Red Alert

Anything and everything that's related to OGRE or the wider graphics field that doesn't fit into the other forums.
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insider
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Red Alert

Post by insider »

Why are many links dead, a user here asked me for links to Hydrax and it's officially dead on Xavyiy's site too, a user yesterday asked me for Ogre AppWizard for 1.7.x and he found dead links too. Is there any conspiracy to take down 1.x supported products, like Microsoft dropped XP, I moved to Vista, Chrome dropped support for Vista, I installed Windows 7 on my backup PC, 1.x dropped move to 2.x, is that the trend. :twisted:

http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... 20&t=30469
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=84892
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c6burns
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Re: Red Alert

Post by c6burns »

I actually asked Xavyiy if I could pay him a fee to have him relicense Hydrax and SkyX to MIT or add a static link clause to his LGPL and no response :( At the time those libs were the only thing non-permissive in my framework, so I wanted to fix that, but I've since moved past caring :lol:

There's a copy of both in Ogitor's source. There's also the ogreaddons repo that got set up on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ogreaddons/
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Re: Red Alert

Post by insider »

Xavyiy also promised to release Hydrax 2.0 and his Paradise Engine has ceased development too, so I have no idea what he's upto. Anyway we keep losing valuable members not sure how many more. :(
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Re: Red Alert

Post by EricB »

We had the same issue with QuickGUI. So I went ahead and dumped all the copies I had of it on github a few months ago: http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... 13&t=30461
Anyway we keep losing valuable members not sure how many more. :(
This is typically what happens with FOSS. They fail to follow #5 of Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathe ... e_software


A note to Ogre Team members and BLOCKED. When you do get around to "improving" the forums. Please note that some people still use some of the libs that are in Addons Forums. Just because a project is dead does not mean it isn't irrelevant. Please do not delete information in this forum. Please find a way to archive it somehow, even if it's read-only it will greatly help those of us who still use old code bases.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by Wolfmanfx »

No fear we wont delete the old forums.
Website were a must (to appeal GSOC) so it do not look like a site from 1997.
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moejac
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Re: Red Alert

Post by moejac »

OgreAddons is the place to put libraries without a maintainer.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by dark_sylinc »

We are not actively killing links. They just seem to fade over time.

I few things to watch though:
  • We've had a forum move many years ago. The forums used to live in http://www.ogre3d.org/forum/phpBB3 or something like that, and now lives in http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/. When you encounter such dead link, you just need to change the address bar to point to the new forum (i.e. keep the topic ID intact) and it will usually work.
  • Same happened with a Wiki move also done many years ago where we moved to TikiWiki. A dead link pointing to the old wiki usually needs to be searched on the TikiWiki.
As for OgreAddons, I have visited that forum like 5 times in my life, so I am not knowledgeable of what happens there.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by moejac »

It is not the forum, but OgreAddons on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ogreaddons/
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Re: Red Alert

Post by insider »

bronzebeard wrote: Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathe ... e_software
Wow this is truly brilliant, thanks a lot bronzebeard. :D
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Re: Red Alert

Post by EricB »

dark_sylinc wrote:We are not actively killing links. They just seem to fade over time.
Dunno if this was directed at me.
No fear we wont delete the old forums.
Great to hear! I've seen people call for deleting the addon forums over the years and it has always worried me. Specifically because I still use a lot of these libs in my projects and every now and then you can find a fix or a patch to the odd bug buried deep within the old forum posts.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by insider »

Well the problem is not of dead web links, I have made bookmarks of atleast a thousand webpages in these five years and many important ones are dead, but ofcourse I can just google the information relevant to the webpage and find the problem/solution posted by someone else, maybe even better than the original, so that's not the issue.

When a file posted on the internet dies, it's gone forever - until someone decides to upload it again, or you can request the original uploader to upload it again which is rare, as he/she or if it's a corporation maybe unreachable.

People post on whichever file hosting site they get, there is absolutely no control where they choose to post or even worse they maintain files on their own website, if I decide to move to a different domain, I won't care about paying the hosting fees for my old one so dead files again.

I remember I had uploaded about 10GB of my coding related files to a file hosting service, 8 years ago, I can't remember the name, I think it was filefront or something similar, it got taken down and I lost all the data, some of them were very important to me but as always I keep a backup so I never have any data loss.

