Welcome to the new Quaddicted forum 👋

News
21

Yes, it works:
https://discuss.quaddicted.com/t/texture-wads-never-used-in-quake-before/2995/25?u=qazzaq

Now I should fix all of the post step by step. Wooh!

22

Where exactly? Demo uploading to map review pages was removed some weeks ago, after having been announced months before. https://www.quaddicted.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1325

It will be back, some day and different.

23

Yea, I read the announcement. The feature remained a decent time afterwards that I thought the cancelling had been cancelled. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

24

Wow, Spirit! I impressed of some good-new features while posting. External links now has a little preview, its great! And (finally) users can post images direct from theirs PC - woohooo!
By the other hand changing the way to rate/discuss a maps is, hmm, so unusual, that some time is needed to get used to.

2 Likes
25

Yeah it is definitely not ideal. I hope someone will write something that works right on the map pages.

I have now “muted” the files category so that it’s cryptic titles do not appear in the latest posts list anymore.

1 Like
26

The new forum looks great. But I’m worried about how the new rating system works now.
I had a dream to play every map on the site. And the old ratings were handy to find new maps for that.
You rated 661/1802 releases, 1141 to go.
Is there any chance this counter will work in the future?

27

Yes, that feature is absolutely crucial and will be back for sure!

3 Likes
28

In terms of suggestions, I think the non-cryptic Recent Activity ought to be fixed sooner than later. It’s nice to check the front page of quaddicted and clearly see what people are playing, rating, and commenting about on the releases, and was always something to look forward to when visiting quaddicted.

1 Like
29

To be honest, after the forum was moved here, it began to die. Now I’m generally bored on the forum. There is almost no activity on the forum. Bring the forum back to the old site.

30

Definitely! The frontpage is quite useless at the moment. Unfortunately I have had zero time to work on the site in the past few weeks. Maybe there will be some progress during the holidays.
If someone wants to help build an interim frontpage (using Flask) please shout.
My priority is to re-enable DB additions first and to actually publish the new DB interface.

Dude, please be more nice. I doubt that the forum software is to blame. It much rather is an issue of halted updates to the DB and that is something the new forum actually makes easier in the future.

1 Like
31

https://www.quaddicted.com/ has a feed for recent activity again that shows the latest comments on releases.

Changes to ratings are not included because nowadays one cannot post a rating without a comment anymore and thus, showing what new rating was added would implicitly leak the author of that rating (latest rating = latest comment). I am not sure how we should handle that in the future. It would be easier if ratings could be all public.

2 Likes
32

Hi, long time lurker, first time registering. I appreciate all the work that must go into maintaining this site, not to mention those creating the maps. Thankyou to Spirit and all the mappers.

However, I think that there needs to be some “back to basics” here. The map page has not had any new maps added since Sep 2023; one of the primary functions of the site (at least for me) was to download maps. I think some priority on getting new maps available for download on the maps page would help reinvigorate the user base and start generating some forum activity again.

2 Likes
33

That would be great! I have very little time so help is highly appreciated.

The new DB uses https://github.com/Quaddicted/quaddicted-data as a base, so if you add new files there (via pull requests), the DB will grab them. The new DB interface is not really public yet, the JSON format will probably need improvement and the tags definitely will, but this might be a good first step so hey let’s go!

I just hacked together a quick and dirty tool to generate the base metadata for files: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/misc/generate_jsons.exe_20240105.zip

Just run that in a directory of zip releases and it will generate the JSON files in a subdirectory called json in the correct structure. Then add tags like title, author(s), release data, etc, just look at random files in the repo to see how they are currently structured.

The URLs of the files can be anywhere, as long as they are direct downloads.

34

Hi, finally got around to getting into my account on the new forum. :wave:

I downloaded your exe and it seems like it doesn’t run at all on Windows 10, even as administrator? I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong so some support there would be appreciated.

When you say

The new DB interface is not really public yet

Am I to understand that the general process of creating a JSON file and submitting it via GitHub pull request won’t be changed much? Because it seems like it’s generally a process that could be much more user-friendly and streamlined, especially if you’re still requiring every submission to be from the author themself. I suspect most won’t even have a github account, and many wouldn’t want one if they could avoid it.

