We stand on the verge of a new era for BWL Development. And I wish to welcome all refugees from the FileFront hosted site apocalypse.
Indeed… welcome to bwldevelopment.com
Now, our transition to the new host was a hasty one since we had only a few days notice. That being the case, I had to foot the full set-up bill here on our new paid host service provided by justhost.com. Normally, that set-up would have been free… but I had no time to come up with more then a month-by-month payment plan.
I certainly seek your help in covering our expenses with the new site. My PayPal link in the left column is here to help accept donations for the cost of server expenses.
Moving on… in the coming days we will be voting on our site direction. You see, I have always expected hl2files to eventually close… though I did expect more warning. Moving to a paid service provider was always the plan.
And since we are no longer a hosted site for an HL2 website, we don’t need to only focus on HL2 and its derivative games.
So…
I a want to recruit volunteers to cover news and events for other games. Obviously, members should always feel welcome to post gaming news on the forum. But I am going to start looking for writers for this blog.
Tonight, I am posting a poll concerning other games/companies we could cover in addition to Valve/ Source Engine Games. Choose your 5 favorites. At the end of 1 month’s time, we will decide which are the most popular five other games/developers to cover.
At that time, volunteers can come forward and we can also recruit from sites like Unconcerned. We will need five “news/op ed” writers for these games… one each. Their task will be to write articles for the blog when developers make news. The writers will also be responsible for coming up with any features for the same games such as Op Ed pieces, reviews, suggestions for a new game, tips, or whatever they feel like.
Tonight, I will be recreating the site tree with new pages, but the changes will be relatively minor. I mainly want to make the point clear that fictions and comics for other non-source games, or not even game related at all, are welcome.
Finally, once again I say welcome. Welcome to the new website.
UPDATE:
It seems the little WP Widget for my poll isn’t going to work on the new server. It hangs every time I try to submit. That being the case, I’ve posted a topic in the forums. Go there to suggest your favorites…
I’m sorry to give you the bad news guys, but due to lack of funding, filefront and all network sites will shut down this month (march, 30). Since you are hosted on xx.hl2files.com still, back up your files right away! I’m terrible sorry guys, but even I have been restriced of access on hl2files and I am also fired. This is all suddenly. Got any questions? Email me back.
Regards,
Skyrider
I’m working on setting up a new host now. Please click the PayPal link in the right column and donate to help with the cost. I’ll be paying some set up fees and don’t really have the money to spare.
Even something as small as $1 would help.
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I haven’t payed as much attention to my filefront account lately as I used to…
Tonight I realized that I forgot to set up my catch-all email in my mail client, so I prepared the needed data and… found a bunch of emails that still went to my old friendlygarg.hl2files.com address.
Among them were notices that my Disorientation 2-part video was being deleted for inactivity and that the other disorientation ziped file was also being deleted for inactivity.
I then decided to check my account and make sure that those were the only files I had lost… then I noticed a link at the top of the page.
http://farewell.filefront.com/
Filefront is shutting down.
Oh dear.
At first, I thought about March 30th being 2 days before April Fools Day… but this could just as easily be legitimate and according to some site’s I have visited… it is legitimate.
If that is the case, this could be bad news for us.
Obviously, all my downloads are hosted on FileFront. But also… and more importantly… HL2Files is a file-front network site. That’s right, our host might also be a part of the shut down. Which means we may need to find a new host.
This is bad timeing as I am low on funds at the moment and would rather pay for a host then go on skipping around the web as we have so often in the past. Cat-Life, Garg Arena, our stories and comics, forums, and even our SF Studios hosted site will be in danger.
There is a rumor that UGO may be interested in purchasing filefront… but who knows.
Stay tuned… I will be looking at hosting options and am making backups now. Just in case.
On a side note… one point I have noticed that still makes this suspicious to me is the lack of emails. I have received no emails regarding a shut down of the file hosting nor a webmaster email warning of a site shut down. That seems a little odd… but the host could just be careless.
[EDIT]
As far as preparations go, I’ll try to make the transition to a new host as easy as possible. I’ll be making use of our steam group [ http://steamcommunity.com/groups/BWL ] and our ModDB Profiles…
BiGToM has posted a new video for Cat-Life today. This one specifically is intended to show some of the current “cat code” work.
The video begins with a run through of a map in traditional Half-Life code. Normal player height, jumping, ducking, etc. Then it offers a view of the same map using the cat’s settings.
There isn’t any combat in this video. Instead, it focuses on the current “buggy” code work and showing how the game “looks” at it’s current level of development.
The video ends with a couple of new map locations revealed from the cat POV.
As some of you may recall, before the change-over I would occasionally update a widget with some featured story. These updates were sporadic at best… but they were a means to show off some of our older stories or point out one of the newer additions.
Well, with this new site I would like to include a feature from time to time as well. But I don’t really want to use the old widget. Instead, I’d like to make a new monthly or even bi-weekly feature.
That said, here is our first edition.
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Tonight’s feature is our first text-fiction, an entry from almost five years ago. Barney Calhoun’s Birthday Party by Ghost Calhoun.
Originally posted on the PHL forums, this story is a script style short fiction. It still stands as a fairly humorous story about Barney Calhoun’s 30th birthday and the Black Mesa/Xen surprise party.
When this story first appeared, Friendly Garg had started to seek potential fan-fiction authors to add to his website. At that time, Friendly Garg’s Stories was a PHL hosted site and home to image stories. He had started to expand his interests and over time, the site would move and become known as the Garg-o-holics, but the fan-fiction aspect would be dropped.
This was one of his first findings during that first expansion. FG quickly posted an offer for Ghost Calhoun to join the story team as a text fiction author and other stories were written and scouted.
Unfortunately, any and all of the other text fictions of that era, there were only a few, have been lost. But thankfully, this little gem still exists and was restored to the site. BWL Development presents… Barney Calhoun’s Birthday Party.
Today I’m starting a new maintenance process to help keep the site running more smoothly.
Since we switched to the new forum software and the new site design, we have seen a resurgence in new accounts by Spam-BOTs. With the old design, there were mods installed to help. I’m not going to bother with many mods this time around.
Instead, I am going to make some fairly simple maintenance routines a common practice and make a few new member requirements. First, you must sign-up to post comments on the site. On the forums, some guest posting is still accepted, but the best sections are for registered members only.
Second, I turned on the self-activation function of the forums and made the first comment posted by any subscriber a mandatory moderation. This is to make sure that bots don’t just sign up and spam.
Third, today I begin a weekly deletion regimen. I will be deleting un-activated accounts more then a few days old on the forums and any new member that has a suspicious email address or user name on the main site. This is to keep the membership pruned down to actual people. If you sign-up for the site… make sure you send me an email or post a message on the forums or at least post a comment on the news so we know you are real.
And if you sign-up for the forums… make sure you activate your account or email me if you’re having trouble so I can activate the account for you.
To give you an idea of how silly this problem is, I’ve just deleted 25 accounts from the main site with sexual, video, pill, or card advertisement keywords in the user name and/or email addresses. I’m sorry if I delete someone by accident, but we need to keep this in check. If you’ve been around this site for very long or perhaps used to visit Chris Livingston’s Concerned forums, then you know how bad this has been in the past.
We stand on the verge of a new era for BWL Development. And I wish to welcome all refugees from the FileFront hosted site apocalypse.
As some of you may recall, before the change-over I would occasionally update a widget with some featured story. These updates were sporadic at best… but they were a means to show off some of our older stories or point out one of the newer additions.
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