im thinking about buying a website where people can put up maps, models, mods, custom game mods, forums for each mod or map or something like that. @raevn will PA Hub have limits in its data limits or whatever?
PA Hub doesn't pull data from one source, so you'd need to ask the people who host the content. Each content type defines its own online storage - mods are from one location (setup by @Mereth, although the mod files themselves are typically hosted on github or elsewhere), maps from another (by @cptconundrum). The only content I host on my server is the plugins & news (with hub updates on github), so I don't get too much traffic.
@svenbrnn has been rewriting the system sharing server and this will allow us to further decentralize map sharing.
so would it be a good idea to make this site or in your opinions will this be a waste of money? because i would love a site that had maps, models, and mods all in one
We already have pa-mods.com, but there is nothing so far for maps and models. I think maps would be an easy one because you could just implement the System Sharing client API and read the server list from the json file we have on github.
Well I wanted a place for people to load there maps to since they will get big like my bigger new ones. I want to be able to show video previews and photo previews of what your going to dl. Being able to host templates for different custom games.
Short answer, I don't think a new site can do what existing ones already don't. You would have too much competition and not enough interest. Sorry
I guess it woulnt be a problem to implement such kind of stuff in the PA System sharing mod. The biggest problem at the moment is, that people are not able to authenticate to the System Sharing server at the moment. I thought about some extra API so people can auth with login or a token at a system share, but it would need extra ingame settings wich not everyone is able to understand. The best thing would be if Uber gives us some API that allows the Server with help of the mod api + some server api at uber to authenticate a user with its PA account. After that you could make an frontend for the System sharing server so you can add pictures + whatever to your system. The biggest problem ATM is that, if i know correct, most PA system sharing servers are hosted free with some limited hosting (traffic + space) so such things would bring us to the limit much faster. Greeting Sven
@svenbrnn @cptconundrum Apologies if this suggestion is ignorant, I don't know exactly what your implementation is for system sharing (well I'm reading it but haven't figured it out yet), but wouldn't it be easiest to treat map submission in a similar way to mod submission? You could require trusted map makers to be part of a pamaps github organisation (like pamods, or even use the same organisation), and submit a map in a zip file with a mapinfo.json (like modinfo, or even just use modinfo with context:map or whatever) metadata file, then you can pretty much copy-paste the mod submission implementation and alter it slightly to your needs. The same/similar system could be used for models or any other type of user-generated content that may arise.
System Sharing now supports map packs that are just mods on PAMM, but the main part of the mod uses servers. The default one is open for anyone to share to, but all the other servers are locked and only authorized people can upload maps to those. I really wish we had oauth from Uber so that we could attach uploads to actual ubernet accounts. This would allow us to add some form of version control, deleting systems, account-based permissions, and probably even more.
So if I did do this site I would get unlimited bandwidth and space of course and cover the monthly cost myself with ads and with donations
Before you go ahead with it, is it necessary to have dedicated hosting for the maps? I suggested github because it would work just as well for maps as it currently does for mods, with all the versioning and auto-zipping benefits. One day I might add a map section to pa-mods, which would be basic (just as it is for mods), but you could have ftp access to add images, video and a description yourself instead of having to go through me. If you want something more fancy, like an in-built forum, you'll have to make your own site. That would be fancy, but wouldn't using the system mods use give us similar results? Map makers have version control in the form of github, deletion, permissions in the form of trusted and untrusted, an existing implementation that can hopefully be re-purposed, no need for servers.
Yeah sure, you can share a .pas file 100 different ways. The (only somewhat successful) goal I had was getting it all to work right from within PA. The map pack feature I added does use mods and can be hosted on github, but it isn't entirely what you are looking for either.
