The Savage Empire Remake: Still Here!
Scythifuge posted a brief update to The Savage Empire Remake’s Facebook page recently, to let us all know that despite how quiet it has been in recent months, the project is still being worked on:
I’m still here. Overtime & other Real Life™ issues always delay my hobbies. I am barely gaming these days.
I am still waiting for help to come along. Artists, coders, etc.
Always remember to check out the Exult forums for other Exult related discussions! Recently, DrCode has been working on the NPC ‘desk schedule.’ You may remember from playing Ultima VII that NPCs may sit at a desk & place items on it.
These developments are great for playing Ultima VII through Exult, as well as for future developments of mods such as Wizardry Dragon’s The Feudal Lands & for total conversions such as Savage Empire & Agentorangeguy’s Ultima VI!
Hopefully, more people will start creating assets for Exult & joining the scene!
It’s nice to see that he’s getting some support from one of the key Exult developers in bringing the world of Savage Empire to life with the Ultima 7 engine.
RL is a killer, man. I am pleased to know the project is still active though. Ideally the Lycaeum would be the answer to asset contributions, but it’s a bit cludgy since it’s post-based. If it could somehow be dynamically updated and browsable (like an FTP site with per-user write permissions and audio/video “thumbnails”) it would be infinitely more usable. WtF only has 24 hours in a day though, so let’s put that in the wish column.
I still periodically look for solutions. It had occurred to me to set up an SFTP drop for people to use, but it’s still nice to put some kind of a front-end on things, with tagging, searchability, etc.
You and I are both right… I was imagining something including both features. The GUI front end is extremely important, as it makes it accessible, yet you’d still want a way to refresh you own directory with updated textures, audio files, etc. which would then be searchable exactly as before. I have these automatic usability visions, as if there are existing solutions out there, but half the time it seems as if they actually don’t yet exist. Confounding for me. 😉
Here’s my basic vision: The front page displays categories by general type (images, sound effects, music, design/logic/code). These are tags applied to each asset in the database which are required for submission. Additional tags are encouraged (both admin- and user-defined) prior to the initial upload. Each user has their own home directory under which they may maintain multiple subdirectories for their own convenience. All home directories are recursively searched by keyword and/or tag. Image thumbnails are generated and displayed in browse/search results and audio assets similarly allow a streamed preview.
Is there a specialized (or customizable) CMS that could allow functionality close to this? I know we talked about this before a while back.
Actually, I think it can be done with WordPress too. The “post per download” convention is something I established for Aiera, and it has been adapted for The Digital Lycaeum as well. But it’s not a hard and fast requirement; we could just as easily set up other arrangements of files (e.g. lists by category).
Really, what gets in the way is user submissions. That’d necessarily have to be a heavily moderated process, and in fact a lot of download managers for WordPress don’t permit anyone who isn’t at least a subdomain admin to upload files at all. Exceptions can be made, but…well, let’s just say I don’t want to give EVERYONE high-level access to the site if I can help it.
I’m not aware of another CMS that would be better suited to this particular case, nor am I all that anxious to give myself another piece of software to manage. Still, if something exists, I’m at least open to running a test domain with it, to see what it allows for.
The “lists by category” option would be very useful, using tags. It would be a matter of tags being hierarchical, starting perhaps with those I suggested and moving down to subcategories.
Perhaps there could be a private (write only) “asset submission” subdomain where submissions could be freely made as long as they had the appropriate base tags. The submissions would wait until an admin reviewed them and decided to publish them to the Lycaeum proper. Which files were overwritten (for updates to existing publishes) would be determined by tag or submission comment.
The end goal would be to make it as easy as possible to create new assets, update existing assets, minimize admin overhead while maintaining security and avoiding IP infringement, and above all allow devs to search, browse and download the assets for their projects.
I’ll poke around with the download manager and see what it lets me do. The other catch in all this is limits, within PHP, on file upload size. I’ve got the maximum size set at 128 MB at present, which is far and away larger than the 2 MB default. I daren’t push it higher, lest I have to start significantly messing around with PHP’s “max execution time”settings…which I don’t want to do, since then it allows runaway scripts to bring things down more easily.
Ah, the tangled webs…
Granted, 128 MB is good for most things, but when we start dealing with large 3D assets, or collections thereof, it can prove insufficient. An SFTP repo is probably warranted here…as long as I can set up some kind of folder monitoring and notification scheme for it.