I noticed this situation a few days ago, that a major game archive will be going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon, but its a very hectic time for me, so I haven't had a chance to do more than briefly search the mods there, and there are some Star Fleet Command mods on the site (at least, that's all I searched). I'm sure there must be more for other games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Star_Trek_games#Computer
"Now who the heck gives a darn about game mods, they're for kids, right?" Well, I don't think its that simple. They are manifestations of human creativity at many possible levels of complexity. Looking at the examples from 2012, where someone really did an interesting conversion on Elite Force 2 to recreate the original Star Trek sets I'm astonished what one dedicated person can accomplish. And if that mod was never finished or released it would be a real shame (if anyone finds out, PM me).
http://forums.filefront.com/st-ef-m...39041-virtual-tos-enterprise-elite-force.html
As someone who worked about 40 hours a week for over a year on an SFC mod (as technical advisor) "back in the day" (when I would work all night to have the 128MB RAM computer keep crashing on the "oversize" files I was working on, and struggled to upload the files to email at 14K), mod making seems to me to be the stuff of blood, sweat, and tears. In short, working on a mod can get very intense, with good or bad results.
The point I'm making is that each mod potentially involved ungodly amounts of human effort. The result can be countless hours of human activity, enjoying the fruits of all that labor. The appreciation can fade over time, but if the content is not lost then it can continue to be rediscovered and appreciated by new audiences, and in turn inspire new works. To me its a significant tragedy when all that effort goes to waste when sites go down and files are no longer available to the public. Its not a phenomena that happens just to mod sites, and I could name various sites I wish still existed, but if you've been around the Trek-net long enough you probably know them already. Sometimes some of the files are saved elsewhere, but often its haphazard and things always get lost in the reshuffle. "Leaky nets" are a human tradition, but not all our traditions are great and good. In this case they are much better than nothing.
A month or so ago I read some articles about how Archive.org had saved saved Apple II & Windows 3.x programs from being lost:
http://blog.archive.org/2016/03/04/saving-500-apple-ii-programs-from-oblivion/
http://blog.archive.org/2016/02/11/...-of-windows-3-1-programs-join-the-collection/
And the thought has occurred to me, couldn't the same thing be done for dying websites such as GameFront? What I mean is, couldn't archive.org (or someone else) approach them and offer to archive their contents for posterity? And in the future, couldn't other websites that are closing down do the same, actively facilitating a transfer of their contents instead of relying on webcrawling bots and internet time-outs? There are differences, such as the amount of content being vastly larger, and perhaps different legal hurdles. It may be impossible, but I would still like something to be done. So, once I'm done with this post I will send an email to Archive.org [ http://archive.org/about/contact.php ] and suggest they try to archive a little more of the internet in the next week than they had planned.
I'm not going to ask everyone who reads this thread to do the same, what you think should be done is up to each reader. What I do ask is that everyone who strolls into this discussion take some time to think about this issue, see if you can come up with solutions to this problem (in-the-box, out-of-the-box, or blowing-up-the-box), and decide if you want to try to do something about it. As for myself, I'm going to be being yanked in several real-life different directions until the start of next week, so I won't have much to add, probably, at least until then.
Regards,
Whorfin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Star_Trek_games#Computer
"Now who the heck gives a darn about game mods, they're for kids, right?" Well, I don't think its that simple. They are manifestations of human creativity at many possible levels of complexity. Looking at the examples from 2012, where someone really did an interesting conversion on Elite Force 2 to recreate the original Star Trek sets I'm astonished what one dedicated person can accomplish. And if that mod was never finished or released it would be a real shame (if anyone finds out, PM me).
http://forums.filefront.com/st-ef-m...39041-virtual-tos-enterprise-elite-force.html
As someone who worked about 40 hours a week for over a year on an SFC mod (as technical advisor) "back in the day" (when I would work all night to have the 128MB RAM computer keep crashing on the "oversize" files I was working on, and struggled to upload the files to email at 14K), mod making seems to me to be the stuff of blood, sweat, and tears. In short, working on a mod can get very intense, with good or bad results.
The point I'm making is that each mod potentially involved ungodly amounts of human effort. The result can be countless hours of human activity, enjoying the fruits of all that labor. The appreciation can fade over time, but if the content is not lost then it can continue to be rediscovered and appreciated by new audiences, and in turn inspire new works. To me its a significant tragedy when all that effort goes to waste when sites go down and files are no longer available to the public. Its not a phenomena that happens just to mod sites, and I could name various sites I wish still existed, but if you've been around the Trek-net long enough you probably know them already. Sometimes some of the files are saved elsewhere, but often its haphazard and things always get lost in the reshuffle. "Leaky nets" are a human tradition, but not all our traditions are great and good. In this case they are much better than nothing.
A month or so ago I read some articles about how Archive.org had saved saved Apple II & Windows 3.x programs from being lost:
http://blog.archive.org/2016/03/04/saving-500-apple-ii-programs-from-oblivion/
http://blog.archive.org/2016/02/11/...-of-windows-3-1-programs-join-the-collection/
And the thought has occurred to me, couldn't the same thing be done for dying websites such as GameFront? What I mean is, couldn't archive.org (or someone else) approach them and offer to archive their contents for posterity? And in the future, couldn't other websites that are closing down do the same, actively facilitating a transfer of their contents instead of relying on webcrawling bots and internet time-outs? There are differences, such as the amount of content being vastly larger, and perhaps different legal hurdles. It may be impossible, but I would still like something to be done. So, once I'm done with this post I will send an email to Archive.org [ http://archive.org/about/contact.php ] and suggest they try to archive a little more of the internet in the next week than they had planned.
I'm not going to ask everyone who reads this thread to do the same, what you think should be done is up to each reader. What I do ask is that everyone who strolls into this discussion take some time to think about this issue, see if you can come up with solutions to this problem (in-the-box, out-of-the-box, or blowing-up-the-box), and decide if you want to try to do something about it. As for myself, I'm going to be being yanked in several real-life different directions until the start of next week, so I won't have much to add, probably, at least until then.
Regards,
Whorfin
