[diamondgeezer]

Yo, admin dudes - how about updating this?

[Stryke 9]

Ya know, instead of just advertising the HOTU download- which few people are gonna care about- if we stuck with my old plan and sent them a modified care package including the SCP, the cutscenes captured and compressed in MPEG-4, and maybe some better-resolution ships, you'd get a lot more customers. The SCP is better looking, more versatile, and a lot more attractive to all sorts of gamers- in its current ripped state it'll appeal only to people who already know how cool it is and the abandonware crowd- a big 'un but not a group that seems too interested in our line of work- I'd know, I've spent a long, long time in the HOTU community and none of this sort of **** ever crops up.

It appears you need to change the extension somehow in the code or campaign for it to recognize them, which is why I couldn't do it myself. If someone could just work out a fix for this or something, the actual movie bit is child's play and would take at most a week. The higher-poly ships... aren't there some somewhere? Thought I saw 'em a year back. Anyway, that'd be GREAT PR, because it would both make the game more of an enticing option and show off our, ah, virtuosity and provide impetus to join. Simple little starter before we move on to bigger things, nyet?

[Thorn]

Its not dead.. its just.... slow.. it'll pick up again once one of the big projects releases something significant...

[Nico]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
The higher-poly ships... aren't there some somewhere?  

tried that, it's of no use. currently, a highly detailled ship looks like crap, because the engine can't handle that. Until the clipping is fixed, the details on ships can't be improved, it's that simple.

[Stryke 9]

We have a week. Go to it.

Er... yeah. That's a fix that needs to be done rather soon, anyway. How hard is it?

[Thorn]

Probably would require rewriting most of the graphics engine just to figure out what the hell causes it...

[Stryke 9]

Uh... crap?

Well, that can come in a later release, anyway. Important thing is, if it's an SCP-modified version of Freespace up at HOTU, then it's props to us on the page and a potential viewing of about 100,000 people a year. If 5% of those people see FreeSpace, 10% of those come through to here (a fair guess, since aside from FSW we're basically the only big fansite in town), and a quarter of those join us and are any good... ****, I need a calculator. It's a fair bit more than we're getting now, I'll tell you that.

[Black Wolf]

Repeating Question, but is there any chance that we're going t be able to find a host who can set up downloads of the magniude we'd need to make Voice actig and Hi Res stuff available? I've been pimping the HOTU release (well, have pimped - one forum so far ) and come up with these as the major complaints...If there's any chance we could get these files out there, 'twould be most cool.

[karajorma]

Actually I'm aware of someone willing to host all three FS2 CD's as ISO who didn't want to post the link here because it would be regarded as warez.

If the general opinion is moving towards not caring about that then I'll say who it was.

[Shrike]

I thought there was legal problems not with the game itself, but with the cutscenes.  Something to do with the mve player I believe.  Putting them into a better format would make more sense anyhow, they take up a lot of disc space.

Does anyone know the exact legality of releasing FS?  Can we legally put up the entire three CDs for download, or can we only spread parts?  I can't condone illegally putting it up for download, because of my position.

[karajorma]

If the problem is only with the cutscenes then we could post everything but together with a copy of FS2_open. That should be more than enough to get the newbies into the game.

That said HotU has had the last 3 cutscenes up in their rip for months now and nobody seems to care.

[vyper]

I officially offer my voice acting to any campaign that currently needs it. This thread is scary. Thank you, goodnight.

[Stealth]

Actually I'm aware of someone willing to host all three FS2 CD's as ISO who didn't want to post the link here because it would be regarded as warez.

i wonder who that could be

Originally posted by Sandwich


1. Yeah, I know. Sad, ain't it? I emailed V about being included on their fansite list, but haven't gotten a reply. I'm also going to be educating myself on the varagries (sp?) of search-engine optimisation for some work-related stuff, but that's knowledge I'll be able to put to good use on the HLP site, for sure.

i'll educate you right now

the first thing you can start by doing is putting some "Keywords" in the main page of HLP, the forums main page, etc.

If you look at other big sites (i.e. Volitionwatch, Interplay, and even massive sites, such as Yahoo, MSN, Ebay, Gamespy, etc.) you'll notice (view the source) at the top of (most) of their pages they have the TITLE, BODY, HEAD, etc. and META tags, ... one META function is the "KEYWORD" tag, another, the "DESCRIPTION" tag.  Here's how they work.

Ex:

{META TYPE="KEYWORD" CONTENT="HLP, HARD, LIGHT, FREESPACE, FREESPACE 2, MODDING, INTERPLAY, VOLITION"}
{META TYPE="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="HLP is the biggest Freespace Modding Community in the world, sporting over 20 user-made campaigns and hundreds of FS Mods"}

Remember, they're to be placed between the HEAD tags at the beginning of the HTML document.

I'm not sure exactly how they work... never got into the theory of them, but i'm pretty sure (it's my best guess) that search engine spiders, when they visit a site, take note of the META keyword and description tags, and when someone types in something in a search engine, it will bring up whatever closely matches those keywords.

