A very nice guy that goes by the name of CheapAlert has taken it upon himself to track down the models that are still on fileplanet.com and archive them. He started with the Quake2 models you can find them here: http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php...true#Post182773
The other models are still up on fileplanet but will require some digging on your part. Please know that polycount is no longer a free model database for you to pillage and this is why the models are gone. At some point they MIGHT put the files back up but I seriously doubt it as it is more of an artist community than the PPM community it once was.
At some point we will try to rebuild the links to the Fileplanet downloads at the very least, I'd do it myself but unfortunately at the moment I have zero time between work and other commitments.
What happened to the database in the first place, to require rebuilding? I missed that part. Did something break, or has this just been part of a housekeeping effort, or has Polycount officially dropped its database function and any service along those lines is meant to be an unofficial "extra", or what? I'm outta the loop!
OK gang, here is the short version of this story (and trust me, this IS the short version...)
Back when polycount was the polycount you knew and loved (and still do, I hope..) we were hosted on gamespy and serving out LOADS and LOADS of models for download. Our bandwidth consumption, which was a large concern at that time, was way above anything we could pay for our handle out of our pockets by any means. The then GameSpy/Planetquake let us leave our stuff there and had no problems dishing out our gigs and gigs of downloads at no cost to us. We did look around, asked friends, etc. None of them could offer us a better solution than the GameSpy solution. The site and all the downloads were (and still are...) there, always available, always free. Yes, GameSpy later started including some downloading queues and throttling and such, but there was nothing we could do about that, just being a hosted site under a hosted site. GameSpy was very good to us and did a lot for us. Not only this, but we were allowed to offer hosting to people (for free, once again...) under us that normally couldn't.
This worked fine for a long time (around 6-ish years...maybe a little less.) We really didn't have to do much work on the site besides uploading news and a little HTML editing here and there to keep things going and to add to the site. We had a lot of people with free time available and got a lot of help. Well, over time, the help faded, some others came on board, some came back, some left for good. The site was still very easy to mange and care for. Then we started getting a large amount of models over a period of time and our model review/stat pages became sparse as did our help. We found others to help once again and started to drain our very full queue. Things started to look up, less a few minor annoyances here and there, and then the boards got attacked....
Those of you that have been here a long while remember this attack. The boards were offline for a while and GameSpy had taken a direct hit, so we were understandably low on the totem pole in terms of priority of getting things fixed. Enter Knight Vito. Vito offered us a place to at least be able to host the boards so that we could a) upgrade to a new system and b) have a home for you guys to use while GameSpy cleaned things up. From that point forward, things were never really "right" on the GSI side of things. They brought the boards up all crooked at one point, we had a lot of missing and broken data.... let's just leave it as a lot was wrecked. Now, while the main site was down, r13 and I both had been wanting to do a redesign of the site and add some things that hadn't been there before. Again, with Vito's help, we got a new site coded up and integrated with the boards system.
The downloads, however, were another story....
Being in the um...very..uh...particular directory structure they were in and the fact that there were now a very large number of models, a very daunting task was ahead of us. Those would manually have to be sorted, restructured and a new downloading system would have to be built. This was far more work than any of us had any time for after accounting for personal schedules including work, holidays, family, emergencies, etc. CheapAlert has been doing a great job of downloading and restructuring a large amount of the Q2 and Q3 models on his own site [edit: saw Quake2 models after I posted..] (please correct any of that if I was wrong, Cheap). Sooo....with a new but not well-recieved site, a whole bunch of models that were, effectively, not available for download we stand where we are today. Trying to figure out what we want to do with everything and how we want to do it.
So there you have it. The full story in its condensed version. This isn't a plea for sympathy or reason to start a blog parade of outpouring for help or anything like that. It's been a while that you have all been told "we're working on it..." with no real other response besides that and I felt that you all really deserved to know the whole deal and why it has taken so long. I hope that this explains a little and makes things at least a little more clear, even if you still can't agree with the length of time it has taken to get the models back in a downloadable state.
Torrents were made for this exact scenario. Why not design a site around sharing the models via torrent? I have asp.net experience if you need a front end, and there are several php based tracker site apps. Make it a private tracker that you have to register a forum account for, or just open it to leechers. All you host is text files.
