Hi everyone and welcome back to Gaming World! tl;dr is below.

You're probably wondering why the forum looks like it did back in 2006. For the past two years I've been working on and off on converting the Invision forum back to SMF, the software we used prior to 2013. It's actually, almost to the minute, exactly 11 years ago since we launched the last incarnation of the forum (Jan 10, 2013).

So why go back to such an antiquated version of the site? Well, when you think about it, this is the most iconic period of our community. This is when the site was at its most active and when it was the most relevant in terms of reach and impact on game dev. I don't think I'm wrong to say it's probably the version that we have our most fond memories of.

This is also not actually the "real" old forum from back then—it has been largely rebuilt. It uses a much newer version of the same forum software (although not the very latest, and an upgrade will happen eventually) and the theme has been rebuilt from scratch. A ton of QOL updates have been made and while there's still some things that need to be improved, it should be much better and more functional than the old Salt World forum.

It wasn't easy to get to this point. When I inherited the Salt World forum, the database was already pretty fragmented. A lot of very oldest posts are also just missing. I don't know where they went. There was a gargantuan amount of legacy data that was never properly converted. Did you know that the Invision forum was actually the 7th forum software we used? All that data ended up getting transferred from software to software with mostly extremely cookie cutter conversion scripts.

Most of my work, and the reason it took so long to get this project up and running, was just cleaning up the database and filling in all the gaps. Literally everything was a jumble, and every past incarnation of the forum required a subtly different approach to bring it up to a good standard.

Tons of data was also just gone: old post icons, member titles, signatures, avatars, member groups. In fact, there was no direct backup whatsoever of the old forum theme and all its associated graphics. All that has been essentially lost to time.

Yet a lot of it has now been brought back from the void. I cobbled together the old theme from my own backups and old screenshots, and got a ton of old data from the Internet Archive. As it turns out, GW was actually a pretty well scraped website and so there was a surprising amount of useful data on the Wayback Machine. I ended up getting a complete copy of everything on there and writing custom scrapers to extract the data from the raw HTML.

I wanted to bring back lost old posts from this backup as well, but that proved too difficult for the moment. While there is a lot of data, it is sparse and incomplete, and when we moved to Invision all the topic and post IDs changed and got recounted from zero, which significantly hinders any effort to use the data.

None the less, things are more or less the same as they were before 2013, and old accounts have been given a copy of their old avatar and signature. Post icons have been restored, premium member groups are back, and I've even restored thousands of broken images from old screenshot and demo topics and the like.

tl;dr: after a herculean effort, the old GW forum has been restored for great justice. RIP Salt World.

I will go first: https://twitter.com/dada78641 gr八 tweets by yours truly

Hi all, so here's the thing, Salt World was down for some time because it was under DDoS attack by a gigantic army of compromised IoT devices. We were literally being attacked by random internet connected gadgets, including one security camera from an Italian pizza parlor.
 
I've installed Cloudflare to help deal with the problem, so you might see a 5 second intermediary message before you get any content. I'm not sure whether it will solve the problem yet but it's something...

was talking about this with hundley, but posting it here for DiScUsSiOn and because I think people would like it.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN9b6A9LdtQ
 
apparently it didn't become very popular, partly because it was an EGA game during a time when VGA had become the standard. but I love the details, and the simplicity of the visuals, while at the same time the city outside the windows add just enough atmosphere to make it work.
 
there's more of a story in the full version apparently but I haven't played past what you can see in this demo. still, it seems like a really great canvas to work with, conducive to building a real narrative.

ok so they're doing a FF7 remake now. it's the one thing Square Enix fans have been wishing for ages.
 
you can probably guess that I'm not too fond of the idea. but mostly, I never really cared about the remake. I mean, who cares? it's not like they're taking the old one away. and a lot of people want this, so who am I to stand in the way of their happiness?
 
but just now I saw the first footage they showed late last year, and suddenly I realized why I'm not behind this remake.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMWEjWCwjzM
 
it's because the same thing is happening with games now that has already happened with movies. they're turning into mindless assembly line productions based on what's called a "universe." you see, years ago, people came up with original ideas (such as the FF7 story, star wars, superhero characters, etc) and now those things each comprise their own "universe", such as the Marvel Universe or the Star Wars universe, and those are basically canvasses with which you can create endless assembly line productions without any reason to believe you should ever stop.
 
so now it's FF7's turn to be turned into a soulless narrative that people work on not because they had a creative spark, but because it just happens to be this week's canvas they're paid to work on.
 
most likely I'm the last person on salt world to come to this realization because I almost never watch new films or play new games anymore, but now I'm just a little depressed. it's interesting though, how the mainstream and all major studios are going nuts in finding new ways to reuse old material, while at the same time the indie scene is basically full of people who value originality of concept over everything else.

Seems we were being DDoS'ed. Don't know if SW was the target, it could also have been one of the other sites running on my server. (Maybe the ToG site for example.) So I didn't have much recourse except for to turn off the webserver process for a short time. Now I've just turned it back on and it seems that the attack has subsided for now.
 
If necessary I might need to turn it off a bit more while we investigate what the deal is but I'm hoping that whatever this was has GONE AWAY now

 

IMMEDIATE BAN IS IMMINENT, 
 
PLEASE ASSUME THE GROIN BEATING POSITION AND WAIT FOR AN AGENT OF THE STATE

Hello!!!!!!!!!
 