Really any sort of frontend that doesn’t require downloading an external program or making an account on another site would be better. Apart from a proper author list, it should be possible to get most of this information from Slipseer, and a proper author list is a feature planned for Slipseer anyway. So with that in mind, do you think you’d be opposed to a feature over there that lets users send a pull request with the JSON file created and filled in with tags automatically at the click of a button? Obviously it’d be done with consent of the uploader, which is the main concern of automating this.

35

Welp, that’s embarrassing for me and I don’t even want to say what went wrong. https://www.quaddicted.com/files/misc/generate_jsons_20240106.zip should hopefully work. :smiley:

Absolutely not. Any idea why you might think so and if others have the same misconception? It would be great to remedy that. The whole point of the restructuring is to make contributing easy for everyone and to take myself as much out of the process as possible. This current stage is just heavily work-in-progress. I thought that was clear, sorry :frowning:

It is definitely possible to build a simple JS webpage where people can drop files onto to do the same file scanning that my WIP tool does. For a start it would be enough to just have a form for basic tags and generate the SHA256 checksum. If someone would build that, I’d love to integrate it.
Same for submitting the JSON files to the repository. There could be a page where such documents can be uploaded with a “technical user” to make a pull request on their behalf. Again, help would be highly appreciated!
See https://unrealarchive.org/submit/ for inspiration, they have a somewhat similar design for their DB.
I would like to build a GUI tool for the process myself at some point.

There won’t be any consent needed from anyone. The database indexes publicly (or formerly publicly) available files. Any Quake related file may be described with metadata. Download URLs can point anywhere.
As far as I know the main reason why people are upset with the “old” DB are that it was not possible to change an entry if a new file version was released and that URLs used filenames as identifiers so updates were always completely separate entries.
The new structure has some support for saying which “release group” a release belongs to so people will be able to share a link to the group instead of a specific file instead. Here is the commit where I added such tags for Quoth: https://github.com/Quaddicted/quaddicted-data/commit/d5160181868beed310ce82c98ed7e8043255aaa9 (it’s not perfect but should work). As with other things, frontend support for this is WIP and if people help on other TODOs it makes it much easier for me to focus.

Quoting from the releases thread:

36

Hi Spirit,

I just tested the tool on a recent map release of mine and it seems to work okay. Two questions though:

  1. How are screenshots factored in? I couldn’t see any mentions of them in the existing jsons.

  2. As the repo is sorted by the first two letters of the sha256s, is there any way of finding out the sha256 value of a particular zip from the existing site page? So, e.g. if my map is for AD and I want to look up the json for another AD map to ensure mine has the correct dependency/install settings, I can jump to the correct json without having to flick through them all randomly?

If I can figure out how to get mine uploaded I’m happy to help with gathering up others

37

Actually ignore the second question, I downloaded the whole repo, renamed everything to .txt files and can search for stuff that way.

I’m also realising that the map repo doesn’t actually generate site review pages, just the underlying map list. So the first question is probably irrelevant too, and I guess a better question would be: if jsons are generated, tagged and submitted via GitHub, what’s the next step between that and actually getting a quaddicted.com/reviews/[mapname].html uploaded?

38

Third post… just to confirm I’m on this. Collated a table of 35 recent releases with filenames, names, authors, release dates and URLs. Still a way to go with tags, mod info etc.

Also, 34 of them are from Slipseer, which does not provide direct download links. I am happy to upload them all to Quaddicted if you sort me out with ftp details?

(edit - I can repack them to fit with QuakeInjector’s structure too, started to notice mods get packed inside their folders. Currently going through a bunch of existing releases and taking notes)

39

Progress: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vjnTQYdN1tr6awS272gMMxAUSgbEPuuOeCSEdjAYo34/edit?usp=sharing

I think that’s the essential tags covered, there are a few gaps in the sizes and I’m not sure I have the patience to go through and do texture themes as well. The repackaging was painful at times

Next up, writing a script to convert all that to JSON…

1 Like
40

^ I mailed rj as it was easier for me.

Some people could become beta testers for what’s already running half-publicly. It’s not much but maybe you have good feedback. If you are interested, leave a heart on this post :wink:

1 Like