As I understand things modellers often hand in a completed item that can be manipulated in limited ways, keeping the major part of their workings on their own computers...
What I am wondering is to what extent it would be practical (memory wise) and useful for members to download their entire workings to the ST website both as a service to modders and as a voluntary thing?
Would this help avoid problems such as Harakiri's hard drive crash and allow newcomers to take up projects unfinished or abandoned due to other commitments?
If this is doable then maybe there could be a 'secure' Library to which Administrators could save such work...
I think this is a smashing idea. 3D models are usually really small (Less than a megabyte a piece), and the only issues we might have are with texture storage. Us Photoshoppers who save their images backed up as .PSDs are in a pickle. A 2048x2048 PSD usually ends up around 50 MB over here, so we would have to save each layer individually as JPEGs or PNGs in order to keep the layers seperate. Too bad there's no awesome PSD compressor.
...if it's of any consolation to you guys, I have all my work backed up on three different hard drives spanning two computers.
No no no.
Sorry but we have about 400 megabytes of data storage space left on our server, and we wouldn't have any at all if the hosted sites had filled up all their allocated space. I'm not saying we're desperate for data storage space because there *are* quite a bit of superflous material backed up on silgrad.com (by myself and others) which I can take down without problems.
The gallery alone uses up more than 300 mb, so that's something I might need to look at as well. Again, there's a bunch of stuff in there that isn't really needed and was added over time just because we had more space than we could fill.
All of my models are always uploaded through post attachments on the forums, in .obj format at least. They usually don't exceed 300k a piece.
Ah, well, if it becomes possible then...
I suppose that if all my plans work out and my dreams come true...on a par with winning the pools atm, but I am working on it then I will help out there.
Hey, are any of out members millionaires? if not, why not - about time we recruited a few!
I am! *cough*inmorrowind*cough*
^ Hehe. Too bad we can't just mod them a couple of Daedric Dai-katanas.
You know, if we offered our open claims up as plots on eBay I bet we'd get bids from people who just assumed it was a MMORPG and they were making an investment. :brew: Hmm... nah... but maybe we should take another look at noremorse's T-Shirt scheme. I mean, I bet we can hook up with a T-shirt printing company who prints and sells them on-demand and we'd just stand for the advertising and marketing of them, like Beth did with their Oblivion merhcandise (but of course not on that level of commerce).
Anyway, if someone here happen to have a server with vast quantities of empty data storage space, I'd be the first to sign up. I'd love the opportunity to back up all my Max scenes to a place that isn't fully open to the public, but still not as closed as email is. I've got a yahoo account with like 2 gigabytes of space, so sometimes I send myself emails with max scenes for backup purposes. Though it's not as easy to use as an FTP site would be.