Gamefront pulled down all it's "network" sites for various mods, including the popular Bridge Commander site that had over 1,000 fan-created mods of new ship classes and updates to old ones. Almost no warning was given, and even some of the mods and insiders at Gamefront (on the interacts with fans/users level) were apparently not told (and were not to happy about the fact either). Word has it that most of the meshes were saved, but it will be a long time before an alternate site can be found and all the material re-uploaded. From the looks of things, the 5000+ image screencap/reference image archive is flat GONE. Corporate bad faith strikes again.
I just discovered this myself the other day when I went looking for some old mods. Very disappointing, although not entirely unexpected for a decade plus old game. I used to love checking out the screenshots of the day and even got a couple of my own chosen.
Good news is that after a Herculean effort, they did manage to save most of the models and mod files...so the reference images are gone, a few of the models, and they're trying to set up again here: http://http://www.bc-central.net/forums/index.php But it will be a LONG time before all the mods are available again. And the web forum version isn't as easy to acess as the filefront one was. So it's not all bad news...the group is crippled, but still alive.
[Pours a healthy gush of your favorite alcoholic beverage over the fresh grave of bc-files] one for my homies... Devastated that this happened. People still use Bridge Commander and Star Wars: Battlefront because in 10 years we haven't seen any games that come close to that level of replay-ability. Glad to hear there's a home for the Trek stuff. Far as I can tell, there isn't a dedicated site just for the Star Wars Battlefront mods. But I will be joining and supporting bc-central.net for sure.
From further reading, it appears that GF basically decided it just didn't want to bother with "lesser" titles and fandoms any longer and went about ending their support in a particularly douche-y way.
I have a ton of old mods I saved on CD somewhere. Back when internet speeds weren't so fast and re-downloading all of the time sucked badly. I'll have to see if I can find them.
^Go up to post 3, and the site link for the new site is there. They said they got most of the mods, but I don't think they got 100% so depending on what you have they may well need some of your stuff.
I have a healthy repository of mods on DVDr as well. Can't live without M'Vam's Galaxy-Class separation mod, that was ingenious. K'Vort, Neg'Vhar and D7 were all critical additions to the Klingon fleets and of course Excelsior and Miranda class were oddly overlooked as models in the original as well. Will there ever be a Trek game as mighty as Bridge Commander? Activision, if you were here now, I'd kiss you on the mouth.
Awesome!! I use BC for my ship shots in my animation and was lost when i couldn't find the old file front. Thanks for the link.