I'm not big on PHP, but why dont you setup a task list of actions required to get the site back to normal, and have people volunteer for small parts? If PC wont do it, I might just to get the hits on my adsense.
[ QUOTE ]
Torrents were made for this exact scenario.
[/ QUOTE ]
Have to disagree with that one. Torrents work best for single large popular files, I can't really see torrents for lots of tiny 1-5 meg files from games only a few people (relaively) still play. The cumulative effect is a large bandwidth drain, but they're varied and small enough that you're basically dropping the whole load on whoever you get to seed the whole thing, since it'd be rare for people to be downloading any individual file at the same time. Chunking everything into model packs like we did back in the Quake 2 days would help of course.
<sarcasm>If I didn't hate them so much, I'd almost suggest a site like Rapidshare or MediaFire except whaddya know? They're already on one (Fileplanet) go figure.</sarcasm>
OK, i'm the creator of the website www.Quake3Stuff.de
I made a model database there based on the one from polycount.
My big Problem is to get new models. Fileplanet is not listing all stuff that they realy have!
My goal of my website is not to host allot files, but to store allot download links to other pages :-)
I think polycount has the duty to rebuild the website like it was!
Polycount could host this model database on an own webserver without paying anything extra. Like i do http://kom4.dyndns.org is my own webserver with php and mysql support. I run this webserver under windows xp! It's just cruelly if they just delete all stuff!
Polycount is a video game artist community. I think it does what it's supposed to do pretty damn well. We're a tight-knit community of great artists, and those that want to learn have a great place to start. People who just want models will come here for five minutes, download the models, waste Polycount's bandwidth, and bugger off.
Could Polycount do with the news being updated more frequently? Absolutely. Would it be nice to have one or two tutorials hosted on the site? Sure. But let's face it, ninety percent of the people downloading the models had no interest in contributing to the community whatsoever and were gone as soon as they'd finished their download.
I personally don't feel the models truly contributed to the community or it's members, and bringing them back would be pointless, when we could simply send the people that want them to FileFront or ModDB or some other service tailored to their needs.
I personally don't feel the models truly contributed to the community or it's members
[/ QUOTE ]
Player models actually contributed quite a bit to the community. Many would agree they helped create it.
To me it all went downhill when Fileplanet started introducing "paid subscription accounts" for jumping ahead of the line in downloads. Forcing non paid accounts to wait. Artists and game content creators provided their work for free and most of the time with a disclaimer in the readme stating "this work can be be downloaded or given to anyone free of charge as long as no money is earned off of it." To me, paid download accounts undermined that. The worst of it was they waited until they were the standard to do this. I guess it should have been expected.
You aren't forced to pay to download are you? So technically the model is still free. I'm sure if the artist who created the model had any real argument about it being hosted on FilePlanet (and the like), they'd get it removed and have it hosted somewhere where no payment is required.
Really, you're just paying for the faster download speeds and jumping the queue, not the model. If you're not willing to pay extra for better service... Wait in line.
[ QUOTE ]
Polycount is a video game artist community.
[/ QUOTE ] Yes, and browsing the models used to be how I went about appreciating all of that art. I'm a hobbyist lowpoly environment artist, eventually trying to model and animate low poly people. Being able to check out how other artists solved some problems, or put things together is invaluable.
I have also read the forums since I've been around here, I just haven't had much to say. Turning us lurkers into leechers is a bit harsh.
I apologize, Vampyre. I wasn't referring to "lurkers," as I was one for a long time myself. I merely meant that there are a lot of people who do just what I said. I wasn't singling anyone out.
hey, making homer in quake2 proved skills and got some polycounters here in the industry thanks to player modeling. They learn a lot form a technical standpoint with game engine problem solving.
Because frankly, no one would want to hire just any modeler that has no experience with the engine the title has?
I guess I should say something, since this is mostly my fault.
The "problem" with the "model database" is that there never was a "model database." There is thousands of hand-written HTML files and images, and there is an index with some model information, like the name and author and an old FilePlanet URL.