See, has it ever happened to you when you search for something, and it comes up with the site URL, and beneath that it has like 25 words of sentences that come from random parts of the page?  wouldn't it be nice to be able to designate your description instead of the search engine randomly finding it?  that's what the description tag is for.  keyword is what the engine looks for though.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Shrike

I can't condone illegally putting it up for download, because of my position.

you can't, but i can.

here's my thoughts:

If Volition released the SOURCE CODE to the game, that's the same as actually making a game freeware right?  And Freeware can be distributed in any form, as long as (correct me on this) credit is given to the correct author (i.e. you can backedit it, etc.)

i think it would be cool to give people the URL to the 3 FS2 CDs.

couldn't they be uploaded to FilePlanet though? even better, why doesn't someone hosted on HLP upload the CD to one of their folders, and someone else upload the second CD, and another person upload the 3rd CD, so that 3DAP won't be suspicious when they see 2 GB in one person's folder.  700 MB is a lot less conspicuous, don't you think?
JUST KIDDING JUST KIDDING JUST KIDDING *shocked* DON"T BAN ME I WAS JUST KIDDING!

[Shrike]

But the problem, as I remember it, was not with FS itself, but the associated media.  It would be neat to have the entire thing up for download, but we'd really have to get ahold of one of the [V] guys and see if they can clarify the situation.  Things might have changed vis a vis the legality of it all... but I'd prefer to avoid anything that might draw flak.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Shrike
But the problem, as I remember it, was not with FS itself, but the associated media.  It would be neat to have the entire thing up for download, but we'd really have to get ahold of one of the [V] guys and see if they can clarify the situation.  Things might have changed vis a vis the legality of it all... but I'd prefer to avoid anything that might draw flak.

yeah i didn't think of that though.

uhmmmmm... what if someone *hehehe* uploads it, and everyone in the community keeps it on the low-key... and if someone wants it, they can contact someone *hehehe* and that someone can give them a temporary URL to the three ISOs.  however, if you're talking about making it PUBLICLY available, like, advertised, then i doubt you'd like that, and i doubt i would like all the bandwidth .

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Stealth


yeah i didn't think of that though.

uhmmmmm... what if someone *hehehe* uploads it, and everyone in the community keeps it on the low-key... and if someone wants it, they can contact someone *hehehe* and that someone can give them a temporary URL to the three ISOs.  however, if you're talking about making it PUBLICLY available, like, advertised, then i doubt you'd like that, and i doubt i would like all the bandwidth .

[color=66ff00]You see if we could actually encode those files in another format and have FS run them as normal, we could simply upload them to Fileplanet for DL completely legally as I understand it...
[/color]

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Stealth
If Volition released the SOURCE CODE to the game, that's the same as actually making a game freeware right?  And Freeware can be distributed in any form, as long as (correct me on this) credit is given to the correct author (i.e. you can backedit it, etc.)

It's not really the same thing. Although some companies make the entire game freeware when they release the code some don't. One reason for this is so as to increase the sales of the game to other platforms.

If FS2 had been ported to Linux, AmigaOS, MacOS etc. people on those platforms would have bought the PC version of the game so as to play it on their own OS.

I doubt that this was the reason for releasing the source code to FS2 (since the game is pretty much impossible to find anyway) but it has had an effect previously with games like Quake, Hexen and Descent.

So for that reason you can't automatically assume the rest of the game is also freeware just cause the source is released.

[Stryke 9]

Funny how people like talk about all this ****, but when the simple option entails doing something here and now, it's too complex.

Listen guys, we don't need to host the voice acting, ISO, or any of that ****- UD will take care of it if we just get the ****ing size down a little. I already talked her into letting in the really important cutscenes- she wants to have as complete a game as possible, she just doesn't want to have to sacrifice a gig of space and the accompanying bandwidth cost to do it. Trimming the movies heavily will go a long way towards that- long enough that we'll be able to fit in the voice file on the HOTU main site. That means a lot more people looking at it, since anyone who downloads it from an HLP site will, necessarily, already know all about Freespace and HLP and thus almost invariably will have it. There's just no point. We don't have the exposure or the audience, and in fact to do what y'all are talking about to legalize it basically entails doing just the same work anyway.

So, uh, yeah. Anyone into actually doing some work and figuring out what's up with the file tag thing? Hell, I'll videocapture the movies myself, already offered to, I just need someone a little more familiar with the workings of the game to take a look and see what's what. You can talk all year, it won't get any more likely to happen, or someone can spend five seconds, I'll tinker it up, package it, and it'll be on the HOTU main site in a month.

[Stealth]

good job Stryke.

i saw your name on the under dogs "special thanks to" thing... really impressed man.  thanks a lot


EDIT:  i was thinking... your goal is to get the total file size down to less than a GB, right?  now i'm thinking hmmm... it's 3 semi-full CDs, which adds up to almost 2 GB.  without the movies, you're probably looking at around 1.2 or 1.3 GB.  if you need any help finding and removing files yet still allowing the game to run with all features (except of course cutscenes) let me know, i'm willing to help with that.