The Digital Lycaeum Returns!

The Digital Lycaeum was originally created as a place where Ultima fan project developers could share ideas, resources, and the like. In its first incarnation, it never quite achieved that goal, but Browncoat Jayson found a secondary purpose for it, and wrote a number of excellent articles covering a diversity of topics. The legality of fan games, the particular issues developers face in crafting an Ultima title specifically, and other issues all came up for discussion.

And while it is still my hope that the Digital Lycaeum can one day turn into a sort of hub whereat aspiring fan project developers can find both advice and assets to use in their projects, I also wanted to give Jayson the opportunity to return to writing about the many excellent topics he covered.

To that end, over the weekend I migrated all of the content from the old Digital Lycaeum to its new home here at the Ultima Codex. Jayson, for his part, has also added a total of four new articles to the Lycaeum since his post in January of this year. The four articles are a brief examination of the current release of the Unreal Engine, a mention of the latest CryENGINE SDK release, a short comparison between Unity 3 and Unity 4, and a short look at Exult.

13 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:

    The asset links in the navigation bar are broken. Also, how do you upload textures and the like? I’d like to contribute some of my game’s assets.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Yeah, I still need to restore the downloads.

      And…you know what, you might make an interesting test case. I’ll see if I can boost your user permissions level high enough to access the file manager on the Lycaeum.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Okay, I’ve set your user permissions to be the same as the minimum permissions required for access to the file manager. Or, at least, that is my HOPE.

      Please to give it a try? Hit up the Dashboard, and look for the File Manager on the sidebar. Just don’t delete anything!

      • Sanctimonia says:

        It allowed me to upload two images, inserting them into the “post”, and then I chose “create package”. It didn’t seem possible to add it to any categories as that area was just empty. If there was some way to upload content with tags without being able to delete or modify other users’ uploads that would be ideal.

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Ah, I see what happened.

        Okay, the first rule in the download manager is: ignore the main text field. Put a brief, unformatted description of the package there, but that’s it. The text there doesn’t translate to an article on the site.

        What you want to do is this:

        1. Give the download a meaningful title
        2. Give it a short description in the text field
        3. Attach a package (“Choose file” button on the right-hand sidebar, at the top)
        4. Hit “Create/Update package”

        Have a go at editing your last upload; use the File Manager menu’s “Manage” link, and navigate to the last page. Page links are at the bottom-right of the list of downloads that comes up when you click “Manage”.

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Once you’ve created a download package, navigate to the last page of the download manager again and look for the shortcode for the package you just created, something like “[wpdm_file id=###]”…

        …that is what you embed at the point in a regular article/post that you want the download link to appear at.

      • WtF Dragon says:

        And…um…basic rules for editing a post, I guess, are in order.

        1. Give it a meaningful title
        2. Give it some entry text, of course.
        3. Give it an excerpt (might need to enable that field using the “Screen Options” link near the top of the posting screen).
        4. Assign it some tags
        5. Assign it at least one category
        6. Assign it a featured image (right-hand sidebar, at/near the bottom)

        Lemmee know if you need any more help.

      • Sanctimonia says:

        Holy skull fuck Batman, is there an app for that? :/ In all seriousness though, I’ll give it a try and see what happens, but for a real repo that regular folk can upload assets to we need something more streamlined and that doesn’t require elevated permissions. Maybe WP isn’t well suited for that… I once looked for something like FTP with tags and thumbnails for my own asset repo and couldn’t find a decent CMS that wasn’t chock full of wholly unnecessary and complicated BS.

        Is there a CMS that you know of geared toward the upload of media with tags and audio/video previews? You’d think there would be.

      • Wp does support video previews and such, if we install the extension for it. And yes, it seriously is a pain to have to navigate to get things posted, but once you do it a few times its cake.

        That said, if you have something to post and you don’t want to figure it out, send it to WtF or myself and we can get it posted for you. I’d love to see some new stuff on the Lycaeum. I just put together a package for the moons along with the original normal maps I was using in UDK.

      • Deckard says:

        We can/will work on improving the system for adding content, it’s just a matter of finding the right plugin that allows submissions.

      • WtF Dragon says:

        @browncoatjayson – The comment you posted with links to the File Manager…I’m actually going to withhold approval for it. We probably shouldn’t post links to backend components in public fora such as this.

        Might I suggest making use of the private message feature if you want to pass such details on to Sanctimonia?

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Eh…it’s convoluted, but it does allow for a bit of vetting to occur. Wouldn’t just want any random clown pushing downloads to the site.

        There isn’t, that I can think of, a CMS that’s geared toward that sort of thing, but there may be some WordPress skins we can apply to a specially-crafted subdomain that will make the upload process easier. I’ll do some investigating.

      • Didn’t even think of PM. Done.