So, here's the thing. I'm working on the long-overdue Salt World site and one of the things which I think would be cool to include is Olde RPG Maker Game's. Some of them were pretty genuinely cool and in and of themselves they have a pretty interesting utility in being a sort of time capsule from the RPG Maker heyday. There are some here but I think it's better to try and limit the selection to stuff that had some importance and/or resonance, rather than dumping all old crap on there (also because these games sometimes run pretty large, and bandwidth/space aren't infinite). For this, I defer to your judgment.
 
Feel free to also use this topic to give suggestions for the new site. It's going to be relatively simple, but the idea is to make it a canvas for some of the cool gamechat/GAME ANTHROPOLOGY going on here these days. The site won't really be "about" anything in particular. I'm hoping to be able to finish it before the end of the month because I'm going on a trip by then, but we'll see.

69

420

WELCOME TO THE GULAG, COMRADE!

IF YOU HAVE A COMPLAINMT, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO HIT YOUSELF IN THE FACE WITH THIS HAMMER AND SICKLE

feel free to dump links in here too.
 
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/15/deep-silver-promote-dead-island-with-appalling-statue/

The following is a list of things that are either planned or actively being worked on:

• create a new IPB theme
• add a maximum size for signatures
• change avatar size
• change PM inbox size
• make a better system for the PIPZ
• add IRC statistics to #saltw
• fix email system (can someone test if recovery emails are being sent?)
• add information about the IRC channel somewhere visible
• fix the fact that the small avatar thumbnail squares don't maintain aspect ratio
• set the non-visual editor as the default
• replace "Recent Topics" text with "Recent Replies" on the forum overview
• simplify the list of forums significantly
• put archived forums in a subforum to reduce forum overview clutter
• make youtube embedding doable only through a special [.youtube.] tag
• bring back the topic icons (does anyone have konix's ~2008 remakes of the topic icons?)
• improve the smiley/emoticon interface
• in the profile fields, website URL is linked, but twitter URL is not. check if this is a problem in the core software.
• make sure there's both a .spoiler and .hide tag
• add a "recent posts" tab aside from the "recent topics" tab.
• change the automatic hyperlink shortening so that they're not excessively shortened (this should be done in CSS)
• remove the default silhouette avatar (replace with no avatar)
• change gender selections in member profile
• add Twitter and Facebook profile fields
• improve profile fields icons
• build a JSON export of the latest visible(non-secret/hidden) posts, plus topic shortlinks for leafo's irc bot
• BUILD A MAIN SITE (start a topic discussing its creation and design)
• possibly revisit the discussion of the site's name (perhaps at a later time after the main site)
• modify old saltw.net and gamingw.net domains so that they redirect here
• use saltw.net for shortlinks rather than saltworld.net
• links are broken if they contain an apostrophe (not when using ')

If you have suggestions or if you'd like to help out in some way, feel free to post them in this topic.

ok so we have TaGs now which we can add to new topics. you can see them under the topic title at the top of the page. this might be useful for when I'm going to build the main site.

hello!

we're probably moving the entire forum over to INVISION tomorrow. we're finally getting rid of this SMF junk. that means some posts tomorrow might get lost if they happen to be posted after I retrieve a database backup.


(note: screenshot shows an old version of that topic. this is from a database backup from a few months ago, for testing purposes.)

the forum will have the default theme for now, but we're going to change that. there's a lot of work to be done!
to those of you who are being hosted by me: my entire server is going to be replaced, but I'll try my best to keep downtime to a minimum. the old server is kinda a mess, but in case anything goes missing, don't worry, I've got backups of everything and the old server will be around for a while in case files need to be retrieved from it.

good riddance, let's hope the next year is marginally better.

HAPPY 2013 Y'ALL

A while ago, someone on IRC found a way to watch Japanese TV online via a P2P protocol called Sopcast. Since then, some people have been requesting a guide that explains how to get started.
You can find the guide that I wrote here.

So basically these streams either show crazy Japanese TV magazine shows or LOTS AND LOTS OF ASSORTED FOOD. It's pretty entertaining to watch or to have running in the background, even if you don't speak the language. For me it's useful because I'm trying to learn it.

So yeah, Drule and Konix have been working on this game for half a year and they're trying to get it on Steam now. It looks really great. Watch a vid here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX9iu5V9CiA

Jamie also made a bunch of awesome promos: http://www.youtube.com/user/Astrojone

If you want to help it get on Steam, vote for the project here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92932760

Hi all. No doubt you've been wondering if anything's happening with regard to the construction of a main site. Or not, maybe you've given up on ever seeing one, and that's okay too.

A new site is actually being planned. It's going to be very minimal and will draw from content posted on the forum. All sorts of content will be accepted. There's not going to be a push to specifically make Salt World a gaming site, or anything else. It will be what you make of it, and the barrier to entry will be very low: that's the general idea.

I've talked to a couple of people about their ideas for the site and it's nice to get suggestions. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them here or send them to me in private.

Unfortunately, the plan has been delayed somewhat due to my being sick for a while. Right now I'm just getting back into working full-time, and I've got a lot of catching up to do. Personally I'm aiming to get the design done in July (meaning the site will only have to be programmed).

Another relevant change will be that we're switching to a different forum software again. We'll be switching back to IPB (Invision) because, frankly, SMF just sucks. It can't even make password protected forums. Of course, all data will be maintained except for a small cutoff window.