I recently went to check in with the goings on over at Halomods.com and to my surprise I was greeted with this message
To the guys at rework3d and anyone else who was a fan of halomods.
I’ve decided to discontinue the site for reasons you can probably figure out yourself. If anyone is interested in taking over the domains and the rest of the site, send a message outlining your future plans for the domain\site to hm.sourceguy@gmail.com. Whoever has the best plans for the site can have it. Deadline: 20 feb.-SG
Now I knew there were some big changes that went on, there was a new domain and stuff but I was very shocked to see it complete down with everything gone!
What ive been planning on doing for a long while was to setup a place where people could upload old and new mods, programs, patches, articles on modding, research, pictures etc everything really, all to one place. With the relevant Creator/Author details if the mod wasn’t yours, Release dates, The History, Description, Different versions of the files etc – you know all those kind of things. It would be one big Halo Modding Archive spanning all the titles Halo1, 2 and 3 and all the different platforms.
I have currently host online some files and some big map packs ( http://halo.snaver.net/modding/h1x/mpack.php ) for people to download, I did this ages ago its just a simple html page linking to the files i’ve hosted. But this gives you a very general idea of what it would be like, it would be alot more advanced, dynamic and I hope there would be a lot more files and an active community behind it all.
It wouldn’t be a ‘forum community’ anymore sort of thing ( I personally dont think this is what people want anymore, if people just want to mod or find out/research about modding its hard to do that on a forum – plus its too hard to moderate aswell ) I would allow comments on files/programs/etc to allow for discussion and I would allow user registration so they could upload any random mods they had laying around on their computer, because I bet a lot of people have loads of Halo Modding related stuff on their hard drives – Which they may just get rid off.. Now that halomods.com is gone alot of mods are hard to come by!
I have quickly looked into it, and there could even be put online a complete static archive of the old halomods forum, for historical purposes so people could look back through everything – Maybe with the original theme!
Things would be have to be moderated and approved of course, but with the help of a few people it could become a great collection – a great resource for all the hard work people have put in. I would have to code a completely custom system, from scratch to do all this of course.
I have started to design the back-end and the database structure, but its a massive undertaking that will take a while – there’s no pre-built solution out there. Its going to be PHP/MySQL with the codeigniter php framework which I’m most comfortable with and I think will provide the most expandable solution.
I hope that someone out there, or SourceGuy has all the relevant files from the forum because that would be a great start – I could pull all the relevant details from mod postings into the new system, along with the files and it would save a lot of time of people uploading each entry one-by-one.
If SourceGuy is willing to transfer the domain control over to me that would be great too, then anyone looking for Halo modding related things then they would be able to find them easily.
Anyway this is just my vision, I would love peoples opinions and feedback on this so either send me an email or just add a comment here.
Cheers
P.S
If anyone has contact with SourceGuy please send him a link to this post, or ask him to check his emails I havent heard anything back from him yet regarding this!