The hand-written HTML files, being hand-written, are all slightly different from each other, and only worked when they were on GameSpy's old servers. After GameSpy's crash, they wouldn't even work on their new servers (and certainly not on mine). The same went for the model index and the code that redirected downloads to FilePlanet. All broken.
To get the models back online with any sort of reasonable presentation means going through every model's HTML and images by hand, cleaning it up (renaming images, directories, paths, fixing anciently bad HTML, etc.), and finding and testing the FilePlanet URL.
To get the models back online "right" means essentially rewriting all the HTML so everything is in a standard format, so it can eventually be put in a "real" model database, so this sort of situation can never happen again.
Before anyone says "why don't you just put the pages online somewhere, like in wiki, and let the Polycount community edit them and make them all right," I should point out that I did that with all the rest of Polycount's old content, and no-one really stepped up to the plate, and now the wiki is filled with spam. So, that's obviously not a viable solution.
As bearkub pointed out, after over a year of "it's on my to-do list," a few weeks ago I started in on it. I went through all of the reviewed Quake 2 models, did a rough editing pass, checked their FilePlanet URLs and put them all online, on Christmas Day. There are still over 200 unreviewed Quake 2 models, nearly 400 Quake 3 models, and hundreds of other models from other games to do.
I haven't provided status updates, or even announced that I had done this, because I have a life and will only be doing this work on an irregular basis. But, I will continue doing it, because I feel, like some of you do, that game art is art and should be preserved properly.
(Also, for the noobs, Quake 1/2/3-style modeling is still commercially relevant for 3D assets for PSP and DS games, and even modern games perform better when you're not wasting polys left and right. You could learn a lot from some of the really good old models.)
I remember the model pages being filled with lengthy reviews that slowed the process. If they're ever up again, just provide the name, image, specs, and any additional info. I miss the days when having a functional model in game was inspiring, and diversity in character design was allowed. I wanted something of mine on that list.
[ QUOTE ]
... checked their FilePlanet URLs and put them all online, on Christmas Day. There are still over 200 unreviewed Quake 2 models, nearly 400 Quake 3 models, and hundreds of other models from other games to do....
[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for that by now!
Hopefully you make the same with the Quake 3 models
Vito, I'd be interested in helping out. I know its shit work, but if there is such a demand to get this stuff sorted. I wouldn't mind committing a free weekend here and there sorting some stuff out. I'll PM you and see what we can sort out.
Replies
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php...true#Post182773
The other models are still up on fileplanet but will require some digging on your part. Please know that polycount is no longer a free model database for you to pillage and this is why the models are gone. At some point they MIGHT put the files back up but I seriously doubt it as it is more of an artist community than the PPM community it once was.
If you're looking for Quake3 stuff, then I have that too. I didn't get the stuff from the accessories sections yet
Back when polycount was the polycount you knew and loved (and still do, I hope..) we were hosted on gamespy and serving out LOADS and LOADS of models for download. Our bandwidth consumption, which was a large concern at that time, was way above anything we could pay for our handle out of our pockets by any means. The then GameSpy/Planetquake let us leave our stuff there and had no problems dishing out our gigs and gigs of downloads at no cost to us. We did look around, asked friends, etc. None of them could offer us a better solution than the GameSpy solution. The site and all the downloads were (and still are...) there, always available, always free. Yes, GameSpy later started including some downloading queues and throttling and such, but there was nothing we could do about that, just being a hosted site under a hosted site. GameSpy was very good to us and did a lot for us. Not only this, but we were allowed to offer hosting to people (for free, once again...) under us that normally couldn't.
This worked fine for a long time (around 6-ish years...maybe a little less.) We really didn't have to do much work on the site besides uploading news and a little HTML editing here and there to keep things going and to add to the site. We had a lot of people with free time available and got a lot of help. Well, over time, the help faded, some others came on board, some came back, some left for good. The site was still very easy to mange and care for. Then we started getting a large amount of models over a period of time and our model review/stat pages became sparse as did our help. We found others to help once again and started to drain our very full queue. Things started to look up, less a few minor annoyances here and there, and then the boards got attacked....
