I recently lost a weekend's work( whew, could have been worse ) due to a virus and had to re-format my computer. I don't really mind too much losing a weekend's work but what I forgot to backup was the 100's of screenshots I took of various mods' resources for quick reference x10. If I needed a mesh and couldn't remember where it was or what it was called I would just scroll through my jpgs. It greatly reduced my modding time but now I have to do it again. This rigmarole gave me an idea:

I would like to see a website that contains jpgs of all resources in a mod aswwell as maybe gifs of the models rotating in 3D. The user could tick a box and it would be "selected". All resources selected could then be packed into a single .zip and the user could download said zip along with a gallery of all the resources it contains - including the credits and readmes of course. There could be an option to create an esp aswell so the whole thing could be loaded and a test cell would be included so teh user could jump straight to it. I don't know if we could load the mesh and stream a view from nifskope to the user but its somethign to consider.

I think with the combined knowledge here on the forums of web development we could create something special ( and fast! ). I would like to open the thread to ideas about implementations, expansions and whatever else you guys think applicable.

Sorry to hear about that. :wink_smile:

I've good news for you because you can actually create a website and host it on http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/index.php.
But I think you need to be a registered member there. I could be wrong though. :shrug:

If you're interested in creating a site, you can host through GHF or I can host it (we use the same hosting company, which is one of the best in the US, I've seen a few days downtime in the 7 years I've used sites hosted by them). I think the account specs are relatively similar, although I may have more disk space than GHF, not sure.

Now, there is a project in the works as a long-term WIP to do something like this for ESPs, providing records and partial data, a system to build and combine items or randomly generate them, and a web-app to build very simple mods in something of a drag-n-drop style. However, that is still mostly in theory with only a few little bits implemented and will be a pretty large undertaking, and Fliggerty and I both have a few other things on our plates at the moment.

In theory, that could be expanded to resources, with some work. However, resource artists are notoriously picky about usage, so some kind of restriction system would definitely have to be worked into the system. If the NifTools folks were up to it, I'd like to see a Java-based NIF viewer, that'd make this a bit more useful. Even still, I think it's possible. Models in particular would have to have their associated textures linked, so I think it may be best to use a mini-bundle system (creature ESP record, model, texture and sounds for a critter would create its "bundle"). Putting those bundles together would be easy, although perhaps unnecessary.

All in all, this would take some significant code and infrastructure based around making it work, but it's certainly possible, and one aspect of it is already in progress.

Mmm if you guys are already doing something similar then I don't want to re-invent the wheel and anything I did would have to come after my mod which is still a ways off. I am patching a jsp/js/java/Postgres system at work so by the time I'm finished I might actually know something about website creation so maybe I can consider it then. I have Yacoby's ESM lib code working for an application of mine so that's not an issue but you're right it would be a large job.