UPDATE October 20th, 2008: not much progress made, but I have a fairly good reason. My ISP. I live in the STICKS people; I get on the internet by way of a ingenious RF-spectrum ISP's tower 5 miles away, that gives me a whopping 384k down/128k up connection AT BEST...and thats only in the middle of the night, for about 5 hours. the rest of the time, I get substantially less, when I get any connection at all. And it's getting worse, as they add more subscribers. So when I registered this domain, it was working just barely well enough to edit this site, but then rapidly fell off to the point where I just don't even bother. BTW, Satellite is no better, and usually worse, when it comes to UP speed in case you are wondering why I don't go that route.
I Have a plan, however.
I'm going to come out of semi-retirement and rent a office in the nearby little hick town a few feet away from the local AT&T CLEC. And get a T-1. And take back all my myriad domains from the various host services i farmed them out to when I had to move away from civilization.
This WILL keep me busy for a while, just getting it organized & transferred, but it will mean that if you want a place to stick a old PC running a shard for you and your friends usage somewhere for cheap, you'll be able to. And I will actually be able to go forward with the great plans I had for this domain! (and download a Linux Distro again! Yay!)
Ok, back to the original message:
Hi there!
Obviously, this site isn't live yet.
It really hasn't been put together at all. While I had the great idea that led to registering the domain name, and thought of using a system I devloped a few years back to power the backend, I've had a few crisis's hit end-to-end right after that, so by the time I'm ready to start putting things together, I'm too wiped to even think about it.
In a nutshell, here is the idea:
Game modding is a very popular thing, both for the people creating the mods, and the people getting more enjoyment out of their games by using them.
One thing I've found very difficult to deal with in the past is actually finding, and then managing to actually acquire, the mods. A few communities use the method of doing mod discussion & planning in a central forum, then hosting the files on a public fileserver.
One or two places exist which have discussion and file storage on the same system.
I usually find these methods annoying. in the first example, I've often found that the files simply aren't there anymore, and even if they ARE there, the "wait a weird amount of time for the file, unless you want to pay us for premium access" bugs me. In the 2nd example, I always feel like I should be considering re-installing my OS with all the active popups and flash ads and "adult Peer to Peer newsgroup chat" banners & whatever.
They are in it to make a buck. I can respect that, I like money also. But shirley there is a better way.......
Some basics: unlimited storage for mods, patches & source files. When transfers pickup to the point where limits look like they might be a problem, I've got a sort of P2P for file hosting system I wrote back in the day that should handle, literally, any POSSIBLE bandwidth issues; it's transparent to end users, by the way.
I'm going to have advertising. Only text or very basic images, no flash or scripts or pop-wherevers or anything really annoying.
Extensive community support options. users will have just about anything they can imagine, blogs, forums, CVS systems if it's warranted, whatever. And seperate areas for the most popular games, for instance "half-life.modthegames.com" (not live yet, don't bother looking).
Financial incentives for mod developers. Haven't worked out all the details, but at the very least mod creators will get a slice of the advertising pie based on how popular their work is; a game or mod reviewer would get income from a review that is heavily read, etc. I've got a couple of ideas on this subject that are still simmering.
I also like the idea of promoting community provided support for game issues.
A Store. A place to sell your LEGAL game-related stuff, maybe a auction component, maybe not. a portion of proceeds to go to Modders and problem solvers.
Thats it, in a weird shaped nutshell. Sounds a little, um, weird looking at it written down. Just who the heck am I, anyway? If you really want to know, send me a e-mail.
Registration is open, feel free to jump on board, post some messages in the plain vanilla forum; if you want to advertise, it'll cost you absolutely nothing until things start to reach a more "finished" stage; if you are a advertiser, modder or reviewer and want to help get things rolling and have some input on how things are going to work, write.