I uploaded all my travel photos to webshots 8 years back and now they say it no longer exits, they hosting was taken down again and this was an upload of over 500 photographs, again I had the backup.

Take Nvidia Physx 2.8.4 for example, you won't find a download link to that anywhere, ofcourse if you search an hour or two you may have a slight chance of finding one, just type - " physx 2.8.4 " in google you'll see the 6th link is my reply to a user on addon forums and as per mediafire stats, the file has been downloaded 137 times since I posted so quite obviously it is very much in need.

So we need a reliable hosting service or should recommend members to host on multiple file hosting services.

Just my 2 cents al right 2 dollars. :)
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Re: Red Alert

Post by Transporter »

Websites are changing! For example, the PhysX SDK is now available on Github (https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks). A lot of Ogre stuff is part of OgreAddons which is a backup of old projects.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by insider »

Transporter wrote:Websites are changing! For example, the PhysX SDK is now available on Github (https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks). A lot of Ogre stuff is part of OgreAddons which is a backup of old projects.
Well I am not asking for legacy software that runs on Windows 95 to be available :lol: , I can't find Physx 2.8.4 when I search in the link you provided, is it hidden several layers beneath.

There's nothing in the OgreAddons related to Skyx or Hydrax, two 200KB source files for each is not all SkyX and Hydrax is about.

https://bitbucket.org/ogreaddons/skyx/downloads
https://bitbucket.org/ogreaddons/hydrax/downloads

Where's the editor, where's the demo, how do I build, all these questions will arise to a new user, and where's PopcornFX, it's not dead, they just moved to Unity, but their port for Ogre 1.8.1 is perfect, where is it, do you have the editor, the source files ?? The addons forum misses many things where's CCS, these are all the addons/plugins/tools that I have used, if a virus wipes out my 10TB hard drives clean where do I download them, I am sure hundreds others are used by members which I may not even know of if I can't find them in the first place, it's a port made for Ogre it should reside within the site it was meant for.

And 1.x is the official Ogre Version as on 22-02-2016 and all the plugins mentioned above work with 1.x, unless you release 2.x and have 10-20 ultra performance Water,Weather,Physics,Audio,FX,Vegetation addons which will take another 2-3 years, 1.x is the version that people will be using this year and well I don't know the future.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by moejac »

Feel free to back up all the dead files if you can't live with the fact that the world moves on :)
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Re: Red Alert

Post by insider »

moejac wrote:Feel free to back up all the dead files if you can't live with the fact that the world moves on :)
I already have mate and have a habit of keeping copies as long as I can remember, I only speak for those who haven't, I am done with with this thread.
Many regards jacmoe or was it moejac :D
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Re: Red Alert

Post by moejac »

I also have lots of DVDs with old stuff on them - too much stuff :)
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Re: Red Alert

Post by Kojack »

I used to host most of my posted images on imageshack. Then I moved to Imgur, because Imageshack kept making things less usable. But recently I discovered that Imageshack is blocking forums from displaying images unless they are posted by a premium account. I'm not going to pay them when I don't like their service any more, so I'm going to have to track down every image I've posted on here and replace them with links to another hosting service. Oh fun.
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Re: Red Alert

Post by Zonder »

Kojack wrote:I used to host most of my posted images on imageshack. Then I moved to Imgur, because Imageshack kept making things less usable. But recently I discovered that Imageshack is blocking forums from displaying images unless they are posted by a premium account. I'm not going to pay them when I don't like their service any more, so I'm going to have to track down every image I've posted on here and replace them with links to another hosting service. Oh fun.
Maybe be cheeky and put them on a github pages :)
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...
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Re: Red Alert

Post by insider »

Here's proof that a user still want's a SDK released in around 2008.
http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... =6&t=30443

The idea of holding backup copies will save you a lot of pain, example my game uses almost 20 libraries and it will be a very meek excuse if I have to showcase it tomorrow to a large company and I suddenly realise I can't build the exe because the SDK I am using for a project no longer exists on the net, so theoretically you can't change anything in your project and will have to live with it as it is even if it has a minor bug because you can't rebuild the project, because you can't find the particular SDK version on the net or I have to reprogram the parts to match the newer SDK's way of doing things, but why would I do that if my project is dead or no longer in development ?

So keep backup copies people for you and for those you can pass it on to.
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