Free Hosting for Kitty Corp. And something else!

[dantarion]

Right now, all the textures on this forum are on things like megaupload/rapidshare, and to be honest, we, as a community, can do better.

I am offering to give free hosting to Kitty Corp, or, in the case that Kitty Corp as a whole declines, ANY texture artist.

I am working on developing a database driven site to catalouge all textures availible, and eventually, automate the current process of downloading, extracting, and renaming files in order to create a customized set of costumes.

Heres how this system would work.

All texture uploads to this texture megasite would include a xml file in the zip file that includes information about author, release revision, description, etc, along with 1-2 screenshots, and optionally, a CSP portrait.

The website would pull the information from the xml file inside the zip and autocatagorize the textures.

Now, I haven't actually built this yet, as theres no reason to build it if someone else is already doing something similar, or if there is no interest in using such a project.

All credit to the group/artist uploading textures would be retained as well.

Please contact me if you are interested in seeing this come to light.

AIM : dantarion
Email: dantarion [at] dantarion.com

EDIT:
blog.dantarion.com/2009/03/27/the-current-process-of-using-sd-texturessucks/
Wrote a little more about this idea..

[picano]

I'm all for the idea but...

How much bandwidth are we talking about here?
(Vsyse and I alone exceeded our 25GB/month allotment on photobucket with JUST images for the gallery --- and at most we host 1/2-2/3 or all the images in there. Counting in pcs / pac / tga files in a zip... that's anywhere from 1-3MB a character more which will be downloaded.)

How will this be sorted?
(Will we be able to sort by character, artist, color-scheme / theme?)

Any additional statistics?
(Not necessary but I for one enjoy tracking the downloads for each character to see what people like / don't.)

How will disputes be handled?
(We already have had some thievery / minor edits of textures via a certain former FoxHound artist.)

I could probably think of a few more... but just putting that out there. I hope this does work out, it would be a great asset to all Brawl Texture hackers / leeches. (I'm sure Vyse would be grateful for not having his weekly chore of updating our current gallery. )

[dantarion]

I currently have 8000 GB of bandwidth left for this month (March) with 600gb space left.

Sorting by character and artist will be possible, and I will add a tag system so people can tag their own work.

In the event that I approach my bandwidth cap somehow, I can cap the number of downloads per IP per day, etc.

[picano]

Ah, that sounds like more than enough bandwidth, even lots of room for expansion.

Sounds great. At the very least, I'd put my stuff up for grabs there --- I have no doubt that most staff / members here would follow suit.

[Vyse]

Mar 27, 2009 13:03:40 GMT -5 dantarion said:

I currently have 8000 GB of bandwidth left for this month (March) with 600gb space left.

Holy fu --

I like it. It sounds perfect.

[dantarion]

Thanks.

Let me explain my motivation in this.

I am trying to expand my resume, and while I have lots of experience coding in PHP/MySQL/XHTML/CSS/JS to make things, I don't have many standing examples on the net to show off.

Here is a chance for me to work for the community, get my name out there, and get something interesting to show off to employers!

I am outlining what I am going to do, and within about two weeks, I should I have working prototype. I want to make it easy for artists to upload and update their work, while still making it easy for people to leech what they want. But first, I need to get a working upload system.

Here's a quick overview.
Step 1: Upload zip file containing AT LEAST .pcs file
Step 1.1: Do a hash checksum of .pcs files to make sure included textures are unique.
Step 2: If metadata.xml exists in zip file, load information, and let artists edit the information in the xml file through a web form. If not, just present a blank form.
Step 3: Put information for the form back into zip file, along with a "You got this from SITENAME" txt file with artist information.

Gah, I am ranting, this belongs in my code notebook, or my blog lol

[..::Marcov15::..]

This would be a huge step for all of us. Go for it.

[picano]

Rant on! I am quite interested in the technical details of this matter.

The system sounds great. If ya need anything just ask.

[deadpixel]

Sounds awesome, would like to see it come to life.

[dantarion]

/me flexes his code muscles and gets to work