Those of you that have been here a long while remember this attack. The boards were offline for a while and GameSpy had taken a direct hit, so we were understandably low on the totem pole in terms of priority of getting things fixed. Enter Knight Vito. Vito offered us a place to at least be able to host the boards so that we could a) upgrade to a new system and b) have a home for you guys to use while GameSpy cleaned things up. From that point forward, things were never really "right" on the GSI side of things. They brought the boards up all crooked at one point, we had a lot of missing and broken data.... let's just leave it as a lot was wrecked. Now, while the main site was down, r13 and I both had been wanting to do a redesign of the site and add some things that hadn't been there before. Again, with Vito's help, we got a new site coded up and integrated with the boards system.
The downloads, however, were another story....
Being in the um...very..uh...particular directory structure they were in and the fact that there were now a very large number of models, a very daunting task was ahead of us. Those would manually have to be sorted, restructured and a new downloading system would have to be built. This was far more work than any of us had any time for after accounting for personal schedules including work, holidays, family, emergencies, etc. CheapAlert has been doing a great job of downloading and restructuring a large amount of the Q2 and Q3 models on his own site [edit: saw Quake2 models after I posted..] (please correct any of that if I was wrong, Cheap). Sooo....with a new but not well-recieved site, a whole bunch of models that were, effectively, not available for download we stand where we are today. Trying to figure out what we want to do with everything and how we want to do it.
So there you have it. The full story in its condensed version. This isn't a plea for sympathy or reason to start a blog parade of outpouring for help or anything like that. It's been a while that you have all been told "we're working on it..." with no real other response besides that and I felt that you all really deserved to know the whole deal and why it has taken so long. I hope that this explains a little and makes things at least a little more clear, even if you still can't agree with the length of time it has taken to get the models back in a downloadable state.
thanks.
--ted (bearkub) and r13.
Thanks for the info. The front page should reflect some of this stuff, I've been waiting for many months now to see it come back!
BTW, Been visiting here since late 2000, when I finally got a box able to play Q2.
I'm not big on PHP, but why dont you setup a task list of actions required to get the site back to normal, and have people volunteer for small parts? If PC wont do it, I might just to get the hits on my adsense.
I wish someone would make a site that encouraged people to make player models and hosted them.... its not like it's an impossible feat
[/ QUOTE ]
YOU are someone!
Torrents were made for this exact scenario.
[/ QUOTE ]
Have to disagree with that one. Torrents work best for single large popular files, I can't really see torrents for lots of tiny 1-5 meg files from games only a few people (relaively) still play. The cumulative effect is a large bandwidth drain, but they're varied and small enough that you're basically dropping the whole load on whoever you get to seed the whole thing, since it'd be rare for people to be downloading any individual file at the same time. Chunking everything into model packs like we did back in the Quake 2 days would help of course.
<sarcasm>If I didn't hate them so much, I'd almost suggest a site like Rapidshare or MediaFire except whaddya know? They're already on one (Fileplanet) go figure.</sarcasm>
I made a model database there based on the one from polycount.
My big Problem is to get new models. Fileplanet is not listing all stuff that they realy have!
My goal of my website is not to host allot files, but to store allot download links to other pages :-)
I think polycount has the duty to rebuild the website like it was!
incase you wonder, people who run the site and forums pay from their pocket and have full time jobs that give them little to no freetime to handle it.
Could filefront (not planet) everything, though
-caseyjones
Could Polycount do with the news being updated more frequently? Absolutely. Would it be nice to have one or two tutorials hosted on the site? Sure. But let's face it, ninety percent of the people downloading the models had no interest in contributing to the community whatsoever and were gone as soon as they'd finished their download.
I personally don't feel the models truly contributed to the community or it's members, and bringing them back would be pointless, when we could simply send the people that want them to FileFront or ModDB or some other service tailored to their needs.
I personally don't feel the models truly contributed to the community or it's members
[/ QUOTE ]
Player models actually contributed quite a bit to the community. Many would agree they helped create it.
To me it all went downhill when Fileplanet started introducing "paid subscription accounts" for jumping ahead of the line in downloads. Forcing non paid accounts to wait. Artists and game content creators provided their work for free and most of the time with a disclaimer in the readme stating "this work can be be downloaded or given to anyone free of charge as long as no money is earned off of it." To me, paid download accounts undermined that. The worst of it was they waited until they were the standard to do this. I guess it should have been expected.
