people in this forum share screenshots? Again, they upload it on an OCH and then hotlink the image. This is problematic. Your post may suddenly lose its image because the OCH decided to kill it. This happens all the time.



Edit 1 (11th November 2012): Added http://www.hedgewars.org/demos
Edit 2 (12th November 2012): Added Share your mods !. You share the schemes in plain text rather than in files which works for now. Altough it is bit annoying to install a game scheme/weapon scheme; the scheme system could change in future versions. I'll keep an eye on that.
Edit 3 (20th March 2013): bender made an awesome announcement yesterday: hh.unit22.org also supports graves, hats, scripts, forts and voicepacks now. I reflected this change in my posting.
Edit 4 (24th August 2013): hh.unit22.org also supports flags.

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Star and Moon
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Use Dropbox.

Wuzzy
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TL;DR: All our files are belong to us!



Sigh. Read the post again. I do not want simply another 3rd party file-hosting / one-click-hosting / however-this-shit-is-advertised service. I do want independence from 3rd parties.

Dropbox is not a solution because:

  • We are still dependent on a 3rd party which is not part of our community.
  • Because Dropbox is not part of our community, they do not share our goals which sooner or later slaps back in your face when you least expect it.
  • Dropbox reserves the right to strike you with the banhammer and burn all your motherfucking files after 90 days of inactivity (whatever that means) - well, except if you are paying. But I do not want to pay and also do not want to have the rest of the community be forced to pay to a 3rd party just for uploading stuff. And besides that, also as paying customer I would not trust them because:
  • Dropbox itself is not independent. Dropbox is based on Amazon S3. It is known to fail from time to time, too, so you'd be a fool to trust it.
  • Amazon itself again is absolutely not trustworthy. Amazon is known to beat people seemingly randomly with the banhammer and delete all their files and all that without telling a reason
  • Dropbox is only one place to upload stuff (but not one I suggest). But I want places, because storing all data only on one place is also rather dangerous.
  • Besides that, the Dropbox software is propritiary software. I do not want to support or even advertise Dropbox because of that. It is certainly not neccessary to rely on propritiary software for something as simple as file hosting.

Again: We need places to store our stuff which are:

  • operated by a Hedgewars user so these share our goals
  • open to any Hedgewars player

Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer. Smile

nemo
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Wuzzy allegedly wrote:

Again: We need places to store our stuff which are:
  • operated by a Hedgewars user so these share our goals
  • open to any Hedgewars player

bender's repo...

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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev

Wuzzy
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Hey nemo, I guess you mean the demo section on this website. Am I right? Is it operated by bender? Whatever, I must have totally overlooked/forgotten it; *whoops*
As this obviously fulfils all requirements, I have added it to the list, thanks.
Smile

But we still have a long way to go, as my list has still a lot non-green entries in it.

By the way, the screenshot section ("Media") of this website is really dated (0.9.15 WTF) and should see an update. Sadly, players can't contribute anything directly to this section so I fear it woudln't change anytime soon.
Sad Smiley

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nemo
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Wuzzy allegedly wrote:

Hey nemo, I guess you mean the demo section on this website. Am I right? Is it operated by bender? Whatever, I must have totally overlooked/forgotten it; *whoops*
As this obviously fulfils all requirements, I have added it to the list, thanks.
Smile

But we still have a long way to go, as my list has still a lot non-green entries in it.

By the way, the screenshot section ("Media") of this website is really dated (0.9.15 WTF) and should see an update. Sadly, players can't contribute anything directly to this section so I fear it woudln't change anytime soon.
Sad Smiley

I was thinking of bender's hosted section off the DLC (mostly maps). But I guess the demos area applies too.

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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev

Wuzzy
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Do you mean this page?:
http://hedgewars.org/content.html

Or this one?:
http://hh.unit22.org/dlc

If yes, this does not qualify, because all submissions go through a manual moderation first; this is just a compilation of the - what the moderators think - "best" hedgewars addons. The best addons are not all addons, thus both pages fail at the "every Hedgewars player should be allowed to contribute" requirement and won't be included in the list.
Additionally, the /content.html has some external dependencies:
The link to the file WxW_0.4.zip points to the host dl.dropbox.com (Dropbox), which I already discouraged. It is a silly dependency to have. It can be easily avoided by putting the file to hedgewars.org instead (and updating the link, of course). Come on, we are talking about 5.7 KiB!
The SOPA hat links to m8y.org which looks like it is operated by a Hedgewars player, so it is okay. It would be nice to have a copy on hedgewars.org, too. You don't have to link on it in the first place, but it is nice to have a copy, just in case. We are talking about 645 Bytes.

If no, for hog's sake tell me what place you mean and post an URI to it.

Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer. Smile

sphrix
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a good thing could be an internet page, hosted by hedgewars.org that would allow us to share our content

that would be a place where all your list is :
a tab for each item, when you click on it, you see a list of all in this category, clicking on it would download

could be cool, but maybe not so easy to do

plus i agree, there is dropbox that is not bad Wink Smiley

if hedgewars.org don't want to host all, it could have the page i mentioned but the file are hosted somewhere else :

tab = mission
liste : mission A : link = dropbox/mediafire/....
mission B link = .............

so all is almost centralised

the problem is mediafire and some other hoster delete file too much
so maybe someone of the community should download file, host them himself so there won't be deleting

a centralised place for all downloable content could be good

edit : if someone understood me and can draw a 'table' or draw a paint of it :p

the beachs hogs surfin hedgewars

Wuzzy
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sphrix allegedly wrote:
a good thing could be an internet page, hosted by hedgewars.org that would allow us to share our content

It would be a good place to begin with. I still don't know if the admins agree.

sphrix allegedly wrote:
plus i agree, there is dropbox that is not bad ;)

Why?
I have posted serveral reasons against Dropbox, none of them have them battled yet; you post no reasons for Dropbox but you support it anyways. It seems to be irrational to me to still stick to Dropbox.

sphrix allegedly wrote:
if hedgewars.org don't want to host all, it could have the page i mentioned but the file are hosted somewhere else :

tab = mission
liste : mission A : link = dropbox/mediafire/....
mission B link = .............


Oh, no, come on. We are already in this stage. We already have lots of links to those hosters. If we'd do that, it really does not change anything. The only difference is that the links to the 3rd party hosters go from the forums to a special page in the forum. We still have the same dependency as we have right now.

But to come back to the first issue of yours, which is hedgewars.org:
@website admins: Are there any objections about hosting more stuff on hedgewars.org itself, which is similar to the system you already have with demos? If you think about file sizes, think again. There are several file types which are naturally very small, which would provide a good continuation of what you've started with demos:

  • game schemes
  • weapon schemes
  • flags (<1 KiB)
  • teams (1-2 KiB)
  • graves (<7 KiB)
  • saved games (<10 KiB)
  • hats (usually 10 KiB, up to 32 KiB)
  • demos (usually around 10 KiB, up to 45 KiB)
  • missions (10-120 KiB)

    Green color means: already used in hedgewars.org

    Schemes are currently shared in the thread Share your mods ! in plain text. It works for now but the scheme system really should be reworked for future versions. Schemes should, like anything else, stored in seperate files rather than stored collectively in one single file. If you want to start a discussion about this, please start a new thread.

    sphrix allegedly wrote:
    so all is almost centralised

    Remember that I do not want only one single place to have everything, but serveral places. Decentralization is better than centralization because if in a decentralized system one node fails, you can easily recover. But in a centralized system, a failure can cause severe damage and in bad cases you may not be able to recover at all.

Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer. Smile

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