Really, you're just paying for the faster download speeds and jumping the queue, not the model. If you're not willing to pay extra for better service... Wait in line.
-caseyjones
http://www.fileplanet.com/filelist.aspx?s=33347&v=0&st=1&sf=3
There are only 191 Quake 3 models. But Polycount.com had more than 300 Quake 3 models!!!
Polycount is a video game artist community.
[/ QUOTE ] Yes, and browsing the models used to be how I went about appreciating all of that art. I'm a hobbyist lowpoly environment artist, eventually trying to model and animate low poly people. Being able to check out how other artists solved some problems, or put things together is invaluable.
I have also read the forums since I've been around here, I just haven't had much to say. Turning us lurkers into leechers is a bit harsh.
Some of my work:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v227/Vampyre_Dark/Mapping%20Portfolio/Shot0068.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v227/Vampyre_Dark/Mapping%20Portfolio/Shot0009.jpg
Because frankly, no one would want to hire just any modeler that has no experience with the engine the title has?
The URL is: http://www.quake3stuff.de/phpBB3/
(btw. there are still only 191 Quake 3 models @ Fileplanet since 2006!)
That's refreshing, isn't it?
On another note: Vig referred to someone as 'very nice'?
The "problem" with the "model database" is that there never was a "model database." There is thousands of hand-written HTML files and images, and there is an index with some model information, like the name and author and an old FilePlanet URL.
The hand-written HTML files, being hand-written, are all slightly different from each other, and only worked when they were on GameSpy's old servers. After GameSpy's crash, they wouldn't even work on their new servers (and certainly not on mine). The same went for the model index and the code that redirected downloads to FilePlanet. All broken.
To get the models back online with any sort of reasonable presentation means going through every model's HTML and images by hand, cleaning it up (renaming images, directories, paths, fixing anciently bad HTML, etc.), and finding and testing the FilePlanet URL.
To get the models back online "right" means essentially rewriting all the HTML so everything is in a standard format, so it can eventually be put in a "real" model database, so this sort of situation can never happen again.
Before anyone says "why don't you just put the pages online somewhere, like in wiki, and let the Polycount community edit them and make them all right," I should point out that I did that with all the rest of Polycount's old content, and no-one really stepped up to the plate, and now the wiki is filled with spam. So, that's obviously not a viable solution.
As bearkub pointed out, after over a year of "it's on my to-do list," a few weeks ago I started in on it. I went through all of the reviewed Quake 2 models, did a rough editing pass, checked their FilePlanet URLs and put them all online, on Christmas Day. There are still over 200 unreviewed Quake 2 models, nearly 400 Quake 3 models, and hundreds of other models from other games to do.
I haven't provided status updates, or even announced that I had done this, because I have a life and will only be doing this work on an irregular basis. But, I will continue doing it, because I feel, like some of you do, that game art is art and should be preserved properly.
(Also, for the noobs, Quake 1/2/3-style modeling is still commercially relevant for 3D assets for PSP and DS games, and even modern games perform better when you're not wasting polys left and right. You could learn a lot from some of the really good old models.)
I'd hate to see you manually correct thousands of HTML files that may need to be updated again in the future.
Please publish your new Quake 3 models at the quake3stuff.de Forum
http://www.quake3stuff.de/phpBB3/
Section Quake III Arena - Models
KOm4 wrote:
Just publish your new models at the quake3stuff.de Forum
http://www.quake3stuff.de/phpBB3/
Section Quake III Arena - Models
www.Quake3Stuff.de
Edited by KOm4 (01/21/08 01:57 PM)
[/ QUOTE ]
said the non-biased casual observer... asshat
There are over 300 models for Quake 3 on my website yet. I got them all from polycount years ago...
I would be happy to see new Quake 3 models again!
I hope i get some new models soon!
... checked their FilePlanet URLs and put them all online, on Christmas Day. There are still over 200 unreviewed Quake 2 models, nearly 400 Quake 3 models, and hundreds of other models from other games to do....
[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for that by now!
Hopefully you make the same with the Quake 3 models
Ha. Vig = pro forum user
Vig
-caseyjones